can anyone foresee any new probs with our new PC?

[ronengineer]

Hello everyone,

 

We are about to re-specify our PC's and would like any comments on the following spec. in case you have heard any bad things about the components used.....

 

We are doing more and more tricky 5 axis stuff and seem to spend so much time re-gening that we want a big performance boost.

 

We are thinking we want:

 

AMD Athlon 64 3200+

EPOX EP8HDA3+ mainboard

512Mb DDR400 Ram (any advantage to 1Gb?)

2 off 120GB 7200 with 2 Mb buffer Hard drives

(one is used as a backup in case of HD faliure - we do this on all our systems after suffering 2 faliures at very inconvenient times.....)

256 Mb DDR ATI Radeon 9800 Pro Graphics.

 

(this plus a few bells costs about £1200 in the UK for the box)

 

Oh, and please don't let this thread degenerate like another recent one did about systems...made us laugh though. Everyone in the UK knows that my Grandad won the war on his own with an old broom handle, a biscuit tin and a 32 piece stainless steel cutlery set.

 

The decision to use a 64 bit processor comes from some magazine stuff in the UK showing these to be about 20% faster than 32 bit equivalents on existing software.

 

Thanks in advance for any replys

 

ron-e

[mayday]

definetly go to 1 gig

 

stay far away from ATI cards, great for games but a big no-no for MC. get a G-force card

[cadcam]

(AMD Athlon 64 3200+) This will do nothing for you on the mastercam side.

So far only a few games support it at this time.

Plus you will have to find WinXP pro for 64bit.

I would save a little money and go with a Xeon proc.

 

(EPOX EP8HDA3+ mainboard) Do not know the board so no comment)

 

 

(512Mb DDR400 Ram (any advantage to 1Gb?)) for sure this will help go with 1gig to 2 Gig.

 

 

(2 off 120GB 7200 with 2 Mb buffer Hard drives

(one is used as a backup in case of HD faliure - we do this on all our systems after suffering 2 faliures at very inconvenient times.....)) Is this statment telling me that you are going to do Raid with a 2 IDE drives?

If so don't this does not work well with MC.

Now if you do SCUSI this will work well.

Now as for a little pickup get the drives in 7200 rpm with the 8meg buffer .

(120GB 7200RPM w/ 8MB Buffer Maxtor IDE Hard Price: $115.99* )

 

 

(256 Mb DDR ATI Radeon 9800 Pro Graphics.) Not a good card for this applacation.

Look for a FX Quadro 500 with 128 megs not much more money wise and a perfect card for what we do.

 

 

Well I guess that is it..

 

[ 11-22-2003, 10:08 AM: Message edited by: cadcam ]

[Bullines]

I'm with Jay. 64-bit CPUs aren't worth it on the desktop; not yet anyway. Go with a fast P4, Athlon XP or dual Xeon's instead. And with the video card, the ATI Radeon 9800 is the best consumer video card on the market at the moment...but ATI cards don't play nice with Mastercam. Stick with the high-end of the GeForce FXs or the best Quadro FX that's within your budget.

[kwolf]

I think ASUS mobos (for workstation) have the best performance and stability. I don't know about 64bit platform but in 32bit ASUS most of the time is the best. Look at A7N8X for example.

1GB RAM is minimum these days.

 

Also I want to know about ATi 9800P (bad and good).

I always use Nvidia but recetly there's a patch that can soft mod your ATi 9700-9800 to FireGL X1. The benchmark and the guys said they had a real FireGL .

In that case should we stay away from FireGL X1 too?

[JAMMAN]

IMO do what you want with the system, but the Radeon has to go.

[Fig sign]

Radeon -no

Geforce -yes

Athlon -yes !!!

Raid is better with SCSI

1 GB of RAM is a low minimum now ,the more the better ,you are buying not a cheap comp, the more the better !

Asus not always the best motherboard now ,

especially for Athlon ,it it only IMHO .

