The Ultimate SolidWorks PC for under $6000

I have an opportunity to spec an "ultimate" system for a SolidWorks workstation for somebody with a budget of $6000. Can I get some good suggestions from the group on this? Here are some of the basic guidelines that I know of right now:

Video card to be the best possible since this is probably going to be the limit to speed for most of the work. Processor / Motherboard choice to be latest available. More than likely will have >1G of RAM (what speed and considerations necessary?) SCSI hard drive may be considered, but not a major concern as load times are not a major issue with the type of work being done.

What about dual processors?

Thanks for the help guys and gals.

Oooooh... $6000 is a LOT of PC these days. For that amount of money, here is what I would suggest:

2X - AMD Athlon 64 FX51 $1598 1X - Tyan K8W (Dual Opteron MB) $449 2GB - PC3200 DDR RAM (4 X 512MB) $522 2X - 10k RPM Western Digital 36GB $260 1X - PNY Quadro FX 3000 $1730 1X - DVD/CD Burner $250 1X - Good Case/Power Supply $250 Floppy/keyboard/mouse/sound... $300

Total (less taxes and S&H) NO MONITOR $5359

This is pretty much the best system money can buy at the moment. Almost nothing can touch it in terms of raw performance, Plus is is ready for

64 bit computing when that happens.

All for under $6000, boy this was fun...drool...

Slightly off topic, but may help Steve! Does anyone have experience with running Solidworks 2004 on the new Opteron or Athlon64 processors? I'm also looking to put together a new workstation in the next month and my current thoughts are: Athlon 3200+ running at 400mhz FSB

2Gb RAM matched to the motherboard - as fast as poss. SATA main HD (RAID 0 them sounds like a recipe for problems and I don't have the money for a fast / redundant RAID) - no running over networks required. quadro 980XGL video card a 20" dell TFT monitor ( I already have a 21" old CRT monitor that can be used as a second unit)

I figured this gave me the best "bang for the buck" at around £1600 excluding monitor and would make a blindingly fast Solidworks machine for most modelling tasks, but my local computer dude is trying to persuade me to go for a 64bit processor (he's an AMD fan) and I am wondering if it is worth stretching the extra dosh for a twin processor MB and a set of Athlon 64's (I aim to be doing some rendering / animation work as well - hence the twin processor gig, I understand Solidworks doesn't gain from having 2 processors?)

would going for one of the new 64bit processors gain anything over the 3200+ (not working on a "bang for buck" scenario) - most of the results on the Toms hardware page seem very software dependent and they don't use the Solidoworks benchmark in their tests! Hope this provides some side illumination and best of luck with the spec Steve! Regards Deri

I look at system performance as a means to get past bottlenecks. There are many sources of bottleneck. You can buy a fast system and load it down with many unecessary processes and then wonder why it is so slow. You can put your CAD box on a network backbone forcing it to look at every packet that flows by on a busy network, thus slowing it down. The ultimate system may very well be a "fast box" to run SW and a slow box to run Office and other programs not related to CAD, tied together with a KVM switch.

Steve Fye wrote:

Probably not. CPU and I/O performance will limit your speed. You will run into this bottleneck in parts that have a great deal of "swoopy surfaces", fillets, draft or other complex geometry, in assemblies with lots of overdefined mates or flexible sub assemblies with lots of configurations to manage and in drawings of large assemblies, drawings having many section views or other compute intesive processes. A fast graphics card will probably not help much on a drawing and drawings are where it all comes together to slow down a system.

Well, you better consider chipset here. Look at

and for reviews of various motherboards, chipsets and memory.

Also consider going to 64 bit computing. AMD makes 64 bit processors that will surpass the latest Pentiums in the 32 bit realm.

Consider the ability of the OS to utilize RAM as well if you have more than

1 GB.

SCSI may help but also consider your networks involvement. Will you need a fiberoptic network connection to a server to prevent bottlenecks there?

Waste of money.