What is the Best Processor for SolidWorks AMD 64fx, Xeon, P4?

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I fairly recently did a ton of research (4 months ago) and came up with the following specs for a SolidWorks PC

Bear in mind that this was 4 months ago, things change quickly, and that not all would agree with my decisions, anyhow I am very happy with the results. I did a lot of my research on Toms Hardware and AnandTech and some other sites aligned to overclocking and modding etc...

Motherboard

MSI K8N NEO2 Platinum N-Vidia NForce3 chipset.

Processor

AMD Athlon 64 3500+ Socket 939 Newcastle.

RAM

Corsair Twin-X PC3200 400DDR 2048mb (2x 1GB).

Primary Hard Drive

Western Digital Raptor 74GB SATA 10,000 rpm 8mb cache in raid stripe

0.(single disk in raid array?? reccomended set up on MSI bulletin board)

Secondary Hard Drive

Western Digital Caviar 40GB EIDE 7200 rpm ATA100 8mb cache.

External Hard Drive

Seagate Barracuda 120GB EIDE 7200 rpm ATA100 8mb cache mounted in coolmax USB 2.0 external 3.5in enclosure.

Video Card

PNY / NVidia Quadro4 900XGL 128mb DDR

DVD Drive

Pioneer DVR-108 DVD + - RW 16x4x16 / Dual Layer +R 4x / CDRW 32x24x40 IDE.

CDROM

BENQ 56x IDE

Case

Antec Sonata quiet case

Floppy Drive

Generic 3 ¼ " Floppy Drive

Wireless LAN

LinkSys Wireless-G PCI Adapter WMP54G

Monitor

Viewsonic P95f 19" pure flat professional series

Keyboard

Logitech Elite Keyboard

Mouse

Logitech MX500 Performance optical mouse

I can thoroughly reccomend the case, seems like a trivial item when building a system but this case together with an AMD processor with "cool and quiet technology" really makes a difference. Due to budget I bought the video card on ebay and i did some research on Nvidia cards and SW before deciding on the 900xgl (a 4xAGP card), this card actually outperforms the fx500 and the

980xgl which are both 8x AGP cards.

anyhow hope this helps good luck and post what you end up with.

What is your benchmarks results... Should I spring for a Dual Intel or AMD or Just Single....I find SW is slowest for me in the drawing mode...it drives me nuts.

I would pay for more speed... If I really got it....

Ship In A Bottle As I recall when first built I was down around 25 or 26 seconds and now I can get 28 with other things running. If I set the graphics real low I can get 18 seconds. For that kind of performance you would have to forgo 1600x1200 and work in 1024/768 with shaded quality set all the way down.

Duals don't buy you anything unless you are running PhotoWorks. Go AMD and the Opteron or FX55.

I recently bought a fully loaded Sun W2100Z dual opteron system for less than many single prc FX55 systems. It is a real nice machine and the dual opterons make rendering in photoworks a dream.

paul

Ben,

You might want to search this newsgroup and the performance section of the SolidWorks discussion groups as this ground has been gone over many, many times before. Not much has changed in the last few months and AMD is still the best in the bang for buck category.