Workstation for Solidworks

• JKimmel:

You probably mean xw6200 and xw6800 ;-) @work we use xw8200 and xw9300 (Opteron machines), and at home I have a xw8200 (2x XEON 3.6GHz, 13GB DDR2, 3x300GB SCSI 10k, PNY GF7800GTX 256MB) for around 1.5yrs now, too. And since a few weeks also a xw9300 (2x Opteron 285, 12gb DDR, 2x74GB

The xw8200 you mentioned is a very good machine, but it's using the old Netburst-based XEON processors which produce a lot of excess heat and are relative slow compared to AMD Opteron and especially intels new Core-based XEONs ("Woodcrest" aka XEON 51xx). It's already on the end of its product life cycle, the successor (xw8400) is already available. Same is valid for the xw6200 btw, the successor xw6400 with Core technology is already there.

The xw9300 which is Opteron based also is a good system but also reaching the end of it's product life cycle, but the successor is not yet on the horizon. It's using the nForce4 Professional chipset and allows SLI gfx. The xw9300 is much more silent than the Opteron workstations from Sun or IBM. One negative thing is that the xw9300 is relative expensive, which together with the better performance of the xw8400 makes it only interesting if you want to use two gfx cards in SLI config.

I'd recommend to go for a Core-based machine. They are much faster than the old Netburst-based systems (P4/XEON up to XEON 50xx) and also much faster than machines based on AMD Opteron. And they draw less power and produce less heat. So depending on your needs a xw6400 or xw8400 probably would be the best way to go.

Benjamin

Dead horse beaten again and again and again. At least for 2 months until computer technology moves along.

KM

J.

Dell 960 Precision Workstation. x64 XP Pro Dual Core Xenon running at 3.73 GHz.

The run pretty quiet. Have to keep looking at the power button to figure out if computer on when monitor is in "sleep" mode. Case is pretty big.

Running SW on x32 mode as SW hasn't released the standard for 3rd party applications. PDM system won't run with SW x64 software.

Played with 2007 in x64 bit mode for a while and it was pretty nice. Not enough keyboard time to benchmark any real differences (Its pretty nice eye candy - I'm getting tired of the "Is that a server" when people look at the CPU.

Len

JKimmel wrote: