Pentium D or Pentium 4, that is the question...

I am getting ready to order a Dell Precision 380 computer. The last
one we bought was about a month ago with the following specs.

Intel® Pentium® 4 630, 3.0GHz/800MHz/2x1MB L2 cache
2GB, 667MHz, DDR2 SDRAM Memory, ECC (2 DIMMS)
128MB PCIe x16 nVidia Quadro FX 1400
80GB SATA 3.0Gb/s with NCQ and 8MB DataBurst

Im curious if anyone on the group is using a Pentium-D processor. From
what ive been told, the dual-cores work pretty well when multi-tasking,
but for a single app like SolidWorks, it has slower performance than a
Pentium-4.

If anyone has any comments/suggestions, please post

 

It shouldn't operate any slower than an equivalently clocked 3.0ghz
single core. Dual cores don't benefit SW much. won't It will help
with assembly, assembly drawing open, opening 2006 high quality view
drawings, photoworks, and cosmos. That's all I remember off the top of
my head. There is a tiny bit of overhead associated with running dual
processors over single processors, but it will be completely
unnoticable by you. I would definitely hit up the dual core bandwagon.

 

afaik, Intel D cpu's require xp64 to take "full" advantage of the dual core.
And with Vista on horizon, I've heard xp64 will have a short shelf life.

 

No 64 bit will live on.
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsvista/getready/editions/default.mspx

It is my understanding that the big push to get Vista to market (with
numerous drivers) is one of the reasons xp64 has so few drivers available.

 

do you mean that Microsoft will drop all 64 bit ambitions and plans in the
Vista era?! does it mean regression for all computer users? I really would
appreciate if somebody could shed some light on this topic because I'm
starting to get confused.

Cheers,
Gil

 

"afaik, Intel D cpu's require xp64 to take "full" advantage of the dual
core.
And with Vista on horizon, I've heard xp64 will have a short shelf
life."

This is an erroneous statement. All current single core Pentium 4's
and Dual cores support 64-bit except for the mobile Pentium-M and Core
Duo/Solo lines. You do not need 64-bit windows to "take advantage" of
them. The only reason to run xp-64 bit is if you are hitting some big
memory walls. ie - when you require >4gb of system memory.

For example, the AMD64 chip has been on the market over two years now,
the first year of which XP64 bit was not even a shipping product. As
you probably know, AMD is doing very well with these chips.

Vista will be available in both 64 and 32 bit varieties, but it will
all be "under the covers" so to speak. From winsupersite.com - "Unlike
XP x64, you don't need to buy a x64-specific versions of Vista.
Instead, all Windows Vista editions, except for Vista Starter, will
come with both 32-bit (x86) and 64-bit (x64) versions in the box, on
separate DVDs. This includes the Home Basic (and Home Basic N), Home
Premium, Business (and Business N), Enterprise, and Ultimate editions
of Windows Vista."

You are correct that the upcoming Vista release is no doubt inhibiting
driver development for WindowsX64.

 

Not knowing when my company will upgrade to Vista (could be a year
after release), would I really have any advantage getting a Pentium-D
over a Pentium-4 right now?

 

We are phasing the P4 out for the shop and secretaries. It remains to
be seen whether the Intel chips can outrun the AMD chips in 64 bit. SW
does use dual processors much more now than ever before but don't make
the mistake of getting a dual core that isn't at least as fast as the
fastest single core.

 

The price premium that Intel is currently commanding for dual core over
single core is small. For example a 3ghz single core verse dual core
on retail market is $176 vs $194. Twenty dollars is definitely worth
the difference in power. The 3.4ghz is 277 verse 355. Again $80 gets
you a full second processor. So make yourself a tad more future proof
in case sw200x becomes heavily multithreaded and spend only a hair
more.

Don't worry about Vista as it will run on whatever processor you buy.

For TOP - AMD's chips do handle SolidWorks better than Intel
processors. This is because CAD software is not highly cache
dependent. The Pentium architecture does best with applications that
can make use of cache (like media encoding for instance).

 

So where does an engineering, i.e. Solidwords user fit into the MS
picture? There seems to be a version missing.

Gary

 

Well SolidWorks currently has SolidWorks x64 that runs on Windows x64.
It was released along with 2006 sp04.

When Vista is released SolidWorks will probably support it pretty
quickly. They are good about adding new technology support right away.
When you get Vista I think most new computers will ship with the
64-bit version. Vista32 version will be reserved for upgrades of older
systems. Intel is adding 64-bit support to their mobile lineup this
summer so even laptops should run Vista64.

So based on what MS is doing I would expect SolidWorks 64 to be running
on most new Vista systems. Otherwise I would expect SolidWorks 32 to
run on older systems. Who knows what SW will do though in terms of
naming and branding. Maybe they will have SolidWorks Vista product.
Or maybe they will do like MS did and not even tell you if you are
running 64 or 32 solidworks, it just installs based on your computer
setup.

 

Most benchmarks run apps on a new OS install, but the typical PC being
used for real work has a lot of little programs eating away at your CPU
cycles. Real-time virus scanning, spyware scanning, and your email
client (MS Outlook) are always typically running. If you fire up a
browser, MS Word, or view a PDF file, then the Pentium-D will be
helping you today. The nice thing is, a dual-core processor should make
the other applications quite responsive even though SolidWorks is
chugging away.