topic Re: Advice for a new workstation in Installation & update

Advice for a new workstation

shtarkel — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 09:20:18 GMT

Hi, I am building a new ArchiCAD and 3dMax workstation and I have some doubts of what would be the best machine for around $4500. Use multiprocessing or single but more powerful

case - Supermicro SC743TQ-865-SQ
MB - Supermicro X8DAI or GIGABYTE GA-X58A-UD9 for single xeon w3680 ?
CPU - one Xeon x5680 or two x5650 ?
RAM 12GB x1333 - G.skill , OCZ, Corsair, Crusial ?
GC- FX 3800
HDD- SAS 15k ? is it so important to have a super fast HDD

I am looking forward to read some advices...

Re: Advice for a new workstation

Anonymous — Thu, 07 Oct 2010 23:25:44 GMT

i would definitely get a multi core chip.as both 3ds 7 ArchiCAD make use of multiply cores. plus the newest intel chips have built-in over clocking which helps with other apps.

Re: Advice for a new workstation

Anonymous — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 13:03:03 GMT

shtarkel wrote:
Hi, I am building a new ArchiCAD and 3dMax workstation and I have some doubts of what would be the best machine for around $4500. Use multiprocessing or single but more powerful

case - Supermicro SC743TQ-865-SQ
MB - Supermicro X8DAI or GIGABYTE GA-X58A-UD9 for single xeon w3680 ?
CPU - one Xeon x5680 or two x5650 ?
RAM 12GB x1333 - G.skill , OCZ, Corsair, Crusial ?
GC- FX 3800
HDD- SAS 15k ? is it so important to have a super fast HDD

I am looking forward to read some advices...

your definition very properly understandable and i Learn lot from it........

Re: Advice for a new workstation

shtarkel — Wed, 20 Oct 2010 09:04:16 GMT

Your welcome

Re: Advice for a new workstation

Steve Jepson — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 22:33:25 GMT

Configure your system for running 3dmax Design with Vray 2.0 and AutoCAD Architecture 2012. Be sure to consider the nvidia quadro workstations and the NVIDIA Tesla Personal Supercomputers.

But before you invest, are you sure you want to do that?

What if in the next year or so we will be required to log into a Super Servers to access our software, which will by then need a supercomputer to run it anyway.

Perhaps we should be putting our money into backup capacity and security rather than processing speed. ?

Do we buy for the future of Cloud Computing or buy for todays needs and hope it will still be functional by the time it's paid for.

It's always a hard decision.

Re: Advice for a new workstation

Anonymous — Thu, 09 Dec 2010 22:43:04 GMT

Steve wrote:
Do we buy for the future of Cloud Computing or buy for todays needs and hope it will still be functional by the time it's paid for.

hmm always a tricky question, I'd say the cloud computing software is still a few years away...

Re: Advice for a new workstation

Steve Jepson — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 00:23:45 GMT

Todays news.

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/12/09/death-hard-drive-cloud-google-chrome/

I already do something like this with Maxwell Render. I don't keep the huge materials libraries on my computer. The material browswer is linked to a server with all of that so I don't need it on my computer. Also, I have the software linkded to a rernder farm for that part of the program.

I think there are already servers where you can log in and use any software they have avaialable. You don't need to keep it on your computer or buy it. You just pay for using it.

Re: Advice for a new workstation

shtarkel — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 10:04:25 GMT

I am not so sure about cloud computing, I don't like the idea of my files being somewhere in the middle of nowhere...I have my own standards for securing data. And I think decentralizing computing is the best way.

I bought this machine:

MB: Gigabyte X58A-UD9
Case: Cooler Master Haf-X
PS: Chieftec APS-750C
CPU: Xeon w3680
Fan: Noctua NH-D14
RAM: 6 x Kingston 2GB DDR3
HDD: WD 640GB Black + SSD Intel X25-M 80GB
VC: Nvidia Quadro FX 1700

Re: Advice for a new workstation

Scott Bulmer — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 19:56:25 GMT

I guess cloud computing would be great if you had reliable and fast internet service.

Anyway, what is the current thinking regarding Solid-State Drives and ArchiCAD?

Here is a brief description on the Apple site:

About Solid-State Drives
Solid-state drives have no moving parts and are capable of accessing data at speeds up to 223MB per second, which is up to twice the average speed of hard drives. The result? Incredible performance at a range of data-intensive tasks, including up to 2x faster ProRes video encoding using solid-state drives compared with hard drives.

Re: Advice for a new workstation

Anonymous — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 21:01:04 GMT

Scott wrote:
Anyway, what is the current thinking regarding Solid-State Drives and ArchiCAD?

I bought a 15" mac book pro a couple of months ago, and payed premium for 8GB RAM, high res screen, i7 and a 256 SDD.
RAM and CPU helps, but SDD really makes a difference. It is not a huge difference, but the machine feels snappy, booting and opening files, and shuts down in a couple of seconds.
For lighter sw like Pages or Safari it is almost instantaneous, on AC it is pretty fast (10 secs).
Other pluses are that it has very good battery life (some 4 to 6 hours real working time) and it is absolutely silent.
For the last one, I am more than willing to pay from now on the extra hundreds of euros.

Re: Advice for a new workstation

Laszlo Nagy — Sun, 02 Jan 2011 23:30:23 GMT

I second Miguel's words.
My notebook became more than 2 years old this fall and became very slow and sluggish.
Programs in 32-bit Vista can not use the full 4 GB RAM.
I bought a 60 GB SSD drive and Windows 7 64-bit. It is an OCZ Vertex 2, which I highly recommend because both its read and write rate is like 270 MB/sec, yeees, megabytes per second.
I made the SSD drive my system partition for Window 7.
My computer feels very snappy and responsive now.
Just one example: Vista used to take about 2-3 minutes to boot.
Win7 with SSD takes about 40 seconds.
It really makes such a huge difference when all your system files are on an SSD partition and the system is loading them at the speed of RAM instead of the speed of a hard driver.
I will never have another computer with an HDD system partition again.
I think I will now be able to use this computer for 4 years instead of the 3 years originally planned.
The only thing I would want is 8 GB of RAM instead of the 4 GB max. possible.