New computer justification

There's really no polite way to put this...

Every minute your boss spends stroking his...err...ego...and preventing your engineers from getting decent computers to work on is costing your company money. LOTS of money.

It's not just rebuilds that will be faster with new systems - everything will be 3x faster.

Let's say it saves on average 1 hour per designer/engineer per day. At $50 per hour (I'm certain the burdened cost is far higher) x 18 users. Your boss's knuckle-dragging is costing your company $900 per day or $216,000 per year!

An HP xw4400 2.6GHz C2D system with 2GB RAM and FX1500 is selling for $2150 right now. You could probably get it for less from Dell and other vendors.

Invest $38,700 or waste $216,000.

The choice is your boss's.

Reply to
jimsym
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I'm not a boss put when I discuss this with my boss the question always is "will I get drawings faster" and the answer is usually "not really". What usually happens is that we do more and more sophisticated things in our models (ie we grow up to our hardware capabilites) once again reaching the limits of the machines, that allows us to get a better product out the door with fewer errors. Also that little bit of processor lag allows for a bit of thinking about what you are doing and your next step.

Don't get me wrong I am all for the fastest latest and greatest I don't think the issue is as simple as stated and any good boss will know that.

Steve R

Reply to
Steve Reinisch

This has been rolling around in the back of my head a bit. Just timing the rebuilds will underestimate the impact of processor speed, just like task manager overestimates. What I mean is, timing rebuilds only does not capture the friction in the UI, like waiting 10 seconds to place a dimension on a drawing of a large assembly.

So, I think the best we can hope for is an estimate, with task manager reporting the upper limit, and rebuilds giving the lower limit.

I wonder if an event is raised at the beginning and end of view manipulation. Subtracting that from task manager's report would get us where we want to be, assuming that we wouldn't spend less time trying to get the model positioned with a faster CPU.

I may be thinking too hard. Waiting for rebuilds should show a significant return on a new workstation even though it underestimates the issue. I suspect that a full time user on medium to large assemblies should be replacing a CPU at least yearly. FEA users probably even more.

Reply to
Dale Dunn

In the absence of precise tools to measure, I propose we find an acceptable percentage or range of percentages to take from task manager / performance log to use as an estimate for this sort of thing. I'm thinking 65-85% of reported CPU utilization is reasonable, depending on the user. Bias toward the high end for making drawings.

Reply to
Dale Dunn

jimsym,

I disagree with your statement about everything being 3x faster.

I won't be able to hide parts 3x faster. I won't be able to rotate my parts 3x faster. I won't be able to draw sketches 3x faster. I won't be able to move my mouse 3x faster. I won't be able to navigate menus 3x faster. I won't be able to read my email, web pages, or this group 3x faster. I won't be able to create office documents 3x faster. etc. etc.

Don't get me wrong. I want, and need a new computer. And I know that other aspects will be faster. But I have got to be realistic in what is actually being our bottleneck, so I know how to show the justifications for it. It would seem that any activity that taxes the processor is our major bottleneck. That would include anything from rebuilds, to creating animations, to doing geometry compares, to rendering scenes, etc., etc., etc.

With that being said, out of everything we do that really puts a load on our system, rebuilds are by far the most commonly done. This is more than likely true for most people.

That is the reason for wanting a utility for measuring rebuild times ONLY.

And by the way, the computers that they did look at for us at one time were extremely, I mean extremely, high end system. I don't remember exactly what they were (been a few months). But I read the specs, and it was all like the best of the best hardware. I believe the systems were in the $5000-6000. They will do that so that they won't have to replace them as often. That's IT's choice. But I'm not going to argue with them.... If it were me, I would buy something like you described, more often. It would definately be easier to justify.

Reply to
Seth Renigar

"Seth Renigar" a écrit dans le message de news:

Not quite what you need, but there must be other people in your company that have obsolete machines. So upgrading the engineering computers is like upgrading a large number of machines as your machines will replace other machines in your company. That's how I justify changing ours every other year.

Reply to
Jean Marc

Seth,

Maybe you are going at this all wrong. Engineers understand numbers like this, management doesn't. You might take the tack that IS doesn't have the qualifications to manage CAD. Of course I would present this a little more tactfully or you might be running SW on a TI55.

