Amd dual processor any good for Solidworks with Pdmworks?

I have been given £2500 ex vat to spend on a new rig.
I don't need a dvdrom, keyboard, mouse or a monitor, so this is for a box of
bits, lol
So I was thinking of getting a Nvidia FX3000 and plonking this in Amd 64 r
Dual processor system with 4Gb ram and windows XP64.
Now I know that the 6800Gt is a gaming card, but what if this was 2x
6800gt's in SLI mode, would this be a better set-up than the fx3000 on it's
own?

 

Dual procesors are nice, but they will do you no good for either as
neither one is multithreaded.

 

Thank you for the reply, so what would you recommend?

 

I would go ahead and get them if you have the budget. They will allow
you to work faster with other programs opened at the same time as
SolidWorks. And stick with the fx3000.

 

That's an overly simplistic answer.

Different components of SolidWorks do benefit from multithreading to
different extents. It changes with release, without official notice
usually. Photoworks will certainly benefit, any Cosmos Express you run
will too, and probably Moldflow Express, some assembly operations. To
say there's no benefit is not correct, although for some operations
there's not much, and for others there's a significant benefit.

For PDMW, I would go to the SW subscription forum and ask Joy Garon
about multithreading specifically.

matt

 

Thnak you, I have sent a request to Joy
Fingers crossed

 

SW does not in general utilize a dual processor. FrodoWorks does. The
only thing I can think of that this setup might help with is to run SW
on one processor and PDMWorks on the other. But then you will run into
RAM issues because until SW runs under XP64 you will be limited to the
3Gb. If you vault is so large that running PDMWorks on such a fast
processor make sense it will limit your available RAM for SW. Catch22.

If you are planning for the future, put in a dual capable mobo but
with a single Opteron 286 or better. Then when XP64 comes out and
assuming you can get your hands on it get the second CPU or more RAM.
Tyan makes some nice dual capable mobos that will hold much more RAM
than the current crop of high performance single CPU boards.

I think there was one post a while back using the Dual gaming cards in
SLI mode. He was just a squeak faster than my AMD64 FX53 with FX3000.
So the FX3000 or similar CAD rated graphics card might make more sense.

 

Go Dual Core with a single processor die. All the benefits of Dual
processors, but not the cost. The only downside is if you have two heavy
handed applications running at the same time or one heavy duty
multi-threaded app, there is only one bus handling all the traffic.

Ken

 

You hit the nail on the head. I/O. SW is very I/O intensive. PDMWorks is
also. So is FrodoWorks. To me dual core is the Celeron solution for multi
processing. I run NENastran which is very hard on memory with SW which is
hard on CPUs. If I was going multi it would certainly be on a dual mobo.

 

Beppe,

The same as "what" ???

The performance "should" be the same when running things like benchmarks.

Once you get into heavy multithreaded applications, or running two heavy
applications concurrently, the dual processor machine will smoke the dual
core. It's an issue of bandwith external to the CPU.

Regards

Mark

 

Was this test using SW2006 or an earlier version?

 

I use ECC RAM in my system and so far only one person has posted any
faster times. It is fully 20% faster than any Intel system I have seen.
And the ECC brings another time saving benefit in fewer crashes due to
memory corruption.

The AMD 64 FX53 I used is far faster in real world work than any of the
Intel boxes at work (up to 3.4GHz Dell) that I get all the big
drawings and really large assemblies to work on. That is the down side.
Big jobs seek the fastest machine.

 

I use Registered ECC RAM in my system and so far only one person has
posted any
faster times and he has a similar setup with a new chip. It is fully
20% faster than any Intel system I have seen. And the Registered ECC
RAM brings another time saving benefit in fewer crashes due to memory
corruption.

The AMD 64 FX53 I used is far faster in real world work than any of
the
Intel boxes at work (up to 3.4GHz Dell) that I get all the big
drawings and really large assemblies to work on. That is the down
side.
Big jobs seek the fastest machine.

AMD is faster on benchmarks and real world.

 

I haven't, but there was one guy who beat my system with one of these
newer chips. He only beat it by a small margin. If I can run Ship in a
Bottle in 18 seconds for 50 iterations with Fast Image Quality it will
take quite a big jump to better that by much.