best cpu

[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.