Over the years SW and in particular Greg Jankowski have done a lot of work trying to support the management side of SWX. I know at the last SWW the CAD Managers Boot Camp addressed a lot of issues that come up in this area. Either your IS department gets qualified to manage SW or Engineering should be given the latitude to do it themselves. Your boss might be able to get a CAD Manager easier than a new computer. The CAD Manager will then have the ear of management and be able to secure IS cooperation.

TOP

Reply to
TOP

You might want to have them look into that to help with cost justification. A $6k system is going to be wated cash, because there will be a lot of money spent on things that won't help SW. Consequently, they will still be outdated in the same timeframe as a less well equipped machine.

Perhaps when you figure out how to measure rebuild time over a day (or maybe a project), you could submit that information with a suggested hardware configuration. The hottest possible SW workstation shouldn't be more than $3-3.5k, unless you build an 8 or more core monster for large analysis projects. More money that that and they'll be wasting it on things that don't help, like SCSI RAID 5 systems and Quad SLI and other silliness.

Reply to
Dale Dunn

Dell has a very fast machine for about 10k. But to do CAD you have to replace the video card. For what Dell is doing I could hand build a machine for a lot less.

TOP

Reply to
TOP

Steve, what you just hit on is "How Good is Good Enough?" That really applies to all jobs.

I do really feel that training can help eliminate unneccessary redraw times and that a monitor to track them would at least quantify what % of a days work is waiting for redraws as they are likely to be a similar % of time regardless of whether the user is doing simpler or more complicated constructions.

Bo

Reply to
Bo

Drawings generally won't get faster, they will hold as SW continues to require more and more resources.

TOP

Reply to
TOP

I am thinking of continuing my practice of generating most of my work in earlier releases in SolidWorks as those releases work fast for my designs, without problems, & on slower processors.

Then just importing them into the current release on an as needed basis is something that is easy for me to do. Obviously an engineering group might not want to do this, but a few people might choose to work that way, and simply take the best of what they can that suits their jobs.

Bo

Reply to
Bo

Seeing that my computer took 540 seconds convinced me that I REALLY needed to get a new computer.

Have any of you tried it with Verification On Rebuild turned on? I did. It took 30,388 seconds! That convinced me that I needed to turn VOR off and remember to check manually after every "significant" change.

Jerry Steiger Tripod Data Systems "take the garbage out, dear"

Reply to
Jerry Steiger

We replaced one of our computers with a Dell 690 that has the FX3500 graphics card. It's fast (about 5X as fast as my old machine) and cost about that much. I'm pretty sure that I can get nearly the same usable performance with a Dell 390 and the FX550 that costs a little over half as much. We'll do some benchmarks when it comes in.

Jerry Steiger Tripod Data Systems "take the garbage out, dear"

Reply to
Jerry Steiger

Jerry,

I have been looking at benchmarks that run across releases of SW. You might find you can get the same performance gain by going back a few releases in SW if that is an option. Some people buy new computers so they can do bigger assemblies, bigger drawings or process more parts. Some people buy new computers just to be able to do what they did last year with the same speed.

I recently went on a one week crusade to fix an assembly that had a reputation as a benchmark because it ran so slow. A week later people were asking what I did because it ran so fast it couldn't be timed accurately. Of course I doubt you are messing up the the way these guys had done because you hang out here and listen to what has been said by the many contributors.

As far as the specAPC benchmark, we may have found some kind of bug in it that misreports results.

TOP

Reply to
TOP

With the kinds of shapes we do, we usually have to be running fairly close to the latest release. We can blame that on Mark Biasotti. We managed to skip 2003 and 2005, because the pain of switching was more than the gain from new functionality, but since 2006 we've had to keep up with all of the nice new stuff that makes generating shapes easier.

Yes, that's been a very interesting thread. Fortunately, we don't do too many "large" assembly drawings, so it's mostly of academic interest to us.

You would be amazed at the some of the screwball mistakes I make!

Bummer! It may not be much of a benchmark, but it is the only one that gets very widely reported.

Jerry Steiger Tripod Data Systems "take the garbage out, dear"

Reply to
Jerry Steiger

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