Hey guys!
I'm thinking about buying a computer for personal use, but also to be a ballin computer to do Solidworks/FEA on. I was wondering if there any computer gurus lurking on here that could maybe help me make up my mind. What I'm looking at right now is a computer off Newegg or Ibuypower. Both are specced out to have a Core I-5 3.4 GHz or a Core i-7 3.4 GHz processor and probably the Gefore GTX 460 - 2Gb video card.

My main deal is this, does anyone know if I should pony up and get the i-7, or think the i-5 would be enough to get the job done quickly? The price difference on the two is like $100 something dollars.

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.


-- Dash Robinson
-- Mississippi State University FSAE

If you are planning to run Solidworks with assemblies of any decent size you need to to get a profesional graphics card, this goes for FEA as well. Performance with the gaming cards is not very good and Solidworks isn't very stable in the large models to begin with. The flip side is gaming performance may not be as good but unless it is the latest game you won't have problems running a Quadro video card.

As for processors always go for the fastest you can get when dealing with FEA. I don't know about other programs but ANSYS doesn't utilize multiple processors very well and to use more than 2 requires a special license.

Thanks for the tip on the professional card. I did a little reading and it does seem that 3D Cad programs are supposed to run a lot better on those cards. Although they are much more expensive...

Solidworks FEA doesn't really take advantage of multi-cored processors if I remember correctly.

Get a solid computer with lots of RAM and you'll be pretty good. Our computer was around 1k with screen and it has been amazing. If you PM me i'll send you the specs.

BK

The lower end quadro cards aren't that expensive. A quadro 600 with 1gb of ram is $170 on NewEgg. And just becasue they are on the lower end doesn't really mean much because software requirements haven't kept pace with hardware capabilities. My personal laptop has a FX 1500m which is a midlevel card that is ~5 years old with 256mb of ram and I am able to open and manipulate pretty big models, >1000parts, with out any problems and I imagine a new low end card will have much greater ability than that.

The real limitation will be system ram, especially with FEA. I would recommend 8gb of ram though 4gb will do except with larger FEA models, >500,000 nodes.

As for the core i-5 or i-7, if you have the extra $100 you should buy a faster i-5

Mesher and Solver in Solidworks 2011 support multi core processors.Also the Rendering PhotoView360 app.

I´ve done nonlinear plastic deformation analysis, and the usual linear static with all 4 cores throttled 100%.

As for the gaming card, really good ones work flawlessly altough without the realview eyecandy. I don´t think a quadro is absolutely a must when doing FSAE typical stuff.

And it won´t affect your FEA capabilities.

quote:

Originally posted by The AFX Master:
Mesher and Solver in Solidworks 2011 support multi core processors.Also the Rendering PhotoView360 app.

I´ve done nonlinear plastic deformation analysis, and the usual linear static with all 4 cores throttled 100%.

As for the gaming card, really good ones work flawlessly altough without the realview eyecandy. I don´t think a quadro is absolutely a must when doing FSAE typical stuff.

And it won´t affect your FEA capabilities.

Soooo wait is that different from Solidworks 2010?

Ben

Don´t think so. I´m almost sure 2010 also does it. I´ll check it tough.

quote:

Originally posted by The AFX Master:
Don´t think so. I´m almost sure 2010 also does it. I´ll check it tough.

We were running 64 bit solidworks 2010 and found the actual solver didn't run multi-core. The MESHER did though.

Ben

Yeah, I'm also running 64 bit SW 2010, I believe the solver is still one core, don't remember on the mesher, but Photoworks would do as many as you could throw at it. Based on what I know about the nature of what the solver's doing, unless they do some major changes I wouldn't expect it to be something that multi-threads anytime soon. I know for most of us the mesher and solver performance is what's most important, so again I'd take more clock speed over more cores.

As for gaming cards, if you want the most bang for the buck, it WON'T be with a workstation video card. For the past several years they've used the same GPUs as gaming cards, and are typically about a generation behind. Gaming cards will have more shaders, etc., but the memory standards, etc. are all the same. The biggest difference is in the drivers, as gaming cards are optimized for DirectX, while workstation cards are optimized for OpenGL. The main reason workstation cards cost more is the market...businesses and universities vs. gamers.

As an example, check out these two video cards:
$115 workstation card
$110 Gaming card

The workstation card looks to be about the same architecture as the Radeon 1300, same RAM and memory standard, which is discontinued, could be had for $25 three years ago, and will offer tolerable performance for assemblies of up to 3 parts, as long as they are simple. With the better FireGL drivers it might be competitive with a typical current integrated laptop gaming processor, like a Radeon 4200. The DDR2 RAM, with most likely a 64 bit interface (not specified), will keep it from ever performing decently. Also, I would set 512 MB as an absolute minimum amount of memory for FSAE use, and 1GB if you want to be happy with it for more than a couple years.