 

quote:

---

The decision to use a 64 bit processor comes from some magazine stuff in the UK showing these to be about 20% faster than 32 bit equivalents on existing software.

---

Very sceptic .

Not because it is 64bt

But it is because of hyper transport and Integrated DDR DRAM ,IMHO, and 32bt mode implementation is better in AMD 64 then Intel

quote:

---

HyperTransport technology is a high-speed, low latency, point-to-point link designed to increase the communication speed between integrated circuits in computers, servers, embedded systems, and networking and telecommunications equipment up to 48 times faster than some existing technologies.

HyperTransport technology helps reduce the number of buses in a system, which can reduce system bottlenecks and enable today's faster microprocessors to use system memory more efficiently in high-end multiprocessor systems.

HyperTransport technology is designed to:

Provide significantly more bandwidth than current technologies

Use low-latency responses and low pin counts

Maintain compatibility with legacy PC buses while being extensible to new SNA (Systems Network Architecture) buses.

Appear transparent to operating systems and offer little impact on peripheral drivers.

HyperTransport technology was invented at AMD with contributions from industry partners and is managed and licensed by the HyperTransport Technology Consortium, a Texas non-profit corporation. The full specification and more information about HyperTransport technology can be found at HyperTransport.org.

---

And this

quote:

---

Integrated DDR DRAM

 

 

As processor microarchitecture capabilities have advanced, one of the greatest performance limitations has become the system architecture’s ability to provide sufficient low-latency memory bandwidth to the processor core. The AMD Athlon™ 64 processor and the AMD Opteron™ processor directly addresses this bottleneck by integrating a DDR memory controller into the processor, revolutionizing the way x86-based processors access main memory. By running at the processor’s core frequency, an integrated memory controller greatly increases bandwidth directly available to the processor at significantly reduced latencies. The performance-enhancing effect is even more dramatic within an AMD Opteron multiprocessing environment, because each additional processor has its own memory controller thereby scaling over all memory bandwidth.

 

Features of Integrated DDR DRAM Memory Controller:

 

 

Available memory bandwidth scales with the number of processors added

128-bit wide integrated DDR DRAM memory controller capable of supporting up to eight (8) registered DDR DIMMs per processor

Available memory bandwidth up to 5.3GB/s (with PC2700 memory) per processor

---

My personal opinion I would not run in haste ,I would buy Athlon XP3200 the regular 32 bt

I prefer to wait a bit and see how things will go on .

Don`t want to be a tester of principially new hardware

 

ISkander teh AMD XP 2000

 

[ 11-22-2003, 11:19 AM: Message edited by: Iskander teh Lazy ]

[cadcam]

quote:

---

(AMD Athlon 64 3200+) This will do nothing for you on the mastercam side.

So far only a few games support it at this time.

Plus you will have to find WinXP pro for 64bit.

I would save a little money and go with a Xeon proc.

---

to add to this go for the dual Atho

[Zero]

I would tend to stay away from the ATI too if your main purpose for the computer will be MC.

 

I just got the 128MB Radeon 9800 Pro at home, great card! Playing games is like a whole new world. I briefly tried MC just to see how it would react...from what I could tell, it was ok. Shading was beautiful, rotation was smooth even at fast speeds. There did seem to be a minor problem with displaying the WCS axis and turning down the hardware accleration made things impossible to work with.

 

Nvidias in general run much better with MC, but I would stay away from the MX series. One of the older Ti's or the newer Fx series would be my choice for MC.

 

 

oh..and if you decide to get the Radeon 9800, get the 128MB and not the 256MB and save the $100. From every benchmark I've seen done on these cards the 128 performs just as good as the 256 and under graphic intense programs slightly outperforms the 256.

 

HTH

[ronengineer]

Zero, Cadcam, Iskander teh lazy, jamman, Kwolf, Bullines, Mayday.

 

Thanks a lot guys. I shall consider your comments and then come up with the 'forum PC'.

 

I'll post how we got on in a couple of weeks.

 

Much appreciated again guys.

 

Ron-e-verso happy.