Workstation advice please

[Anonymous]

Our IT consultants have suggested the following system for myself. I know nothing about computers, they know about as much about Archicad. As a comparison to what I have now (see signature, this will be passed down to a colleague the currently has an abacus) is this a significant step up, or could more be suggested that would further enhance the system for me, at an affordable price (I am not the one with the money).
Most of the work we do is bigger than a house, but smaller than a shopping mall, mostly construction drawings but a bit of rendering / presentation too.
Advice (in plain English please) is much appreciated....

HP Graphics workstation
HP xw4300 (which apparently has...)
Proc: Intel P4 - 640 (3.2GHz, 2MB L2 Cache, 800MHz FSB, single core) Proc SUPP Hyper-Threading Tech
Mem: 2GB 533MHZ PC2-4300 DDR-2 upg to 8GB
HDD: 160GB SATA 3.0 GB/s HDD (7200rpm) with Native Command Queuing + 80GB OS drive
Graphics: ATI FireGL V3100 PCI Express (128MB)
Controller: Intg 4 channel SATA Cntrl with RAID 0, 1, 10, 5 functionality
Comms: Intg Broadcon 5752 10/100/1000 for HP (PCI Express i/face)

As a comparison they have offered an HP 7200 P4 Standard PC 2.8GHz with 2GB RAM at about 75% of the price of the workstation.

Thanks

[__archiben]

s2art wrote:
Advice (in plain English please) is much appreciated....

get. one. of. these.

[__archiben]

but seriously - you need a bigger graphics card than that. 128MB will work, but it will be slow: 3D window work will be quite painful. very minimum go for 256MB but 512MB (or above!) would be better . . .

wouldn't hurt to put as much memory in as possible (or that you can afford) too . . .

the single-core is a bit of a worry - although archicad itself doesn't take advantage of multi-processors yet, lightworks rendering does. and surely it can't be long before all apps are multi-processor aware, eh? (come on GS!)

~/archiben

[Anonymous]

~/archiben wrote:

s2art wrote:
Advice (in plain English please) is much appreciated....

get. one. of. these.

The only Mac I've ever had came with fries and a coke.

~/archiben wrote:
the single-core is a bit of a worry

That's what I thought, hence the highlight.

Thanks for the (lightning fast) response, ~Ben, I will pass it on.

[__archiben]

s2art wrote:
The only Mac I've ever had came with fries and a coke.

heathen trog.

~/archiben wrote:
the single-core is a bit of a worry

That's what I thought, hence the highlight.

increasing the graphics card performance is probably the more important of the two in that set up . . .

~/archiben

[__archiben]

s2art wrote:
The only Mac I've ever had came with fries and a coke.

again more seriously - the xeon quad will be a hell of a workstation to run XP on too!

~/archiben

[Anonymous]

Thanks for all that. Would there be any compatability issues having a single Mac (running XP or not) in a 4-seat office, all others running the same configuration as my current setup? On a Linux server (I think)? What are the key differences (in 1000 words or less) with Mac/PC systems if I was to consider moving over to the light? Can't see it happening myself, but never say never.

[__archiben]

s2art wrote:
Thanks for all that. Would there be any compatability issues having a single Mac (running XP or not) in a 4-seat office, all others running the same configuration as my current setup? On a Linux server (I think)?

if you're running XP? none at all - it's just different hardware running the same system as you currently are . . .

running mac OSX? not much. OSX can handle all types of network traffic. and it's going to be more akin to your linux server than the windows machines are: OSX and linux are both different unix flavours at the end of the day.

there are some character-usage differences - but windows is stricter with character usage than OSX anyway, so as long as you keep your file naming conventions the same as the windows boxes (and as you currently are) there won't be an issue there.

What are the key differences (in 1000 words or less) with Mac/PC systems if I was to consider moving over to the light? Can't see it happening myself, but never say never.

you know the sound an expensive car door makes when it clunks shut? that's the difference . . .

(not to mention pleasure, efficiency, stability and things that just ... work)

come down to chch. i'll give you an OSX demo . . .
~/archiben

[Aussie John]

Price comparison between Apple mac pro and like configured Dells and HP has the mac much cheaper. You can run it in boot camp mode so you can run windows

[Eduardo Rolon]

Not to discourage a possible switcher, but aren't the xeons 64 bit forcing you to run WinXp 64 and having all the lack of drivers and software problems?

Anyway AutoCAD is to Windows as Archicad is to Mac OS X (hidding under the desk)