[QUOTE] I just got in a new Xi AMD computer and ran benchmarks against a HP dual zeon. The AMD 64 bit w/ better video beat the HP by 21% overall. The test was the SPEC standard run on SW 2003 sp4 HP xw8000: dual 3.06 zeon 2 GB ram nvidia quadro 4 980 xgl (1) 70GB SCSI hard drive windows xp results: total = 133.25 graphics = 25 CPU = 73 I/O = 36.75 Xi MTower Opteron 64 Bit: single AMD Athlon64 3400+ VIA K8T800 GAK8N DDR 400-1GB-SATA RAID-1394-AC97 6.1 motherboard upgrd 2 GB ram nvidia quadro fx3000 (1) 80GB 7200rpm Ultra hard drive windows xp results: total = 105 graphics = 18 CPU = 61 I/O = 26 I plan to do more testing, but the initial results look promising for the Xi. Has anyone else run tests on similar systems? An earlier posting from Eddy Hicks subject "Solidworks 2004 - confirming what everyone knows" showed his benchmark results with a similar system but the much cheaper FX1000 card and he got the same 18 seconds on graphics. So, is there no speed increase between the FX1000 and FX3000 or does the graphics card help the other numbers? (I'm not a systems guy - just a user that wants the fastest machine possible without going way overboard on cost) Has anyone compared the FX1000, 2000, 3000? I haven't loaded any of my assemblies yet or played around with it to see if I can tell a difference.[/QUOTE] Here are the rest of my test results: convert iges file #1: HP 68 Xi 47 Diff 21 (31%) save file #1: HP 7 Xi 6 Diff 1 (14%) open file #1: HP 3 Xi 3 Diff 0 (0%) convert iges file #2: HP 434 Xi 318 Diff 116 (27%) save file #2: both hung (after saving) open file #2: HP 28 Xi 18 Diff 10 (36%) convert UG file: HP 194 Xi 120 Diff 74 (38%) save file: HP 21 Xi 21 Diff 0 (0%) unsupress features: HP 78 Xi 59 Diff 19 (24%) save file: HP 77 Xi 63 Diff 14 (18%) open file: HP 84 Xi 67 Diff 17 (20%) open top level assy: HP 83 Xi 56 Diff 27 (33%) rebuild: HP 2 Xi 2 Diff 0 (0%) save file: HP 22 Xi 17 Diff 5 (23%) open sub-assy drawing: HP 49 Xi 32 Diff 17 (35%) update sheet 2: HP 102 Xi 80 Diff 22 (22%) activate sheet 1: HP 8 Xi 5 Diff 3 (38%) update sheet 1: HP 66 Xi 52 Diff 14 (21%) save file: HP 14 Xi 11 Diff 3 (21%) TOTAL HP 1340 Xi 977 Diff 363 (27%) ship in bottle (50) rebuilds average 4 times HP 37.8 Xi 30.1 Diff 7.7 (20%) If anyone has any other tests that you think might be good to run, let me know. These numbers are not scientific - just me and a stopwatch. I think that they are good enough to prove to us that the 3400+ is the way to go. We are going to swap our FX3000 card for a FX1100 because I don't think we are going to see enough speed increase with the 3000 to justify the cost. I will re-post to let you know what the FX1100 does to these tests. I couldn't get the SPEC benchmark to run on 2004 but I assume that the speed difference shown on 2003 should be similar if run on 2004. Bob