How Much Ram Are you running these days?

go with the 1gb of ram. it definitely won't hurt. if the budget allows, go for more. ram is really cheap right now. bob z. is running 1gb of ram. what operating system are you running? (oh yeah, window$. sorry forgot what newsgroup we're in. :~)> ) go into your task manager when you have everything running that you normally would have running. maybe open something else up just to 'work it' a little harder. check out the the 'commit charge' under the performance tab. what does it say? your ram installed should equal about twice that number. this will give you some room to grow. one thing to keep in mind - window$ will stretch it's legs out as soon as you give it room. for example, if you have

256mb of ram right now and you have a commit charge of 200mb - shut it all down, install 512mb of ram, turn it all back on, you will have a commit charge about 300mb or so (approximately!)

have fun!

I was running 500M, and recently upgraded to 1G--found it was a MAJOR performance improvement; well worth the money

If you are multitasking then the 1GB is well worth it. I do have a simple single part that will run out the 1GB, but that is another story. More than

2GB will be unusable by the OS. More important, especially in light of your intent to multitask is to get the right chipset with your P4. That can make a lot of difference. You will find the discussions and testing on this at: and sure the graphics card and drivers are the ones specified by SW.

Stick with W2k also. So far, for me at least, XP has been more headache that performance.

Another thought, have them buy you the fast mach> I'm Gearing up to Put together a new machine my Company has agreed to

Larry,

Running AMD 1.8GHz processor and 1Gig ram...I do a lot of top down modelling but they are smaller assemblies, less than 50 components usually...although that could be changing very soon.

Al

I run Win XP Pro SP1 currently with 0 problems unlike when I ran W2K last year. Cant remember the last time my system froze up like it did in W2K. I accually run two systems at home with a switch. It works quite well but I dont relly think the company will let me keep the kayak to use. They probably will want to pass it down to sales or something. I May be able to convince them to let me keep it for web stuff but I will get frustrated with seeing the fast machine running CAD and eventually just end up installing it all on the new machine anyways!

Larry

2Gig here....sometimes pretty big assys with a lot of incontext 3d sketched pipes. The biggest improvement You're about to see though, will come from the processor.....800 is very slow compared to the 3GHz You're looking at now.

Krister

Larry Jedik skrev i diskussionsgruppsmeddelandet: snipped-for-privacy@mygate.m ailgate.org...

I'm running both an ASUS A7N8X and a Abit KD7 at home with the AMD

2200XP and a 2100XP in either or. Both run excelent but I am scared still about moving to AMD from the pentium chip set at work. I;m sure they would perform great but I want to get the most performance for the buck here.

I'm currently looking at all the quadro series video cards and trying to decide weather to spend 200 or 500 dollars on the video card. Its my belief that this is the most important feature I can spend the money on but the thing I'm going to have a problem with is getting the Company to replace the Monitor. I currenly have a old 21" Digital. I think Compaq bought them out and the thing is still working. I would love to convince them I need a 19" Flat screen but that will be tough. I think a new video Card would not be put to good use unless I replace the monitor.

I currenly have the 3D Labs Oxygen GVX1 card which works great, but I think theres better out there and I want to be ready for the SW2004 release.

Larry

All of our older CAD machines have 512mb ram but I am ordering 2gb ram on all new machines. Well worth the extra money!

afik, XP can use 4GB

there is a switch (/3GB) that can be used in the boot.ini to support programs that can use more than 2GB of virtual memory.

partial example of boot.ini with switch set:

[operating systems] multi(0)disk(0)rdisk(0)partition(2)\WINDOWS="Microsoft Windows XP Professional" /fastdetect /3GB

Larry,

We've got 2 of those new HP xw4100 boxes for "testing". One has XP, the other Win2K. (The XP one is slightly faster) They're definately very good machines,but....we have experienced some CTD's; mostly due to the SW Piping package we believe...but thats another story :).

We standardize on 1gig Ram, 1gig NIC's & nVidia 750XGL cards otherwise.

Jeff

Larry,

The most important thing to speed money on is memory. I'd suggest the more expensive memory which is matched, like the corsair xms memory. For the TFT's, I thought the 19" Samsung 191T was pretty good and it cost about $650 at most stores. The screen size is actually very close to my P815 viewable size less .5" on the height. It's totally subjective, but imho, the problem with the TFT's is the resolution is not as tight as the CRT's and the screen response is delayed. I persponally do not like having a big honking box in front of me and the TFT's gave me a sense of breathing room or less clutter. And, since I do travel to locations, it would be nice not having to lug my P815 around. Also, for presentations, the large TFT's are great!

..

bob,

mine says 325M/1878M ?

what does the second number mean?

the second number should be 'Limit'. this is how much total free space you have on your system. this includes free hard drive space and free ram added together. you don't want to get into the hard drive to store information that needs to be in system memory. takes too long to access - really kills performance.

Lots of folks here are running AMD with no problems that anyone has ever been able to attribute to the processor. It used to be that AMD gave you a lot more bang for the buck, but I think that isn't true right now.

That depends. I've seen quite a few benchmark tests that show that the expensive cards are not giving you much bang for the buck at all. We went with the 750, but we didn't really have any analysis to show that it was best, just a gut feel.

Why do you think that? How much resolution does your old monitor support? I would be inclined to think that any 21" monitor would probably support at least 1600x1200.

As I said above, I've seen a SW benchmark test where the GVX1 was only a little slower, maybe 10%, than an expensive Quadro (I think it was the 950). You may have to replace it anyway, as it won't fit in the new boards with an AGP 8x slot.

Jerry Steiger Tripod Data Systems