Now the gaming card, for $5 less, has 4 times the memory, and GDDR5 which is over twice as fast, and a 256 bit memory interface. Hard to compare GPU performance since the workstation's isn't specified, but a Radeon 5830 vs. what's probably a Radeon 1300 GPU, it probably scales similarly to the 4x memory performance increase. Even with its "lesser" Radeon drivers, it will still probably be at least twice as fast in Solidworks, and handle a whole car model a whole ton better with its extra memory.

So now that we've compared the hardware, let's look at the drivers a bit more. Aside from enabling pretty Realview, you also get a huge jump in performance as it does a lot better job with hardware acceleration in OpenGL. I've heard of performance increases of 150-300% by just switching drivers. So then the $1 million question is, can I make workstation drivers work on a gaming card? If you have an older Nvidia card, check this out:
GeForce to Quadro hack

I got it to work great on my GeForce 7900GS and the GeForce 8600GTs we have in the lab, on both XP and Win 7. No bugs, no glitches, no reliability issues, but you get Realview and probably a solid double the performance. The only bad news is is doesn't work with any decent cards that are still in production as far as I know, couldn't get it to work with our GTX 260, and from what I hear the 8000 series are the newest it works with. The article is good though, it at least gives charts to compare GPUs from gaming cards to workstation cards.

Here's another thread about doing the same thing with ATI cards, and it's a lot more recent too. I haven't messed with it yet, but I'm looking to upgrade cards in some of our lab computers so I'd like to try it out:
FireGL Softmod

Adambomb is right on about the gaming vs workstation cards.

I built our team a workstation for $1k. We run this system, with the graphics driver name hacked to say it is a workstation card, and it runs most everything we can throw at it. It doesn't load big assemblies from memory very fast, so I would recommend a SSD upgrade although I heard that 2011 is better with that.

specs:
Simple case and PSU:
CASE APEX|PC-389-C RT
PSU ANTEC|EA650 RT

Asus motherboard, they typically have good quality:
MB ASUS|M4A78LT-M AM3 R

Asus graphics card, 1 gig of DDR5
VGA ASUS|EAH5830 DIRECTCU/2DIS/1GD5

6-core CPU:
CPU AMD|PH II X6 1075T 3.0G AM3 RT

8 gig memory (fast FSB speed as well)
MEM 4Gx2|CORSAIR CMX8GX3M2A1600C9 R

2x 1TB hard drives for mirrored array (we had one fail, so we are glad we did this!):
HD 1T|SEAGATE 7K ST31000528AS OEM

23 inch monitor:
MNTR ASUS|LCD 23.6" 5MS VH242H RT

Let me elaborate on how to change any graphics card to the model that you need for SolidWorks.
I did this a while ago so I don't remember the exact details, but with a little trial and error you can get it.

When you install your graphics card driver, in the driver files there should be an .ini file that contains names of graphics cards, associated by device IDs or something. Just open up any .ini files in your driver setup files and you should find this eventually. Pick out the name of one of the compatible graphics cards, then find places where the name of your current graphics card occurs and replace them with the compatible name.

Most likely, these names will all be encased in quotes and should be easy enough to find.

Check out here:
http://forums.guru3d.com/showthread.php?t=313065

quote:

Originally posted by Nick Renold:
I built our team a workstation for $1k. We run this system, with the graphics driver name hacked to say it is a workstation card, and it runs most everything we can throw at it. It doesn't load big assemblies from memory very fast, so I would recommend a SSD upgrade although I heard that 2011 is better with that.

That's awesome you got the 5830 working with a soft mod! I'm stoked, will be shopping for some ATI cards to upgrade a bunch of old Core2 Duo machines we just inherited from the university.

To get a bit more hard drive speed, we're running Seagate Barracudas in RAID 0. Looked to be the way to get the speed of SSD with less than half the cost and several times the capacity. The Barracudas are great, only a tad slower than a WD Velociraptor (on the outer portion of the platter at least), and a couple years ago when we built our system it was $40 for 160 GB. To get max speed (since the small Barracuda is a single platter 7200 rpm drive, there is a large difference in speed from the outside of the platter to the inside), set up a c: partition first to keep your OS on the "fast part," then use the rest for storage. I've got two in RAID 0 in my personal computer a couple years ago, and was getting 200 MB/s transfer rates. When we built our last workstation I decided to go all out with 4 of them in RAID 0, but only got 250 MB/s, most likely due to a combination of diminishing returns with putting 4 vs. 2 in RAID, and maxing out the onboard RAID controller. Will probably get a new RAID controller one of these days, hoping that will help a bit.

