Pentium D or Pentium 4, that is the question...

I am getting ready to order a Dell Precision 380 computer. The last one we bought was about a month ago with the following specs.

Intel=AE Pentium=AE 4 630, 3.0GHz/800MHz/2x1MB L2 cache

2GB, 667MHz, DDR2 SDRAM Memory, ECC (2 DIMMS) 128MB PCIe x16 nVidia Quadro FX 1400 80GB SATA 3.0Gb/s with NCQ and 8MB DataBurst

Im curious if anyone on the group is using a Pentium-D processor. From what ive been told, the dual-cores work pretty well when multi-tasking, but for a single app like SolidWorks, it has slower performance than a Pentium-4.

If anyone has any comments/suggestions, please post :)

Reply to
SW Monkey
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It shouldn't operate any slower than an equivalently clocked 3.0ghz single core. Dual cores don't benefit SW much. won't It will help with assembly, assembly drawing open, opening 2006 high quality view drawings, photoworks, and cosmos. That's all I remember off the top of my head. There is a tiny bit of overhead associated with running dual processors over single processors, but it will be completely unnoticable by you. I would definitely hit up the dual core bandwagon.

Reply to
Mr. Who

afaik, Intel D cpu's require xp64 to take "full" advantage of the dual core. And with Vista on horizon, I've heard xp64 will have a short shelf life.

Reply to
kb

No 64 bit will live on.

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It is my understanding that the big push to get Vista to market (with numerous drivers) is one of the reasons xp64 has so few drivers available.

Reply to
kb

do you mean that Microsoft will drop all 64 bit ambitions and plans in the Vista era?! does it mean regression for all computer users? I really would appreciate if somebody could shed some light on this topic because I'm starting to get confused.

Cheers, Gil

Reply to
Gil Alsberg

"afaik, Intel D cpu's require xp64 to take "full" advantage of the dual core. And with Vista on horizon, I've heard xp64 will have a short shelf life."

This is an erroneous statement. All current single core Pentium 4's and Dual cores support 64-bit except for the mobile Pentium-M and Core Duo/Solo lines. You do not need 64-bit windows to "take advantage" of them. The only reason to run xp-64 bit is if you are hitting some big memory walls. ie - when you require >4gb of system memory.

For example, the AMD64 chip has been on the market over two years now, the first year of which XP64 bit was not even a shipping product. As you probably know, AMD is doing very well with these chips.

Vista will be available in both 64 and 32 bit varieties, but it will all be "under the covers" so to speak. From winsupersite.com - "Unlike XP x64, you don't need to buy a x64-specific versions of Vista. Instead, all Windows Vista editions, except for Vista Starter, will come with both 32-bit (x86) and 64-bit (x64) versions in the box, on separate DVDs. This includes the Home Basic (and Home Basic N), Home Premium, Business (and Business N), Enterprise, and Ultimate editions of Windows Vista."

You are correct that the upcoming Vista release is no doubt inhibiting driver development for WindowsX64.

Reply to
Mr. Who

Not knowing when my company will upgrade to Vista (could be a year after release), would I really have any advantage getting a Pentium-D over a Pentium-4 right now?

Reply to
SW Monkey

We are phasing the P4 out for the shop and secretaries. It remains to be seen whether the Intel chips can outrun the AMD chips in 64 bit. SW does use dual processors much more now than ever before but don't make the mistake of getting a dual core that isn't at least as fast as the fastest single core.

Reply to
TOP

The price premium that Intel is currently commanding for dual core over single core is small. For example a 3ghz single core verse dual core on retail market is $176 vs $194. Twenty dollars is definitely worth the difference in power. The 3.4ghz is 277 verse 355. Again $80 gets you a full second processor. So make yourself a tad more future proof in case sw200x becomes heavily multithreaded and spend only a hair more.

Don't worry about Vista as it will run on whatever processor you buy.

For TOP - AMD's chips do handle SolidWorks better than Intel processors. This is because CAD software is not highly cache dependent. The Pentium architecture does best with applications that can make use of cache (like media encoding for instance).

Reply to
Mr. Who

So where does an engineering, i.e. Solidwords user fit into the MS picture? There seems to be a version missing.

Gary

Reply to
Gary Knutson

I know you've been doing a lot of benchmarking. Can you give us a short list of things that you find are using multiple threads? Or are you referring to the increase in publicized multi-threading, such as background drawing view updates? I'm terribly curious about this, but I can't test it myself.

Reply to
Dale Dunn

Well SolidWorks currently has SolidWorks x64 that runs on Windows x64. It was released along with 2006 sp04.

When Vista is released SolidWorks will probably support it pretty quickly. They are good about adding new technology support right away. When you get Vista I think most new computers will ship with the

64-bit version. Vista32 version will be reserved for upgrades of older systems. Intel is adding 64-bit support to their mobile lineup this summer so even laptops should run Vista64.

So based on what MS is doing I would expect SolidWorks 64 to be running on most new Vista systems. Otherwise I would expect SolidWorks 32 to run on older systems. Who knows what SW will do though in terms of naming and branding. Maybe they will have SolidWorks Vista product. Or maybe they will do like MS did and not even tell you if you are running 64 or 32 solidworks, it just installs based on your computer setup.

Reply to
Mr. Who

Most benchmarks run apps on a new OS install, but the typical PC being used for real work has a lot of little programs eating away at your CPU cycles. Real-time virus scanning, spyware scanning, and your email client (MS Outlook) are always typically running. If you fire up a browser, MS Word, or view a PDF file, then the Pentium-D will be helping you today. The nice thing is, a dual-core processor should make the other applications quite responsive even though SolidWorks is chugging away.

Reply to
JoelH

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