Advice...Dell Precision 390 specs?

I'm working up a quote for a new Dell Precision 390, and have a few
general questions. I'm using SW 2007 and have recently (by default)
been appointed "SW expert" in my research lab. I'm still ramping up
my learning curve but it's apparent my 5-year old 2.5GHz P4 with 1GB
RAM just isn't going to cut it. Projects will likely be on the 500
part/assembly scale, and we'll be looking to do some simple Animator
and COSMOS stuff down the line. I have the go ahead to price out a
new system (within reason). That said, here's what I've selected thus
far:

Intel® Core™ 2 Duo E6600 2.40GHz/1066MHz/4MB L2/Dual-core/VT
2GB, 667MHz, DDR2 SDRAM Memory, ECC
250GB SATA 3.0Gb/s with NCQ and 8MB DataBurst Cache
128MB PCIe x16 nVidia Quadro FX550
Dell 20 inch UltraSharpâ„¢ 2007FP Widescreen

As for a HD, 250 GB is plenty of room, but should I stick with SATA,
or go with SAS? Graphics cards...The price jump to go up to a 256MB
card is pretty steep (see below). How much improvement will that get
me?

768MB PCIe x16 nVidia Quadro FX 4600, Dual DVI or Dual VGA or DVI +
VGA [add $1,429]
256MB PCIe x16 nVidia Quadro FX3500, Dual Monitor DVI or VGA Capable
[add $754]
256MB PCIe x16 ATI Fire GL V7200, Dual Monitor DVI or VGA Capable [add
$429]

The above config is priced at $1749. Which seems like a good deal to
me. If you had another $250 or so to put into the system, what would
you upgrade? Processor, graphics, or HD? I do plan on upgrading to
4GB RAM through third-party (much cheaper, 2 x 1GB from crucial is
under $100), so I've got that covered. Is there something else I'm
missing?

Thanks.

-Dave

 

Hi db,

Always go for the fastest dual core you can get for Animator
and COSMOS, then ram, graphics, HD.

Store everything on a server and run raid0 on your local machine.

I upgraded from the NVIDIA 980 quadro to the NVIDIA 3400 pcie, and I have
not noticed a difference at all, on projects of 1500 parts and countless
sub-assemblies. the 256Mb cards will not give you any benefit at all on 500
parts.

There are still the graphic leaks, when viewing from a distance, with sheet
metal parts, so don't believe your var, if they say you need a better
graphic card.

The thing you seem to have missed is the power supply, Nvidia is hungry for
power, so make sure you have at least a 650watts psu or higher is you are
thinking of running more than 2 sata drives.

I would stick in 3Gb of ram, as xp, will nick at least half for it's self.

Pete




I'm working up a quote for a new Dell Precision 390, and have a few
general questions. I'm using SW 2007 and have recently (by default)
been appointed "SW expert" in my research lab. I'm still ramping up
my learning curve but it's apparent my 5-year old 2.5GHz P4 with 1GB
RAM just isn't going to cut it. Projects will likely be on the 500
part/assembly scale, and we'll be looking to do some simple Animator
and COSMOS stuff down the line. I have the go ahead to price out a
new system (within reason). That said, here's what I've selected thus
far:

Intel® CoreT 2 Duo E6600 2.40GHz/1066MHz/4MB L2/Dual-core/VT
2GB, 667MHz, DDR2 SDRAM Memory, ECC
250GB SATA 3.0Gb/s with NCQ and 8MB DataBurst Cache
128MB PCIe x16 nVidia Quadro FX550
Dell 20 inch UltraSharpT 2007FP Widescreen

As for a HD, 250 GB is plenty of room, but should I stick with SATA,
or go with SAS? Graphics cards...The price jump to go up to a 256MB
card is pretty steep (see below). How much improvement will that get
me?