Here's the specs for the latest system we put together in 2009, cost us just over $800 (it's about 2/3 of the way through the album):
2009 Workstation, "Mad Max"

Case: Found a late '90s vintage EATX case outside of the virtual reality lab. Rattle canned it satin black and added this 20 in 1 card reader, USB, eSATA, audio port dealy that installed in a 3.5" bay that we found for $15 as the ancient case did not have front panel USB or audio.

PSU: Found a good deal on a 750W Antec known to cleanly put out more like 850W

We also went with the Asus motherboard as they are solid, also considered Gigabyte since we have had good luck with those as well. Made sure it was AM3 and supported Hypertransport 4.0 and DDR3 (that was a bit new and exotic in 2009), as well as the 125W CPU we were getting.

CPU: What was then the "2nd from the top" CPU. Those are generally about the best value, as getting the top of the line CPU meant spending 30% more for 3.4 GHz vs. 3.2 GHz. We got a 4 core 3.2 GHz Phenom II x4 955. The stock cooler was a bit marginal with this near-the-top processor, so we shelled out $30 for a massive Cooler Master cooler with a 120 mm fan. CPU idle temps dropped like 30º C, so it should last a good bit longer. Messed around briefly with overclocking, but couldn't get anything stable.

Graphics: GTX 260, overclocked about 20%. Again, good bang for the buck, as the 280s cost a good bit more, and the 295s were super spendy. The 260s had good overclocking headroom, haven't had any stability issues with it.

Memory: DDR3 1600, dual channel. DDR3 was still new and expensive, so we just put in 4GB, leaving two slots open, with plans to upgrade when the price went down. Now that prices are down I'm thinking we'll throw in another 8 to bring it up to 12GB, which should be fine for several years; possibly the rest of its life. The board supports 16 GB.

Hard drives: 4x 160 GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11's in RAID 0, for a total of 640 GB. Not terribly concerned with storage space or data loss since we have everything of value stored on the school's server. Looking to upgrade the RAID controller to something a bit faster. Although with 4 drives, if there isn't much speed difference due to RAID scaling issues, if we ever end up re-formatting it it might be good to switch to RAID 0+1, so if something does happen you don't have to mess around re-configuring the system.

Monitors: Beastly old pair of Dell (Sony) Triniton 20" CRTs we got for free. Beautiful picture, and running 1920x1440 resolution each for a combined desktop size of 3840x1440. Only downside is that they kick off like 440W of excess heat, necessitating AC upgrades in the office.


I'd personally recommend going this route, this powerhouse should be good for CAD for probably the next 6 years. Bear in mind that we are also running old Pentium 4 and Athlon 64 desktops from 2004 with stripped down XP, also one surviving Dell Precision 650 from 2002, they're not great but good enough to design tabs and a lot of the more basic parts, also for reports, internet, etc., and teaching people how to use Solidworks.

...also here's what I'm running for my personal setup, it's a combination of FSAE style with a touch of redneck and tactical flavor. It's about 50% 2006 and 50% 2009 hardware, so nothing impressive by today's standards, but the setup is interesting.
Adambomb's Tactical Phenom

Case: 1981 vintage IBM 5150 "Personal Computer" case with riveted-in ATX motherboard/card base, polished Al diamond plate back panel, massive 5.25" floppy drive milled out and converted to a modular dual hard drive bay, front panel USB and audio pilfered from some other case, Radio Shack old-skool pushbutton for power switch, fabbed drive bay for standard DVD burner

PSU: 550W Antec

Motherboard: MSI, supports Hypertransport 3.0 and DDR2 8500, 95W CPU

CPU: quad core Phenom x4 9600, 2.3 GHz. I wasted many hours attempting to get any overclock, to later discover that these are about the worst ever to attempt to overclock.

Graphics: EVGA GeForce 7900GS, soft-modded to Quadro FX 3500, processor overclocked 20 MHz from the factory, memory overclocked 20%. Was a fairly hot card in 2006.

Memory: DDR2 PC2 6400, dual channel, 4GB

Hard drives: 2x 160 GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11's in RAID 0, 200 MB/s transfer rate

Monitors: Same beastly Dell's as above, paid $13 for the pair at university surplus sales.

quote:

Originally posted by Adambomb:
Monitors: Beastly old pair of Dell (Sony) Triniton 20" CRTs we got for free. Beautiful picture, and running 1920x1440 resolution each for a combined desktop size of 3840x1440. Only downside is that they kick off like 440W of excess heat, necessitating AC upgrades in the office.

