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HW recommendation for Pro-E WF 2.0?

A

aland

New member
Hi all,
I'm a PC Tech tasked with building a workstation that runs Peo-E Wildfire 2.0.
I've searched at PTC site for infos on certified components and did not see anything regarding MB or CPU hardwares. I need to build a box on the cheap side with off-the-shelf parts as quickly as possible. Can anyone help and point me to some resources of haradwares that Pro-E will be happy with? I'm leaning toward an Intel MB/CPU combo. Budget including the monitor is about $2700.
Your time and help are much appreciated. Thanks.
 
Graphics card 128 MB


Ram 1GB


Speed 3.0 GHz


HDD 80 GB


you can get HP XW8000, I use it personally


Israr
 
Some major PC companies work closely wth PTC to build machines
certified to run Pro/E and they can probably build a machine for less
than you think as their purchasing power is so great. Also if you have
a hardware problem on a certified platform you will get far more
support from PTC to resolve the issue than if the platform is
un-certified.







For a example, you can check out Dell's Pro/E offerings at



http://tinyurl.com/hjypa



and don't forget to check out PTC's certifications for Dell at



http://tinyurl.com/otmk9





My advice is save yourself some headaches and purchase a certified machine.





DB
 
Dell_Boy said:
Some major PC companies work closely wth PTC to build machines
certified to run Pro/E and they can probably build a machine for less
than you think as their purchasing power is so great. Also if you have
a hardware problem on a certified platform you will get far more
support from PTC to resolve the issue than if the platform is
un-certified.
Click to expand...



Thanks,

That's a solid advise. We're a Dell's shop - All of the Engineering's
PCs are from Dell (except for the old left overs). This is a box that
we need sooner than the quoted production/delivery date given by Dell;
Hence, I was tasked with the job and looking for help to do it
correctly. Hopefully, a workstation comprises of Intel's dual Xeon and
a nVidia FX card will do the trick, maybe? I'd love to hear from those
who has built a custom box on specific Mobo/CPU/Graphic card combo.

Thanks for the great input so far...
 
We spec our own boxes, more specificially I spec them as one of my
tasks. The MB is not all that critical, I stick to Asus or Intel
boards, with the newer LGA775 processor sets. The biggest kicker
is the graphics card, 128 MB FX5200 is fine, but I would go with a 256
MB version FX6000 series...but no matter what I would stick with Nvidia
all the way. If you have it in the budget the best recommendation
is to get a Nvidia Quadro card.



Other recommendations are at least 1 GB for memory and 80 Gb for HD.
 
Thanks everyone,
I've decided to go with the following:

- Dual Xeon 3.0GHz CPU/Intel E7525 MoBo
- 2GB DDR2 RAM
- PNY Quadro FX1400 graphic card
- 80GB SATA system drive & 200GB SATA scratch drive
- WXP Pro


Would these components make a good start? Thanks.
 
If you're running ProE and nothing else you'll get very little value for your money in going for a dual processor machine. If it were my money I'd get me a top notch dual core Athlon.


And 80 GB harddisks are harder to find and more expensive (except for their SCSI counterparts) than 250 or 300 GB, which is mainstream for the moment.


FYI : I have 2 x 250 SATA disks doing linear read transfer at 65 MB/s (on an ASUS A8N board) compared to the 45/55 MB/s of the IDEs, which is more than sufficient for my line of work.


Alex
 
Looks like a good start. For the money your specs look pretty good. I agree with the dual processors not helping much. Xeons will work OK but are not as fast as the AMD chips. See the OCUS benchmark page. But this machine will probably beat the Dells you already have, so don't sweat it.
 
Thanks Everyone,
This box is going to run Outlook and a bunch of usual resource hogging ERP apps in the background, plus Pro_E top speed is not a primary concern because the files will be read/write across the network - Do you think a dual core is still the better choice?

Thank you for all the solid advises so far.
 
Dual core athalons will out perform dual Xeons in any application. WF3 is going to have some multi-threaded areas so it will take greater advantage of multiple cores/processors than previous versions.
 
I would worry more about memory if you have Outlook and ERP running in the background. These programs are more about data pumping than real processing, so the more you hold in memory and the less you switch to and from disk the better the performance will be. I have 2 GB RAM but when opening a large database it can all get consumed and leave me 50 kB to openup CAD. Obviously things get swapped out of memory then and that's the point where performance is degrading.


I'm sure that you'll have something left over to invest in memory when you exchange a fully equipped dual processor motherboard for a single dual core version.


My 0.02 Euro.


Alex
 
From my experience (15 in a design department using WF2), we get great performance from the FX540 cards. There is some money in the FX1400 that you could use in other areas.





Dave
 
My experience says that AMD X64 processors run best (opteron better), and Nvidid quadro series cards are THE ONLY solution, because I had alot problems with ATI and 3DLabs cards. By the way I am testing hardware for one local manufacturer for Pro/E.


For now, AMD processors benchmarked better about 20% from equivalent PentiumD. But Office applications can be painfull.


Considerig graphics, best solution for the money is GeForce FX 6800 Ultra, tweaked with RivaTuner to QuadroFX 4000. It works GOOD. Very GOOD.
 
I know what will end up in my next Pro-E workstation...
A BIG thanks to everyone...
The next question is can my user handle the power... ;)

Alan
 
At the end of the day you'll see 99% idle CPU-time, as with the most of us
smiley1.gif



In present day computing the processor has about 15 million clock cycles to wait for the next keystroke of the best typist ....


Alex
 
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