XP pro 64-bit or not?

We will be upgrading our W-stations in a few months. We upgrade every 3 years or so. I plan to set up SW2006. Should we get XP pro 64-bit or the plain 32 bit one?

We are stuck with Dell's. So no Athlons, except if I find a VERY good reason to do so (and buy somwhere else). Any experience with P4-830 + 2x1Go Ram? Will they perform correctly with a 64-bits OS and SW?

TIA JM

Planned setup: P4-830

2x1Go Ram DDR2 Quadro FX1400 - 128 Mo HD 160Go Sata

24'' LCD ultrasharp 16:10

Reply to
Jean Marc
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hi Jean

I have just gone away from Dell for the first time, I now have a dual opteron set up, its about 2x as fast as my dual 3ghz zeon dell full spec below

I also have a 24" widescreen LCD (1920x1200) I think these will become THE standard for cad work, just great.

I'm in the UK, and used

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steve

Case : X20a-64 Dual Opteron Case Main Board : Supermicro H8DCE Graphics Card : NVIDIA Quadro FX 3450 256MB (PCI-Express x16) Hard Drive : 2x Western Digital 74GB Serial-ATA 10,000RPM Optical Drive(s) : 16x DVD-ROM Drive + Pioneer DVD+/-RW Drive (Dual Layer) Sound Card : Integrated Intel High Definition Audio (5.1) Network Card : Dual Gigabit LAN Floppy Drive : 1.44MB Floppy Drive CPU : 2x AMD Opteron 254 - 2.8GHz - 1MB Cache Memory : 2GB PC3200 (400MHz) DDR Ram (2x1GB) ECC Registered

Reply to
solid steve

"solid steve" a écrit dans le message de news: snipped-for-privacy@f14g2000cwb.googlegroups.com...

I wish I could

Nice setup. What OS did you mount? Any experience with 64-bit?

Reply to
Jean Marc

XP pro 32 bit, I don't think 64 bit is not ready for production work yet.

steve

Reply to
solid steve

There are so many "White Box" suppliers out there and some willing to give service warranties or contracts, that I would think a local supplier of an AMD Opteron box would be able to compete on both price and service for critical CAD workstations.

My understanding is that a large % higher powered workstations come from these types of generic suppliers, and it is partly because of the price & partly the quick service when fixes or upgrades are needed that drives people to local suppliers.

I did that with my last desktop workstation in So. Cal.

Reply to
Bo

"Bo" a écrit dans le message de news: snipped-for-privacy@z14g2000cwz.googlegroups.com...

Except that I work in a (somewhat) large company where NOT buying the 'company standard equipment' needs a ton of paper, and a couple months negociation. Last time it took three months justifying our Athlons XP 2600. I do not feel/ have the info that there is so much difference between a P4-830 and an Athlon 64 4400+. (That's our budget zone- 7 stations)

BTW, here is "A Look At AMD's Socket AM2 Platform":

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Reply to
Jean Marc

As far as I know, SWx64 is not quite ready for production yet (still in beta). I'm running it and it seems fine. Runs fast, but I'm not comparing it against any benchmarks. From what I've read, you won't see much gain in actual SolidWorks performance except the ability to utilize more than 2G worth of ram. However, as time and code progresses, I'm sure this will change.

Now, if you want to talk about WinXP x64, that's a whole different story. I would NOT recommend setting this up in a workplace... yet. There were so many damn workarounds and bugs, and missing drivers that I had to contend with when getting my system going. It's not worth it. At least not until we have more truly 64-bit programs available.

Reply to
Fye

Fye,

I ran into the same thing on a machine I purchased just a week or two after Win2000 was released. There were not many drivers available, and there were several software titles that simply would not run on it. It took a couple of months for all of the software to "catch-up" with the OS. It was frustrating.. But I don't regret it because the only other option at the time was WinNT (yuk!). That system was the most rock-solid system I've ever had.

Reply to
Seth Renigar

"Seth Renigar" a écrit dans le message de news: YM2Lf.41140$% snipped-for-privacy@tornado.southeast.rr.com...

That's this type of train I would not like to miss. But I suppose there must have a possibility to upgrade when XP-64 bits will be stable enough. I could mount 32 bit on every station except mine, for testing 64 b.

Reply to
Jean Marc

Hi Jean, I upgraded our workstations to the Athlon 4800 r2 with windows 64 specs. Asus An8-sli deluxe, ( ensure that the motherboard has the newer large fan on the nForce Sli chip as the small fan on the first released boards burn out) Nvidia PCI 3400

4Mb ram 3x Raptor drives, (2 in raid 0 mode), plus 1 backup of in-progress working data DVD recorder ( why did I not get one of these before??)

The Pc is fast and stable, but... that was after removing Windows 64 and installing Windows Pro32 os.

With Windows 64 the Benchmarks were 25% slower than with windows pro32.

Get rid of the Dells, even if you have to wait, it will be worth it. I had the same problems with Compaq and HP being the preferred hardware here.

I had our systems built by Matek

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in Horsham West Sussex.

We proved their worth, when we designed a fully working project within a week, (with preliminary build manuals), before it would take around 3 weeks!

Reply to
pete

I don't think you can "upgrade" to a 64-bit operating system unless you have a true 64-bit processor / motherboard setup underneath it all first. Make sure you have the right hardware first!

Reply to
Fye

I'm working on 64-bits WINXPPro, SWX - 64bits Beta and Pre-Relase and I cannot see big acceleration of SWX. Files open faster than 32 and thats all. Of course SWX Corp. are still working on this version.

I would like to try better GFX card, I have Quadro FX500 and I'm sure it is not enough now.

You should wait for full relase of SWX64 and then make your decisions.

zygzag

Reply to
<zygzag_spam

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