New Gaming Rig gives Sizzling SW2005 Performance

My computer caught on fire the other day while playing one of my
favorite games, Delta Force - Typhoon Rising. I was now forced to buy
a new motherboard, processor, memory and video cards.

Since I do CAD and love to play these 3D processor intensive games, I
opted for some pretty fancy hardware as follows:

· Gigabyte NF4 Ga-K8nxp-SLI compatible Motherboard
· 2 Gigabyte| 6800GT Gv-Nx68t256dh Video Accelerators
· AMD64 |4000+ Athlon 64 939p CPU
· 4gb| Pc3200 Ram

Needless to say my gaming performance is nothing short of spectacular.
The pleasant unintended consequence was the Solidworks performance I am
now getting.

I can now take super complex models and rotate like crazy. OpenGl
performance is unbelievable. Photoworks just rips through the most
complex rendering jobs. Stability has improved almost 100% (This might
have something to do with 4GB of RAM)

The key to all this I think is the SLI array of not one, but two video
cards working in tandem. I am so pleased with SW performance that I
feel almost bad now about complaining previously about flaky
performance. My computer takes 12 seconds to boot up to the desktop
now!

I feel justified now in spending all this money on a gaming rig just
because of the added SW performance.

So for all of you Roller Coaster Tycoon, Halo, Battlefield 1942 and Far
Cry freaks out there, maybe its time to upgrade.

 

Funny you should mention your system catching fire. I overheated my RAM
the other day running FEA. Seems like SW will overheat a CPU while FEA
will toast RAM and hard drives.

 

Awesome!
How about a "ship in the bottle" benchmark test?

Best Regards,
Devon T. Sowell
www.3-ddesignsolutions.com


My computer caught on fire the other day while playing one of my
favorite games, Delta Force - Typhoon Rising. I was now forced to buy
a new motherboard, processor, memory and video cards.

Since I do CAD and love to play these 3D processor intensive games, I
opted for some pretty fancy hardware as follows:

· Gigabyte NF4 Ga-K8nxp-SLI compatible Motherboard
· 2 Gigabyte| 6800GT Gv-Nx68t256dh Video Accelerators
· AMD64 |4000+ Athlon 64 939p CPU
· 4gb| Pc3200 Ram

Needless to say my gaming performance is nothing short of spectacular.
The pleasant unintended consequence was the Solidworks performance I am
now getting.

I can now take super complex models and rotate like crazy. OpenGl
performance is unbelievable. Photoworks just rips through the most
complex rendering jobs. Stability has improved almost 100% (This might
have something to do with 4GB of RAM)

The key to all this I think is the SLI array of not one, but two video
cards working in tandem. I am so pleased with SW performance that I
feel almost bad now about complaining previously about flaky
performance. My computer takes 12 seconds to boot up to the desktop
now!

I feel justified now in spending all this money on a gaming rig just
because of the added SW performance.

So for all of you Roller Coaster Tycoon, Halo, Battlefield 1942 and Far
Cry freaks out there, maybe its time to upgrade.

 

Report to Client...

When beam subjected to force A, Beam will start to burn!

 

What is a "ship in the bottle" benchmark test?

 

Search for Ship in a Bottle on this NG.

Also try STAR2.1 which you will find on the SW discussion forum. In
place of STAR you could also run BoxTree which you will find on the NG.


Here are the main benchmarks:

1. Ship in a Bottle (Regen and graphics)
2. SPECapc from SPEC.org (graphics)
3. STAR (CPU test)
4. PATBENCH (IO test)

 

Try this link. You can run four different benchmarks with a SW flavor:

http://www.engtran.com/SWBM001.html

 

OK. Ship in a bottle I was able to run in 28.5 seconds. Is this a good
time?

CPU
AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 4000+
Manufacturer AMD
Family AMD Athlon(tm) 64 Processor 4000+
Architecture 64-bit


Dual SLI NVIDIA GeForce 6800 Series GPU Driver 7.1.8.9

4GB DDR400 RAM

 

Yup. If you change your options for shaded mode to fast you should be
able to get down to 18 seconds. To my knowledge there haven't been any
Intel systems that can touch 28. Did you get a chance to try any of
the others?

 

I ran the benchmarks and here are the results. Are these good or bad?

PatBench 6.6 seconds




SPECapc

**** Overall Test Results ****
Note: All results are in seconds.
Lower scores are better.

Test Number 1
Test Total = 473.49
Graphics = 108.59
CPU = 176.03
I/O = 188.87

Test Number 2
Test Total = 444.34
Graphics = 109.68
CPU = 178.54
I/O = 156.12

Test Number 3
Test Total = 443.95
Graphics = 110.74
CPU = 176.57
I/O = 156.64

Test Number 4
Test Total = 444.13
Graphics = 109.86
CPU = 175.41
I/O = 158.86

Test Number 5
Test Total = 442.9
Graphics = 107.74
CPU = 176.85
I/O = 158.31

Test Averages for 5 tests(s).
Test Total = 449.76
Graphics = 109.32
CPU = 176.68
I/O = 163.76

 

There are two ways to post results. If you go to this link you will
also find the other ways. But, yes, it is pretty fast on both Patbench
and SPECapc. Have you been able to get STAR to go?

http://groups-beta.google.com/group..."Test+Number+1"&rnum=2&hl=en#bb5bf44ac2435539

 

Your setup is sweet, what kind of hard drives are you running? Just
imagine, in a couple months when the X2 dual-cores become readily
avalable, you'll be able to upgrade using the same motherboard (unlike
if you had an Intel rig)!

 

But what benefit to SW?

 

I believe I heard that sw2006 will take advantage of multi processors
and dual core for drawing regeneration of large assemblies when fully
resolving lightweight.

And of course Photoworks benefits.

Hopefully we'll see more in future versions, seems a given considering
that ghz won't be increasing much anymore and multi cores on the
processor will be the future.

Can anyone think of tasks in Solidworks that be could done in the
background thus ustilizing multi processors?

 

In addition to multicore optimizations in the future releases, most
designers/engineers do not only use SolidWorks. Throw in a sprinkle of
PDM, ERP, Geomagic, MathWorks, PhotoShop, your favorite CFD or FEA
package and you'll have a dual-core at 100% utilization in no time.