Not any more as far as I know. Last time I was back in Ames they had 4 lcd flat screen monitors set up on that computer. I'm pretty sure that the CRT's are all gone now. I want to say that they got the lcd's free from some department.

quote:

Originally posted by Adambomb:
...also here's what I'm running for my personal setup, it's a combination of FSAE style with a touch of redneck and tactical flavor. It's about 50% 2006 and 50% 2009 hardware, so nothing impressive by today's standards, but the setup is interesting.
Adambomb's Tactical Phenom

Case: 1981 vintage IBM 5150 "Personal Computer" case with riveted-in ATX motherboard/card base, polished Al diamond plate back panel, massive 5.25" floppy drive milled out and converted to a modular dual hard drive bay, front panel USB and audio pilfered from some other case, Radio Shack old-skool pushbutton for power switch, fabbed drive bay for standard DVD burner

PSU: 550W Antec

Motherboard: MSI, supports Hypertransport 3.0 and DDR2 8500, 95W CPU

CPU: quad core Phenom x4 9600, 2.3 GHz. I wasted many hours attempting to get any overclock, to later discover that these are about the worst ever to attempt to overclock.

Graphics: EVGA GeForce 7900GS, soft-modded to Quadro FX 3500, processor overclocked 20 MHz from the factory, memory overclocked 20%. Was a fairly hot card in 2006.

Memory: DDR2 PC2 6400, dual channel, 4GB

Hard drives: 2x 160 GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11's in RAID 0, 200 MB/s transfer rate

Monitors: Same beastly Dell's as above, paid $13 for the pair at university surplus sales.

On our CAD stations at work we are currently running Dell T7500's with Intel Xeon E5507 Quad Core Processor's (2.26GHz), 6GB DDR3 1333 ECC (3x2GB), NVidia Quadro FX 3800 GPU, and dual Dell 2209WA monitor's (these are really nice). It's been a great setup but now my bottleneck is the processor. When we upgraded I pushed for a much faster Xeon but they insisted on the cheapest quad core they could get. When it came down to it they let me have the graphics card I wanted but screwed me on the processor.

Moral of the story is for SAE I'd get the cheapest entry level Workstation graphics card you can get (200-300$), 4 plus gig of memory, and the fastest processor you can get your hands on.

The Quadro FX 580 can be had from Amazon for $150 and is a great card for SolidWorks. And it should run circles around those older softmoded NVidia gaming cards.

We got a sponsorship from computer hardware company a while back. They gave us a large amount of money to spend through Dell. I specced out the station. We ended up with a Dell Precision T7400.

Dual Quad-core Xeons at 3.0 ghz.
8 GB DDR3 fully buffered
10k RPM HD (80 GB?)
7400 RPM HD (500 GB)
Quadro FX 4800

It would easily max out all 8 cores during rendering. The FEA solver would only use about 40% of total processor capability. It handled large assemblies with ease.

We chose the higher speed HD to store the models we were currently analyzing, because we found that Solidworks FEA did quite a bit of read/writes, and we had a bottleneck on our older system. SSDs were still too expensive two years ago when the system was built.

Ran some 3D Mark tests on it when it was new but I don't remember the results. I was able to overclock the video card by about 15% on both memory and clock, and saw roughly equal improvement in 3dMark scores. I removed the overclocking after the benchmarking because I don't touch the team to keep an eye on the temps and such. They blow up enough engines as it is

Wow, glad I got all these responses. Think I'm going to take the dive and build my computer from scratch now.
Just to throw this out there, I just ran a test on my laptop though ( Core 2 Duo Processor and Solidworks 2011 ), and it seems that solidworks is sharing the Solver computation on both cores.

quote:

Originally posted by Dash:
Wow, glad I got all these responses. Think I'm going to take the dive and build my computer from scratch now.
Just to throw this out there, I just ran a test on my laptop though ( Core 2 Duo Processor and Solidworks 2011 ), and it seems that solidworks is sharing the Solver computation on both cores.

If Solidworks made the solver multi-core, we all just saved hours on thermal or multi-body simulations. Huzzah.

Ben

A good start would be a Quadro 2000, Corei7, SSD with HDD, 8 GB of ram min.

For the SSD there is the 250GB OCZ Vertex 3. For lower capacity you may check the 128GB Intel 510.

It was proven that a softmodded graphics card is not as fast as a low cost Quadro.