XP pro 64-bit or not?

We will be upgrading our W-stations in a few months. We upgrade every 3
years or so. I plan to set up SW2006. Should we get XP pro 64-bit or the
plain 32 bit one?

We are stuck with Dell's. So no Athlons, except if I find a VERY good reason
to do so (and buy somwhere else). Any experience with P4-830 + 2x1Go Ram?
Will they perform correctly with a 64-bits OS and SW?

TIA
JM

Planned setup:
P4-830
2x1Go Ram DDR2
Quadro FX1400 - 128 Mo
HD 160Go Sata

24'' LCD ultrasharp 16:10

 

hi Jean

I have just gone away from Dell for the first time, I now have a dual
opteron set up, its about 2x as fast as my dual 3ghz zeon dell full
spec below

I also have a 24" widescreen LCD (1920x1200) I think these will become
THE standard for cad work, just great.

I'm in the UK, and used

www.xworksinteractive.com

steve


Case : X20a-64 Dual Opteron Case
Main Board : Supermicro H8DCE
Graphics Card : NVIDIA Quadro FX 3450 256MB (PCI-Express x16)
Hard Drive : 2x Western Digital 74GB Serial-ATA 10,000RPM
Optical Drive(s) : 16x DVD-ROM Drive + Pioneer DVD+/-RW Drive (Dual
Layer)
Sound Card : Integrated Intel High Definition Audio (5.1)
Network Card : Dual Gigabit LAN
Floppy Drive : 1.44MB Floppy Drive
CPU : 2x AMD Opteron 254 - 2.8GHz - 1MB Cache
Memory : 2GB PC3200 (400MHz) DDR Ram (2x1GB) ECC Registered

 

I wish I could

Nice setup.
What OS did you mount?
Any experience with 64-bit?

 

XP pro 32 bit, I don't think 64 bit is not ready for production work
yet.

steve

 

There are so many "White Box" suppliers out there and some willing to
give service warranties or contracts, that I would think a local
supplier of an AMD Opteron box would be able to compete on both price
and service for critical CAD workstations.

My understanding is that a large % higher powered workstations come
from these types of generic suppliers, and it is partly because of the
price & partly the quick service when fixes or upgrades are needed that
drives people to local suppliers.

I did that with my last desktop workstation in So. Cal.

 

Except that I work in a (somewhat) large company where NOT buying the
'company standard equipment' needs a ton of paper, and a couple months
negociation. Last time it took three months justifying our Athlons XP 2600.
I do not feel/ have the info that there is so much difference between a
P4-830 and an Athlon 64 4400+. (That's our budget zone- 7 stations)

BTW, here is "A Look At AMD's Socket AM2 Platform":
http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/02/21/a_look_at_amds_socket_am2_platform/page9.html

 

As far as I know, SWx64 is not quite ready for production yet (still in
beta). I'm running it and it seems fine. Runs fast, but I'm not
comparing it against any benchmarks. From what I've read, you won't
see much gain in actual SolidWorks performance except the ability to
utilize more than 2G worth of ram. However, as time and code
progresses, I'm sure this will change.

Now, if you want to talk about WinXP x64, that's a whole different
story. I would NOT recommend setting this up in a workplace... yet.
There were so many damn workarounds and bugs, and missing drivers that
I had to contend with when getting my system going. It's not worth it.
At least not until we have more truly 64-bit programs available.

 

That's this type of train I would not like to miss. But I suppose there must
have a possibility to upgrade when XP-64 bits will be stable enough. I could
mount 32 bit on every station except mine, for testing 64 b.

 

Hi Jean,
I upgraded our workstations to the Athlon 4800 r2 with windows 64 specs.
Asus An8-sli deluxe, ( ensure that the motherboard has the newer large fan
on the nForce Sli chip as the small fan on the first released boards burn
out)
Nvidia PCI 3400
4Mb ram
3x Raptor drives, (2 in raid 0 mode), plus 1 backup of in-progress working
data
DVD recorder ( why did I not get one of these before??)

The Pc is fast and stable, but... that was after removing Windows 64 and
installing Windows Pro32 os.

With Windows 64 the Benchmarks were 25% slower than with windows pro32.

Get rid of the Dells, even if you have to wait, it will be worth it. I had
the same problems with Compaq and HP being the preferred hardware here.

I had our systems built by Matek (www.matek.net) in Horsham West Sussex.

We proved their worth, when we designed a fully working project within a
week, (with preliminary build manuals), before it would take around 3 weeks!

 

I don't think you can "upgrade" to a 64-bit operating system unless you
have a true 64-bit processor / motherboard setup underneath it all
first. Make sure you have the right hardware first!