New 3D CAD Machines

Hesky82

Hesky82

Hesky82

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Joined
8 Jan 2005
Posts
2,405
Location
Worcestershire
Our little engineering company had its monthly budget meeting today and it looks like our IT department is getting a bit of a funding cut.
Our IT department have always got ready built workstation solutions that in my opinion cost to much in the 1st place and are costly to maintain as they were supported by an outside IT company.

I'm one of three design engineers in the company but lately I seem to be giving extra support to the IT guy. He wants to upgrade out CAD machines, but cant see how it would be financially viable to spend upwards of £1600 on replacement pre-built workstations when there are other cost to cover like software licences, etc..

He asked me if I could help him put together 3 - 4 machines from scratch as cost-effective as possible and we do the maintenance.

Our old systems are pretty old now and are pre-built dells machines consisting of...

XP Pro
P4 3.2Ghz
intel i955x mb
2GB ddr2 ram
NVIDIA Quadro FX1400

We are looking at completely dumping the old machines so we are looking at getting the below new hardware....

Case
PSU
motherboard
CPU
Ram

We are not sure what to do about replacing the Quadro FX1400 gfx card as anything significantly faster is pretty damn expensive.

We need to stick to XP Pro for comparability reasons and our primary design program we use is Pro Engineer Wildfire 5.

This is the gfx compatibility list for W5...

http://www.ptc.com/WCMS/files/77550/en/hp_wf5.pdf

I was toying with the idea of soft moding a Geforce based card to a Quadro.

Our budget is 1k max per rig.

I have a few ideas but it would be cool to get a few suggestions for what hardware to go for.

Cheers:)
 
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Nvidia 8800 512mb will mod to FX3700 - Ive done this and works.

BTW for 1K you would struggle to purchase a new machien with a quadro card
 
First off I suggest you keep the FX1400s. It's hardly an impressive card these days, but nonetheless it can be expected to outperform gaming cards while doing cad work. Softmodding has been demonstrated up to 9800GT, I'm unaware of anyone succeeding with a gtx200 to date. Someone managed an 8800gts I think, but by far the most success has been with 8800gt's. I believe this to have been a nibitor limitation more than anything else. Performance is significantly higher than a gaming card but less than the true quadro equivalent, meaning driver optimizations are available but are not the only difference between gaming and cad cards.

I can probably put together benchmarks of an 8800gt running fx3700 bios for you if you tell me what conditions to run it under. I'm using two of these in sli with a 4ghz i7, can vary clock speed on cards and on processor without any particular hassle (say to imitate a stock speed 750).

I think you're probably going to want i5 750s with 4gb of ram (obviously somewhere between 3 and 4 will be available). PSU mainly depends on the rest of the hardware, corsair 400W is the most likely choice.
 
Dangerous said:
Nvidia 8800 512mb will mod to FX3700 - Ive done this and works.

BTW for 1K you would struggle to purchase a new machien with a quadro card
Click to expand...

Yup, that's why we will probably not upgrade the GFX cards.

If softmodding a Geforce card is at all feasible I'm not sure how reliable or acceptable it would be for using within a business.
 
Im sure its entirely reliable, or at least to within the limits of the card. You use the same bios that came with the 8800 with a couple of identification flags changed so Quadro drivers will install instead of geforce. At least, im not getting crashes in ugnx or folding with mine. Running a benchmark on it now.

^Benchmarking was taking considerably longer than expected, I'm afraid it'll need to wait until I can run it overnight.
 
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