New workstation specs - opinions?

[wildcat99]

Have a new system spec'd out for Mastercam and Solidworks. Am I on the right track? Any suggestions appreciated.

 

Dell Precision 690:

* Dual Core Intel Xeon Processor 5060 3.20 GHz 2x2MB L2, 1066

* 2GB DDR2 SDRAM FBD Memory, 667MHz, ECC (2 dimms)

* nVidia Quadro FX 3450 256MB PCIe x16, Dual DVI or Dual VGA or DVI +VGA

* 80 GB SATA, 10K RPM Hard drive with 16MB cache.

* Windows XP Pro

[Guest]

almost identical specs to my machine here at work and have no complaints thus far. as a matter of fact i have yet to work on a machine better with master cam very stable very fast.

cant give opinions on what to expect with sollidworks but would guess it has enough horse power.

 

doug

[MLS]

If you do large parts and use Vericut(or multiple applications concurrently), you might want to up the RAM to 4 GB. That would be the only suggestion I have.

 

I'm using a Quadro FX 3450 and it works very well for CATIA and Mastercam. I'd assume Solidworks would compare to CATIA's performance on the card.

[gcode]

quote:

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Any suggestions appreciated

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I suggest you send one to me for testing

 

That machine will run Mastercam and Solidworks very well. There is one performance setting in the video drivers that you may need to tweak, but thats about it

[bogusmill]

Almost identical to mine too. 4 Gig of ram would be good. We went for 2 10,000 RPM drives in RAID 0. The hard drive is the slowest thing on a PC and RAID 0 drives speed up launching programs and loading and saving of files. Not twice as fast but about a 66% gain.

[Gilberto]

Just a note:

The New Intel Core 2 Duo is faster then Xeon, for complex toolpaths and surfs/solids conversion.

[wildcat99]

Thanks for all the input.

 

We have some proven programs for our router done in Mill 8.1.1 and 9.1 also, that occasionally need revised...haven't got these all converted to X yet.

 

Any problems running v8 or v9 on newer systems?

[HEAVY METAL]

RAID 0 is that where the computer looks at both hard drives as one

[gcode]

quote:

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Any problems running v8 or v9 on newer systems

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If you want to run V8 and V9 on it, you'll probably want to stay away from Win Xp 64

 

I don't know if anyone has successfully run

V8 on a 64 bit OS.

 

Some people have succedded with V9, others have failed.

I don't think Mastercam supports WinXP64 yet,

but they've got a download available that you'll need to make it run.

 

Personally I'd get the 64 bit system and keep an old computer around for V8-v9 translations.

 

Someone on the beta fourum did a race with

V9, X-mr2 and X -Mr2 with a very large surfacing file.

V9 took 3 1/2 hours to regen

X-MR2 did it in 1 1/2

X-MR2 on a 64 bit OS did it in 45 minutes.