MIS dept building CAD machine for Engineers, need advice please

[ewimberly]

Hello,

I work in the MIS dept and have been assigned the task or building/purchasing 4 MCAD machines for our Engineers. This company is relatively small and very budget conscious, so I want to give them a system that offers the most bang for the buck.

I've been exploring 2 options, purchasing a MCAD machine through Dell or building my own. The Dell machine I specced out is an upgraded version of this one:

http://configure.us.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?c=us&cs=04&kc=6W300&l=en&oc=w37mc&s=bsd

and the machine I'm looking at building myself has a Pentium 3.2 800 Mhz FSB, ASUS P5AD2-E Motherboard, 200 GB 7200 RPM SATA Maxtor HDD model 6B200M0, Nvidia Quadro FX540 128 MB PCI-Express Video card, and 2GB DDR2 Kingston RAM.

I know the video card is lacking on both setups, but we are running older versions of Mechanical Desktop and Autodesk Inventor (Version 7 for both) and don't need anything too high end for now. I wanted to get a nice machine minus the expensive video card to leave room for upgrading our software and video card in the future if needed.

I wanted to see what you guys thought of these setups. The machine I'm building myself runs around 1,300 and the Dell is around 1,800, so I'm leaning toward the one I build myself. I don't need Dell support as we can replace anything ourselves and don't want the hassle of calling them and waiting for a repair. I've dealt with Dell in a large corporate environment before and I'd much rather fix it myself.

I mainly wanted to see if you guys thought the video card/motherboard/RAM/Processor would be ok for Autocad. The motherboard is very new and has a new hard drive technology called NCQ [Native Command Queuing]. NCQ allows for the hard drive to multitask better and is supposed to improve performance. The hard drive supports this as well. Have any of you used this with Autocad? If so, how does it perform?

[slayer913]

Your system design looks good, though perhaps just beefed up for brownie points:razz:

A note on the board: I've always used an AMD setup for as long as I've used CAD, and have never had a problem. I currently run an AMD XP64 3500+ system at home, which is literally like sticking morphine right into the computer! With a 64 bit system (and a supporting operating system or bridge), you could run for example at a clock speed of 1.5 Ghz, but be processing 4 times (about) the calculations per second than any other 32 bit chip. Pentium is overrated in the fact that Ghz is really not what you want to be rating your capabilities in - your system should be judged by it's ability to run concurrent calculations. And if price is your major motivator, build your own AMD system and you'll be glad you did.

Costs for my system:

AMD XP64 Asus board & 3500+ chip = $350
(go for LAN, USB, Sound, etc on board - quicker and cheaper)
2 GB's RAM = $200
(2) 160 GB Maxtor HD's UIDE = $160
Raedon 9800+ 256MB AGP Card = $150

Total = $860 for the important stuff.

I know I need to go over to an NVIDIA card...one of these days...

As for NCQ, this is actually a rather old technology launched originally in SCSI drives. Performance wise, the NCQ theory wraps around completing commands more efficiently by reordering instructions, and really only shines in a high load data server environment. Further, SATA has a cable speed of 150 mb/s, as compared to UIDE's 133 mb/s. The difference is minimal when running Seagate, Maxtor or WD 7200 rpm drives with non-continuous read/write software like Inventory/AutoCAD- one could even say that the true power of SATA is yet to be developed.

I have recommended in the past for customers to hold out on SATA for the moment because it's still an infant technology. The motherboard (or add-on controller card) and drive is going to be the determining factor in SATA's abilities, so why buy a board and drive now that will be updated by the end of the year anyway (and not see huge power gains in the mean time)?

I personally choose to use RAID stripping technology instead of any fancy new SATA/SCSI fads. RAID 0 will allow you to take two separate hard drives and write to both as if they were one, essentially doubling your read/write speed. If you go with a RAID 0+1, you'll get this huge speed gain in addition to the security of writing your data to dual setups (meaning you use 4 hard drives - two for the stripping setup and two for exact duplicate backup - one drive could fail and you'd loose nothing). If you're set on the SATA board, make sure the board has RAID ability and hook up two drives. Last thing on RAID - I'm a little sketchy around using such large hard drives on any system simply because one error would mean huge losses. Setting up a RAID array could use two 100gb drives for the same total. And for these types of systems I recommend putting in a spare 40 gb for the operating system/program files alone - this way the reading/writing of the OS does not affect project drawings and designs storage.

