Building a workstation

KillerCars · 15 Feb 2006 at 19:05

Hey.

I need to build a workstation for running CATIA V5.. I don't know if you know much about this, I don't..

I've been looking around, my basic needs are Dual Opterons 248/250 (dunno if its worth getting 252's?), Nvidia Quadro FX3450 (again, is it worth the huge price jump to the FX4000+ series?). I have pretty much no idea about motherboards for this kind of setup. Memory.. i'll probably need either 2gb or 4gb, if anyone knows how much I should look at getting that would be helpful.

I'll probably be able to work out HDD's, DVD-RW drives, PSU's etc. Although any advice on those would be welcome too. And one last thing, it has to be SILENT. So I guess water cooling is in order.. I looked at the Zalman Reserator 1 plus.. that says it's silent, and I trust Zalman, but it only has one CPU cooling block, and it's a dual cpu setup so I dunno about that.

Any help would be really appreciated

KillerCars · 16 Feb 2006 at 18:19

ok, so I guess most of you have as much idea about this as I do..

At least maybe someone will know if SuperMicro are good for motherboards. There was this other make.. erm, Tyan, I think. But they didn't look as good, does anyone know about that?

Thanks.

Storm · 16 Feb 2006 at 21:51

Don't know anything about CATIA, apart from its a 3D cad package yup ?

Anyways the only thing I can comment on is your graphics cards. I've got a Quadro FX3400 in work and a Geforce 7800GTX at home and for manipulating 3ds Max 8 in the viewports I can't tell any difference between either of them and my PC's at home and work are similar. Work is Dual Xeon 3.2ghz, 2gb ram v home is Dual core AMD 4400+ with 2gb ram.

On some tests I've benchmarked my home PC was more than twice as fast at rendering frames as the work one. So I've got back to AMD's side now and the next work PC I'll spec will have AMD.

Someone will be able to correct me but I read somewhere that you need a 64bit o/s to see any advantage of more than 2gb ram ? I may be wrong though.

KillerCars · 17 Feb 2006 at 17:37

Yeah, CATIA is a 3D CAD package.

I found your post pretty helpful, do you reckon a 512mb X1900 XT-X would be just as good as getting a 256mb Quadro FX3450? I don't really understand how these kinds of graphics cards differ.. I know the price differs a lot because the 3450's are like £850 and the X1900's are £500 tops, what's the reason for this?

Also, about the processors, are you saying that getting something like a high end Dual core opteron or Dual core X2 processor would be just as good as getting two seperate opterons? That would also help because finding silent water cooling for dual cpu's is quite difficult..

And for RAM, I'll probably just get 2gb because I think what you said about needing a 64 bit o/s is true.. what kind of RAM are you using?

Thanks.

hellforleather · 14 Mar 2006 at 13:56

dont know if this is a bit late to reply, just been looking at beefing my system up to cope with catia as well. looking on the dassault systemes website the specs of the certified workstations are through the roof! they seem to rate Quatro cards, correct me if i'm wrong but these are meant to be better at vector graphics rather than direct-x applications. i coudnt comment on the RAM requirements but watching the task manager while running catia it does seem to rinse both the RAM and CPU! all i can say is that the workstations reccomended all run with ECC registered RAM and usually dual core 64 bit CPU..