768MB PCIe x16 nVidia Quadro FX 4600, Dual DVI or Dual VGA or DVI +
VGA [add $1,429]
256MB PCIe x16 nVidia Quadro FX3500, Dual Monitor DVI or VGA Capable
[add $754]
256MB PCIe x16 ATI Fire GL V7200, Dual Monitor DVI or VGA Capable [add
$429]

The above config is priced at $1749. Which seems like a good deal to
me. If you had another $250 or so to put into the system, what would
you upgrade? Processor, graphics, or HD? I do plan on upgrading to
4GB RAM through third-party (much cheaper, 2 x 1GB from crucial is
under $100), so I've got that covered. Is there something else I'm
missing?

Thanks.

-Dave

 

I would also match the memory bus speed to the processor. No need for
a bottleneck.

Dito on the Raid0

 

Thanks, Pete. We're a small group, and I'm the only CAD person, so
this will be a single station setup. Plus, I'm using this workstation
as my "regular" desktop. Not ideal, but it's where we are right now.

Glad to hear that 128MB GPU should suffice. Any thoughts on ATI vs
NVIDIA?

Dell specs say the Precision 390 comes with a 375 Watt power supply.
I suspect there's no way to customize that through Dell. Maybe third-
party once I get it, assuming their chassis config is standard.

-Dave

 

DiscDawg, not sure if I understand you. The E6600 C2Duo has a 1066MHz
Bus, and the RAM is 667MHz. I can't ramp up the RAM speed can I?

 

I have only has one ATI card, I have seen many woes from users of ATI card,
so the choice is yours. They may have improved since I last used one.

The psu will be easy to upgrade, but check with dell about the warranty,
will they allow you to upgrade everything?

If you only have the one work station and no server, I would STRONGLY
recommend that you get FOUR sata drives, raid 0 the first two and raid 1 for
the second two. Backup, backup and backup, not a stutter, lol, but a BIG
must do.
Note CD's do not last forever, as we were lead to believe, I have some that
are decaying and they are only 6 years old.

If you do not backup, YOU will get the blame when things go wrong and they
will not listen to, "I told you so, six months ago!"
(Hmmm... rings a bell :-s).

 

Hi db,

My $.03:

The 1066MHz bus is matched up with 533MHz RAM, 667MHz and 800MHz
speeds may help slightly, but you will not currently be facing a
bottleneck.

I agree with pete as far as his RAID recommendations and would add
that spindle speed can make a significant difference also. SATA drives
run at up to 10K rpm and SCSI/SAS drives run at up to 15K rpm. The
difference between the two is not linear, that is you will not see the
same jump in performance going from SATA 10K to SAS 15K drives as you
will see going from SATA 7.2K rpm to SATA 10K rpm or from SAS 10K rpm
to SAS 15K rpm. Don't know the reason, have just researched the
results. Here's a good site if you want to do some more digging
http://www.tomshardware.com/find_by_topic/hard_drives.html

As far as price/performance on the CPU you have hit the sweet spot,
although SW will make use of every extra clock cycle that you can
afford. The 2.4 GHz E6600 has the same architechture as the other two
core2 CPU's with 4MB L2 cache, the 2.66GHz E6700 and the 2.93 GHz
X6800.

 

The single thing you can do which will keep the speed of your new
workstation maxed out with Windows XP & SolidWorks is to keep your old
machine for all Internet and local network activity. Use the new
workstation only for SolidWorks and MS Office and KEEP IT OFF the
local net and Internet.

This is illustrated when users put in a new hard drive and reinstall
the OS & SolidWorks from scratch and everything works much faster.

Bo

 

Get the E6800. Otherwise get an AMD machine. It will be faster.

TOP

 

I'm almost certain that Dell uses non-standard chassis sizes with a
non-standard power supply. I seem to remember duct taping a power
supply to the side of a case at one point for this reason. You
*might* want to ask them about their power supply sizes. 375 Watts
seems kind of small but Core2Duo uses significantly less power than
those P4s we were all used to using, right? If you end up smoking
something Dell would be more than happy to replace your system... I
think

You should be fine with PC2-6400 (DDR2-800). That Core2Duo E6600 is
so cool. Did i mention I <3 mine?

 

Faster is better, but cost is a consideration. If it wasn't I'd go
for the Core 2 Extreme. Any specific recommendations for an AMD
processor?

