ProE on a media center PC

I have an HP media center PC P4 3.2 Mhz / 512 Mb RAM / ATI PCI-express card / 300w power supply.CanI bump the RAM to 2 or 3 Mb and replace the ATI card with a Quadro 1400,and have a decent CAD station for ProE? The ATI cardlooks pretty thin. Will the 1400 fit? Are these things standardized?


Also, I'd like to set up two 19" LCD's on the 1400. Will ProE or the card driver let you display the part or assy on one screen and the drawing on the other?

Hmm-

I am asumming you are upgrading to 2 or 3 GB of RAM. Keep in mind though that ulitmately the motherboard limits the amount of memory that the system can utilize. Some motherboards only allow up to 2 GB to be addressed on the system regardless of the number of ram slots and the operating system used (Windows XP Professional can support up to 4 GB).

Quickly looking at HP's current line of Media Center PCs (HP Pavilion Media Center PCs on their shopping site), it seems like 2 GB wil not be a problem. However, 3 GB may be depending on the model.

However, in my opinion 2 GB is usually enough for Wildfire deployment.

The Nvidia Quadro 1400 card is an excellent choice (128MB) and your processor is fast enough that it should not "bottleneck" its (the video card) performance. Regarding the size of the card, I'm not sure wha you mean by "thin" but the requirement for this card (Quadro 1400) is you have a PCI-Express x16 slot (which the current line of HP Pavilion Media Center PCs have at least 1 PCI Express slot) and from your post it seems you have it too. The location of the slot (relative to the computer case) and connector
are standardized (by IEEE, I think), but you still need the PCI Express
x16 slot.
See this for more information: Quadro 1400 Specs

Finally, regarding the dual monitor support. This will probably be an issue with Pro/Engineer Wildfire rather that the video card as the video card contains two DVI (digital output interface ports) on the card itself. Therefore, the card can support dual monitors. However, last I seen from Pro/Engineer's pre-installation documentation (I cannot remember where or what version of Wildfire that I saw this on) dual monitor support was either not or partially supported (I can't remember). I will see if I can find where I seen that at. I have never tried to get Pro/Engineer to work on dual monitors personally.

All things considered, if you make the mentioned upgrades, the system will probably run fine.

Thanks.

Found it.I knew it was somewhere.For the current dual monitor support (offically supported by PTC) for Wildfire 3.0 see this link:Hardware Notes - Pro/Engineer Wildfire 3.0Look under the section "Dual Monitor Support".