Post SWW2006 Blues

Well I benchmarked a bunch of computers on the floor of the vendor
exhibit and they are faster than mine. But I was soured by the fact
that SW2004 running on mine is still faster than SW2006 running on one
of them when working with parts. Not to be disuaded from a planned
rollout of 2006 I did some more testing. SW2006 did seem to rebuild
large assemblies about twice as fast as 2004 so this was good news. But
then I tried the next step in pre-rollout testing on SP3 and created a
drawing. Oops, SW2006 would cut a section through the same large
assembly, but if section scope was used the section failed. On the
other hand, when I just converted the 2004 drawing it seemed to work.

Conclusion: Parts slower, assemblies faster and drawings quirky.

 

Well, yes. Up to the point that the sectioning bug surfaced they were
faster if not disconcerting. The disconcerting part has to do with the
background processing going on. Views take time to "develop". Takes me
back to my darkroom days. I have yet to try this on a dual core AMD.

I have to come up with a way to benchmark drawings. This is not nearly
as easy as part rebuilds.

 

It is new hardware time around here. Based on your benchmarking at SWW,
what hardware worked the best with 2006? We have tried Dell and
Tri-Star and are willing to try someone else. Is AMD that much better
with SWX? Can a good prebuilt machine be bought for under $2,500? We do
very simple parts, no surfacing at all. Some assemblies can have around
500 parts. Any insight would be appreciated.

Thanks

Brad

 

It is new hardware time around here. Based on your benchmarking at SWW,
what hardware worked the best with 2006? We have tried Dell and
Tri-Star and are willing to try someone else. Is AMD that much better
with SWX? Can a good prebuilt machine be bought for under $2,500? We do
very simple parts, no surfacing at all. Some assemblies can have around
500 parts. Any insight would be appreciated.

Thanks

Brad

 

In general AMD has always been better than Intel by a significant
margin the last few years. The Centrino is the only Intel chip that
seems to naturally do well with SW, but it is only available in
laptops. The Pentiums make good space heaters though as a consequence
of their high clock speeds.

The machines I benched at SWW were for the most part top end. The SUN
workstation line (dual Opterons), IBM (Dual Opterons) and the HP4300
(3.8Ghz Intel) were pretty decent. The IBM was probably the fastest and
most expensive. I can't help much with prebuilt machine information as
I alway roll my own.

Since I first penned this thread I installed SW2006 on a couple dual
core AMD64 x2 4400+ systems and loaded a big drawing (5,000 part
assembly). SW does indeed use both cores fully about 50% of the time
which means maybe 25% improvement over a single core. This not only
happens when loading the drawing, but also when printing as SW seems to
regenerate everything when printing.

 

Personally, I'd stay away from Tristars. I would add Xi and Boxx to
your list.

All the benchmarks I've seen up to a few months ago show AMD on top.

Maybe. Not a "really" good machine. For that you'll lay out closer to
$4k. A top-of-the-line machine would be like $6k (dual PCIe video, 4 Gb
RAM, raid drive, etc).

For that you might be able to get away with something that isn't quite
top of the line. Sounds like your memory requirements are low, 1 Gb
might do for you, and possibly a lower end graphics card like the Quadro
FX 1400 or 500.

I would recommend Xi Computers. They make AMD boxes and tend to be
cheaper for identical components than some of the others.

Good luck,

matt

 

Thanks for the advice, Xi looks like a nice machine. What are some of
the newer technologies that SWX actually uses? I was pretty sure that
for modeling and drawing dual processors were no advantage but it
sounds like dual core is. As far as SLI I don't have the budget but
wonder if it can be utilized. BTW, any experience with Xi product
support?

Thank you,

Brad

 

As I mentioned above, SW2006 does make use of a second processor in
drawing regeneration and view creation. This does not mean a speed
doubling, but is a significant speedup.

 

And the first big drawing I loaded (made in 2004) had serious
regressions. Hatch shows, but part outline doesn't on several sheets
with section views.

2006 conversion wizard crashes when converting certain folders with SW
parts.

 

do you export to autocad much? seems to be some glitches there too.
with blocks and hatches. sucks for all the customers that want 2d
intead of native swx. :0(

 

From time to time we export.

 

You might be able to get another 10% - 12% out of your dual core by
applying a Microsoft hotfix to XP, reference Microsoft KB Article
896256.

