Intel W3520 vs E5520 for Autocad work

[exxoo]

Hi

 

So this week im going to deside what hardware our 2010 workstations should have

 

Many workstation threds mostly talks about rendering, sure its a good benchmark for a CPU. But what about genreal work. We are using autocad and revit (not that much rendering).

 

Im looking at both Dell T3500 (T5500?) and HP Z400 (Z600> is to expensive), im not going to buy parts and build on my own.

 

The i7 860 is realy good, but they are not an option in T3500 or Z400. And something tells me that a workstation should have a Xeon with ECC memory.

 

If you look at the benchmarks at cpubenchmark dot net the W3520 (2,67ghz) clearly beats (~10%) the more expensive E5520 (2,27ghz), it is clocked higher so its not that strange.. Is there any benchmark that will favor the E5520 with its lower clock?

 

Doesen't the E-series offer more than the dual cpu option, slightly higher bandwidth? 80watts vs 130 is a big differens though, i wonder if that is a good reason alone to choose the E5520, some people leave their computers on 24/7.

 

My main concern is to have a solid workstation, not hunt seconds in rendering.

 

Just checking with you guys before ordering a bunch of workstations with W3520

 

If you got any input please share

[AJLynn]

"Workstation" is a marketing word. The only reason for Xeons is so that you can put two on one motherboard (which is not useful for anything we do except rendering) and ECC memory is more expensive but not helpful to you.

 

There's no reaon to buy a single-CPU "workstation" with a low-end Quadro card. A W3520 is an LGA1366 CPU - it's an i7 920 with a different label, same motherboard and everything, so Dell can make an i7 desktop box and put a cheap Quadro in it, call it a "workstation" and charge more. Instead, get a computer with an i7 CPU and a good Radeon video card.

[exxoo]

I got two T1500 with i7 860 (2,8ghz) with 6gb of RAM and a FX580. They are really cheep (~1k€) and small, 9 vs 17kg! But they feel cheep too.. thats why i keep looking at T3500 / Z400. Last bunch of WS we bought was HP XW4600 with Core 2 Quad Q9550 (2,83) 4gb ECC, no xeon there, and they work just fine so you got a point there.

 

The prices i got for the HP XW4600 c2q is about the same as the T3500 with W3520 6gb ECC.

The HP Z400 with W3520, 6gb ECC, FX580 is a little more expensive than the T3500 with E5220, 6gb ECC, FX580.

Our budget is ~1200-1500€.

 

I have no experience with the regular geforce for autocad usage. I do have some bad experience with ATI fireGL cards and Archicad. Thats why i stick to nVidia.

Our in house test of fx580 vs fx1800 in revit both cards felt the same, 3ds max felt more snappy though. Autocad is always slow/the same no matter what we use..

Why do you prefer Radeon card over nvidia? better price/performance ratio?

 

Another thing is amount of RAM, these WS are expected to be used for 3 years. With the 64bit OS and Revit gaining more and more popularity maybe 6gb RAM (3x2gb) is too little. Next step according to dell is 12Gb (3x4gb) and that feels a little too much

[John.RenderStream]

The difference between the MPU chips are:

Price (from Intel) $373 $284 $284 $284

Processor E5520 W3520 i7-920 i7-860

GHz 2.26 2.66 2.66 2.80

Turbo GHz None 2.93 2.93 3.46

GTransfers/s 5.86 4.8 4.8 2.5

Memory Bandwidth 25.6 25.6 25.6 21.6

Memory (Max) 144 GB 24 GB 24 GB 16 GB

ECC Memory Support Yes Yes Yes Yes

Memory Channels 3 3 3 2

Number MPU (Max) Dual Single Single Single

Power 80 W 130 W 130 W 95 W

Demand Based Switching Yes Yes No No

PCI-e Express on Chip No No No Yes

 

Couple of comments:

Common they all have 4 physical cores and 8 logical cores.

 

Demand Based Switching is a power management where voltage and clockspeed at an optimal setting for the operation.

+++++

 

For your budget you are forced to a single CPU solution. The one thing in electronics you get what you pay for. For a balanced system I would suggest either the 920 or the 860. A slight variant of our Entry level box (or equivalent from others) using the best FX card for your budget would be good to meet a high polygon placement accuracy requirement or go a head and use a GTX card if placement accuracy is not important. In any case I would get a card with the most memory possible 0.5 to 1 GB minimum is good for many applications these days and some of your posts suggest this could really help you in your work.

 

For memory we find more and more that 12 GB is rapidly becoming the new "4 GB". What happens is many of these programs have muti-threads that get a fixed memory allocated to them from the application so with 8 logical cores which are four physical cores that each have two hyper-threads you end up using a lot of memory. Revit may have dynamic allocation and this may not be an issue but you should be aware of it.

 

Though this would stretch your budget but another thing to balance a system is storage I/O you should consider a boot drive plus at least a three to four RAID0 media cache or scratch disk that you can also set up for paging. While you could use 80 GB drives we think larger drives are more advisable.

 

I hope this helps.

Thank you

john