Best Workstation Specs - Your Opinion?

[Eric]

My boss has just recently come to me and mentioned that he'd like to upgrade my system to a high-end workstation (within reason I'm sure). I wanted to get everyone's opinion on what is the best all around system. I'll mainly be using it for:

AutoCAD2000

Autodesk VIZ4

Adobe Photoshop

 

He wants to be able to bring a client over to my desk and "walk-thru" the model, but I mainly just want something that will render quickly, as well as give me good interactivity when I'm modeling.

 

Thanks,

Eric

[Greg Hess]

Low End....(These are by price)

 

Single 2800+ Athlon XP

Nforce2 Motherboard

1-2 Gigs of PC2700 or higher DDR (Must be bought in pairs)

WD800JB 80 Gig Special Edition

Geforce4 Ti 4200.

 

Midrange....

 

Dual Athlon 2400+ MP (Avail next week)

Asus or MSI Dual Mboard

1-3 gigs of Registered ECC DDR

WD800JB SE

GF4 or Quadro 700XL

 

Upper Range...

 

Dual 2.8 Xeon (533)

Supermicro E7505 Pacer MBoard

1-4 Gigs of Registered ECC DDR (Must be bought in pairs)

WD800JB or U160 SCSI system, with X15-36LP cheetah's. hehe.

Quadro 900XL

 

You might be able to build two of the Dual 2400+ MP systems for the price of the Dual xeon system.

 

[ December 06, 2002, 08:37 AM: Message edited by: Greg Hess ]

[richymcp]

Howdy partner!! Well if you want some good advice check out this retail site http://www.armari.co.uk/ (uk site) and if you want some good reviews and bench marks tests then check out http://www.xbitlabs.com/.

 

Personally I'd go for duel Xeon 2.8's at least a gig of RAM and a PNY quadra 4 980 XLG Pro 3D 128MB AGP video card, try saying that with a mouthfull of chips!!

 

All the best

 

Richard

[Dave Buchhofer]

I see you mention 1-3 gigs of ram.. I was under the impression that Viz and even Windows can only take advantage of 2gigs at the moment?

 

Curious..

 

Dave.

[Greg Hess]

The maximum amount of allocated ram per process is 2 gigabytes.

 

If your undergoing a multithreaded process (aka both cpu's are in use) you can allocate up to 4 gigs of ram. (Though many boards don't support 4 gigs of ram...)

 

One of the big reasons for the push towards 64 bit, is everyone is tired of not being able to have 64 gigs for a single process. LOL.