I recently purchased a laptop from Hypersonic-pc. AMD64 X2 4800+ with
2GB ram and 7200 SATA HD and Nvidia Quadro FX Go1400 running XP Pro.

I ran the SPECapc benchmark for SolidWorks 2005 on it comparing
results to Dell M70. The only thing that I did that was not documented
for the benchmark was to convert the files into 2005 format before
running the test. My I/O numbers are better because of my SATA and the
fact that I converted the files. Here are the number for average of 5
test.

Dell M70

Total time 488.03
Graphics 93.3
CPU 202.83
I/O 191.91

Hypersonic Aviator FX7 before hot fix

Total time 439.48
Graphics 119.47
CPU 208.5
I/O 111.51

Hypersonic FX7 after hot fix

Total time 389.55
Graphics 111.66
CPU 180.11
I/O 97.78

Applying the hot fix made all activity faster, but my Graphics is
still slower than the Dell M70 and they have the same Graphics
processor. I have done some research on this and it appears that there
is an issue with Nvidia 80 series drivers and dual core processors. My
laptop has driver version 79.xx, but the drivers come from CLEVO, the
real manufacture of the laptop. This is a brand new model, so there
are no older versions of the video driver. I have notified them of my
issue, so I hope that they will get it resolved soon. It is ironic
that everyone complains about ATI drivers and Nvidia has problems.

I also found it strange that the hot fix reduced my I/O times. I
converted the files thinking that I/O times were effected by the CPU
since it had to convert the files when loading.

 

John, glad to see you for a few minutes in Las Vegas.

I wholeheartedly agree with you on your note about your primary
SolidWorks machine not going on the Internet. More people need to hear
that.

My Dell M60 has never been on the Internet & it has been a pleasure to
use. It has no antivirus, Spybot, firewalls activated, etc and the
machine is ROCK SOLID, and has virtually 100% uptime (not that
SolidWorks doesn't occassionally die, and have to be relaunched).

There are plenty of $500-1000 boxes in any form you want to go online
without worries. Mine is a Mac, and again, no downtime (it downloads
all my SolidWorks updates, and I Ethernet them over to the M60 in a few
minutes).

Bo

 

Same here, but replace Mac with Linux box. Same reliability at a
fraction of the price.

 

Mac, Linus, BSD, or other flavors are a personal choice as I see it.
Like Ethnic restaurants.

I like the upscale chain that is open 365 days a year which has that
extensive menu of munchies, & feel like I get my money's worth on my
Big Macs.

My applications cost so many more multiples of the Mac hardware cost
that I don't judge my Mac on just the hardware cost. A good MiniMac
can be had for $500-600.

Bo

 

Dale, I did not do the testing on the M70. I was just using the
information published on the SPECapc website. Here is info published
for the M70

Intel Pentium M Processor 780, 2.26GHz, 2MB L2, 533 FSB
1GB DDR2 533MHz SDRAM

Their video driver was 6.14.10.7203 and mine was 7931

 

I don't put much faith in the separation into Graphics, CPU and IO times. In
my experience, anything you change can affect any or all of the times.
Processor speed definitely affects all three. The graphics card can affect
the CPU and IO times. Memory speed can affect all three.

Jerry Steiger
Tripod Data Systems
"take the garbage out, dear"

 

SPEC APC is heavily weighted towards graphics. A good graphics card can
make an anemic machine look stellar. Ship in a Bottle and STAR can
separate graphics from CPU much better.

 

They now have the new FX60 processor, which is dual core. I think the
M70 does have faster ram, 533Mhz to 400Mhz.

I purchased from Hypersonic-pc and was somewhat upset with the
purchase. It took a little over a month to get the computer and they
did charge my credit card on placement of the order. They are working
with Nvidia on the driver issue so I cannot complain about that. The
actual manufacture is Clevo. Since I bought, I have found a couple of
other sources. One is Xtremenotebooks. I have purchased from them
before and was happy with their service. I cannot remember the name of
the other source.

 

I knew that the benchmark was high on graphics. They do more spinning
of the models in one test than I do in an entire day. Also some of the
spinning they do is through the API and it is much slower than
spinning with the mouse.

The reason I choose this benchmark, was that I do not trust
individual's reporting their times for these other test.s. But after
looking closer at the posted results from the SPECapc benchmark, they
did not follow the instructions. The instructions were to run the test
5 times and post your average times. Some only ran the test once.