best cpu

[pryoplasm]

Originally Posted by _GP_

speaking of tom's and multiple processors... i saw this pic in an article the other day... not one, not two, but 4 processors with ram for each.. i assume like 16gb max

*edit* for some reason the picture disappeared.... I'll see if i can hunt it down elsewhere

um, limits on ram is set by the motherboard and chipset, not the processor. i think PII chips could have something ridiculous like a lot of GB, off the top of my head i think it clears 20GB, not too sure.,...covered it in my A+ class at school....


as for what kind of cpu and rig you want. i would suggest that you dont worry too much about just upgrading the RAM, or vid card, or processor. spread it around if you want to. as for the cpu itself, if you are on a budget, you can often get a cheaper celeron processor, then add some L3 cache to make up for the difference. not sure what cards are best for rendering since i havent done the animation team for quite some time, but just spread things around for this new PC, and you should be fine....

[Grommit]

I'll avoid repeating things that have already been said, but I'll offer you a comparison between two computers that I have running inventor which serves a useful purpose.

One of them is a (roughly) 1.5 gHz P4, nice Ti-4200 GeForce grfx card, along with 512 mb ram. Another is a (roughly) 2.0 gHz P4, some 128meg (I think)ATI card, 768MB ram, but the hard drive was completely full. The 1.5gig ran inventor much much smoother, and I'm not certain, but I'm quite sure that Inventor uses a paging file of some size on your hard disk and benefits from an uncluttered drive. Although this is not the main concern, it might help you to consider clearing your hard disk as well as these other things... defragging each week won't hurt. Aside from that, I do recommend a good graphics card, but I can't honestly say I know that it will make a difference. As far as AMD versus Pentium, I've gone Pentium in the past, but don't ask me.

[Heretic121]

2 gb of ram is OVERKILL!!! espically if its ONLY running 3dsmax or mya... 1gb-1.5gb is all you need... a jump from 1gb-2gb will go un-noticed... save the money!! (and look at the benchmarks if you dont belive me =D)


also shouldn't he go with a Quadro card instead of a regular gfx???

[Venkatesh]

Awright,

It looks like you intend to work with Inventor and 3dsmax on this system you hope to build. Am I correct?

Autodesk Inventor does not require very much technological firepower to run. Pretty much any computer that boots will be able to use it. I run Inventor 5 on a Pentium 166mmx with 64mb of ram and a PCI Radeon 7500 (32mb sdram). In wireframe mode, it is very very usable.

To run Inventor well, that is a different story. I would recommend a P4 of at least 2.8ghz, preferrably on the Northwood process (.13 micron) or an Athlon XP of at least a 2500+ rating (Barton core preferrable, the extra 256k is good for inventor). I have never used an Athlon 64 myself, but I have heard only good things about their performance. I believe than an Athlon 64 2800+ or a 3000+ will be very good for Inventor-ing. To support either the P4 or Athlon XP/64 system, I would recommend a lot of good, fast ram. Nothing unnecessary here (CL2 ram is unnecessary IMHO), but PC2700 or PC3200 DDR would be excellent. 512MB of RAM should be enough for about anything today.

I would recommend sticking with a good, reliable graphics card. I have had only good experience with the Radeon 7500 and the Radeon 8500. In my desktop right now, I have a GeForce4 ti4400, which was very unstable at 4400 speeds. I have downclocked it to ti4200 speeds, which helped with reliability.

[Nuson]

As an Inventor user, I would caution against getting an ATI card. ATI has a reputation for not being friendly with Inventor -- within Inventor circles, they've come to be known as "Always Trash Inventor". I really have no idea as to why ATI cards have a tendancy to behave this way, but from my own experience using a radeon 8500, I did have problems running Inventor correctly, which forced me to change my Inventor hardware settings to conservative (yuck ) to get things to work correctly.

[Rob Colatutto]

Originally Posted by Nuson

As an Inventor user, I would caution against getting an ATI card. ATI has a reputation for not being friendly with Inventor -- within Inventor circles, they've come to be known as "Always Trash Inventor". I really have no idea as to why ATI cards have a tendancy to behave this way, but from my own experience using a radeon 8500, I did have problems running Inventor correctly, which forced me to change my Inventor hardware settings to conservative (yuck ) to get things to work correctly.

I have a Radeon 8500 and Inventor runs great for me. It could be the processor though, Athlon xp 2600+
This summer windows 64-bit is comming out so an Opteron for a workstation or an Athlon64 might be a good choice for your CAD needs.

[Matt Krass]

Originally Posted by Rob Colatutto

I have a Radeon 8500 and Inventor runs great for me. It could be the processor though, Athlon xp 2600+
This summer windows 64-bit is comming out so an Opteron for a workstation or an Athlon64 might be a good choice for your CAD needs.

It works really well on my computer with:

Athlon 1700+ XP (1466 MHz)
512MB DDR400
ATi Radeon 9600XT AGP

No glitches at all, I even ran it with 256MB RAM and a Radeon 7200 PCI, so it should run quite well on middle end hardware.

[Nuson]

Yeah, 64 bit windows might be on the way, but it doesn't matter unless your design software also supports it. Also, I can run Inventor with my radeon 8500, but only on conservative settings. You may be able to run it fine on your ATI card, but they just have a reputation for having compatibility problems with Inventor; that's all.

On the memory front, esp if you're going to make drawings of large assemblies (.idw), you'll need at least 1 GB of ram. Autodesk recommends that some users enable 3 GB page files, which just shows how much memory you'll need to do large drawings (tip: don't have more than one sheet in such drawing files). When modeling (i.e. working parts and assemblies), however, you won't need as much RAM (seems strange that doing 2d drawings of your parts and assemblies would require more memory than working on the parts themselves, but that's how it works. I'd like to find out for myself why that is). Realistically though, you should probably just go with 1 GB of RAM. If you're running on a tight budget, 512 MB of RAM is ok, but not preferrable.