Hopefully this will be a valid reference in your research. I primarily run 3D CAD systems, high end (render intensive) game studios, 3D Studio-like animation, and MCAM applications.

Albert

[RobertAitken]

I personally choose to use RAID stripping technology instead of any fancy new SATA/SCSI fads. RAID 0 will allow you to take two separate hard drives and write to both as if they were one, essentially doubling your read/write speed. If you go with a RAID 0+1, you'll get this huge speed gain in addition to the security of writing your data to dual setups (meaning you use 4 hard drives - two for the stripping setup and two for exact duplicate backup - one drive could fail and you'd loose nothing). If you're set on the SATA board, make sure the board has RAID ability and hook up two drives. Last thing on RAID - I'm a little sketchy around using such large hard drives on any system simply because one error would mean huge losses. Setting up a RAID array could use two 100gb drives for the same total. And for these types of systems I recommend putting in a spare 40 gb for the operating system/program files alone - this way the reading/writing of the OS does not affect project drawings and designs storage.

Hopefully this will be a valid reference in your research. I primarily run 3D CAD systems, high end (render intensive) game studios, 3D Studio-like animation, and MCAM applications.

Albert
If HD throughput is a primary concern then forget both IDE and SATA. The speeds rated for both technologies way below the sustained transfer of SCSI. I think the current standard is SCSI 320 - 320MBytes of sustain transfer. Since raid started becoming the norm in user affordable solutions the talk has been RAID levels 0, 1 and 0+1 (not to be confused with RAID 10) There is the option of RAID 5 that will provide a very good half way house to RAID 0+1. See here (http://www.webopedia.com/TERM/R/RAID.html) for the different types and there definitions

Robert

[Phil Ferguson]

One of the things that I have heard recently, and honestly always wondered about, is increasing the amout of virtual memory beyond the "Windows suggested size". I've even heard of people setting aside a seperate hard drive for a huge swap file. Do any of you have any experience with this?

[RobertAitken]

One of the things that I have heard recently, and honestly always wondered about, is increasing the amout of virtual memory beyond the "Windows suggested size". I've even heard of people setting aside a seperate hard drive for a huge swap file. Do any of you have any experience with this?
I think with R14 Autodesk stated that the paging file should be 4 time the physical memory. So your 1GB RAM should be accompanied with a 4GB page file.

The reason the page file is swapped to another disk, not just a drive letter is to allow the OS and hardware to read and write to separate disks at the same time. This will give you the best performance boost as the swap file read/writes won't interfere with the data read/writes. It would probably be better to ensure that both disks use separate IDE channels.

Again disk speed will have an affect on the overall system speed.

Robert Aitken

[Glenn Pope]

I have my swap file on a separate hard drive and it does make a difference. Just make sure to make a separate partition for the swap file and that its the first partition on the drive. This will place it on the outside of the disk. That is the place the data is read/written to the fastest. Also make the swap file min. and max. file size the same. This helps in speed because Windows doesn't take the time to increase or decrease the file.

[slayer913]

Great info for all of us; thanks.

I'm curious though - is there really any desktop CAD system that needs to go to SCSI? Thinking out loud here - since most of the modeling and design work is manipulated in memory, disk writing can't really peak out in a continuous state, I would imagine. Comparatively, when moving 5-100 Mb Inventor parts at say several read/writes every 10 minutes or so across a RAID 0 setup, the difference between sustained (theoretically) 266mb/s and SCSI's 320 Mb/s is what, a few hundredths of a second an hour?

If the question was of a central server hosting these files to dozens of users, then I'd of course agree with SCSI. On personal desktops, however, I just can't see justifying the cost. Please let me know if there is information otherwise; that would be great info!

Thanks,
Albert

[RobertAitken]

the difference between sustained (theoretically) 266mb/s and SCSI's 320 Mb/s
Not sure about SATA but IDE doesn't have a sustain transfer rate. The figures quoted are for burst of speed. If you require high data transfer rates then SCSI is the only option.

Robert