 

I personally see these discussions which mention cost of the "PC
Workstation" routinely, but in fact when that box is compared against
its useful life (say 2 years) versus the TOTAL cost of the time value
of the designer/engineer who uses it, the proper analysis of return on
investment MUST be compared using the employee cost.

We buy SolidWorks to save time, increase accuracy, autogenerate much
content, and variations of content efficiently, but then worry about
the cost of the PC it runs on, which costs somewhere from the yearly
maintenance fee up to 3 times that much. The PC needs to be evaluated
more like a machine tool. How much is it worth to buy a tool that can
get work done faster, compared to the other costs (mostly personnel)?

If 2 years = 4000 hours of work, and 2000 is on the PC, and the
burdened cost of the employee is $50/hr, then that is $100,000 worth
of time spent on the PC in two years.

It is very easy to argue that buying a $4000 high end PC pays great
value where Save, Open, and Rebuild times and then really flies with
FEA analysis and Photorealistic imaging.

How many hours a year can be saved by a high end workstation at the
$50/hr burdened pay rate? If you say 2 hours a week (not unrealistic
in many cases), that is 100 hrs/yr x $50 = $5000. In other words
payback for the extra $1000 cost is less than one quarter.

Bo

 

at the moment I would consider waiting just a little while till the
E6750 launches and do something like this:

2-3gb DDR2-800
E6750 o/c to 3.4ghz with upright air cooler - or water (CPU<$200)
150 gb raptor
520W power supply
24" LCD widescreen
Quadro FX1500

this will give 3x the performance of your old 2.5 P4 for SW
and somewhere about 5-6x for rendering etc

you might try looking at XI computers..

 

should have said -
i think this will give you a balance of things
- adequate graphics card without $$ and capable of handling SW08
Realview - if a bit roughly in rotation
- a power supply with some headroom
- plenty of screen space
- fast disk with no broken RAID worries etc - consider an external USB
disk backup too
- very fast processor for little money
- ram sufficient for your purposes at reasonable cost

HTH

 

I'd stick with the FX550. It's cheap and provides full support for
Shader 3.0 (required for SW2008 shadows). If you really need to, you
can upgrade to a new DirectX 10 compatible FX x600 series card in the
fall. (It doesn't make sense to me to shell out $500+ for a graphics
card that doesn't support what will the general computing standard a
year from now.)

As for the CPU, the C2D E6400/6600 are both excellent values and as
fast or faster than anything AMD has today, but SolidWorks performance
is almost always CPU bound, so the extra $500 for the X6800 would be
money well spent.

 

Oops....

That should have read...the "E6600/6700 are"....(the E6400 is slow)

The E6750 will be great when it ships, but you can't buy it now.
(Though the performance gain with the faster FSB is minimal, unless
you overclock.)

For perormance comparisons, see

http://www.deskeng.com/Media/PublicationsArticle/polywell.pdf

 

All great info. Thanks to everyone. Now, just need to measure to see
if I can fit the 24" LCD on my desk

 

We have both a three year old FX53 AMD64 and a Dell with the E6800. On
SpecAPC the AMD was .09 seconds slower on the CPU score. Upgrade the
graphics card in the AMD and it likely would have been in the running
for overall score as well.

Most of the AMD machines you see do not get this kind of performance
and neither do the Intel's. It is a matter of setup.

However, CPU is not the only consideration. It doesn't take much to
kill even the fastest CPU with bad modeling habits. The nice thing
about modeling habits is that they can be constantly upgraded and cost
little if you are willing to do so. That being said it took me about
15 minutes to spec our Dell Precision 390 and now everyone wants one
here. But seeing different users with them I come right back to what I
just said. The guy who builds models that lock up a machine still does
it. The guy who cranks out model after model still does it, old
machine or new. The user is the number one performance factor with SW.
Second is the type of modeling, and third is the software. Then comes
hardware.

TOP

 

Amen, brother. Spot on and well said. That is so true! It could be
argued that the first two are really just the software as well.

 

its coming quite soon but the kicker is there is going to be a price
drop with it to less than $200...