New Hardware for Window 7 64bits Suggestion
- Thread starter DavidL
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RocketNut
Alibre Super User
I also been thinking of upgrading also. My research suggest that a workstation instead of a pc is the best for CAD work. For one a PC can only go up to 16G or 32G of memory, where a workstation can all the way up to 128G. Also there faster. You might not want or need that much memory right now but in the further you might need it.
bigseb
Alibre Super User
RocketNut said:
You designing an aircraft carrier? :lol:
Seriously I think cost, or rather value for money, play a huge role here too. I mean 12Gb RAM is a lot of RAM for CAD. Throw in an i7 or even an i5 and you're good to go. i7's are great because of turbo-mode (which I don't think the i5 has). Tweak your clockspeed a bit and you can have over 4GHz in turbo-mode easy peasy. This means you can have a very powerful rig for between $1000 - $1500.
Here's why I say this: I good friend of mine works in the design department of a food packaging manufacturing company here in Cape Town. They're mainly design moulds along the vein of my lunch-box mould http://www.alibrepowered.com/albums/view/423. These assemblies are usually between 500-700 parts. All the designers use Core 2 Duo 2,4Ghz with 4Gb RAM (the GPU is a Quadro FX1700, I think) running Solidworks and these PC's do the job perfectly. Recently they acquired a new PC with a Xeon 4GHz and 12Gb RAM (don't know what GPU, doesn't matter though) and also running Solidworks. My friend got to design a mould on there and according to him there was no real performance boost... :shock:
My point is why spend money on a hugely powerful computer when/if a lesser one will do the same job?
RocketNut
Alibre Super User
I agree bigseb. If a PC is all you need then then save the money for a good lunch. I to am using a laptop to do my CAD work (Toshiba Satellite, AMD Dual Core, 8G) and is working just find for me (altho I think the model I am working on might be to complex for AD and having a lot of problems with it). All I was saying was if you have a couple thousand laying around, collecting dust, then you might want to think about upgrading to a work station. For my I have to wait until I win the lottery before I can up grade. :lol:
:lol: :lol: As for the aircraft carrier you could say it's one with wings :lol: :lol: :lol:
:lol: :lol: As for the aircraft carrier you could say it's one with wings :lol: :lol: :lol:
Hop
Senior Member
DavidL said:
Ah, a PC is oh so... personal. I have been trying for months to configure my next PC for Windows 7 64 bits.
My approach has been to pick a processor (CPU) first and then find someone who makes a decent motherboard (mobo). Memory is almost a given once the mobo and CPU are specified. Load the mobo up with as much RAM that is as fast as you can afford and that the CPU clock speed supports. That is, match the speed of the RAM to the speed of the CPU. Get at least a 500GB hard disk drive (HDD). Consider a solid state drive (SSD) and HDD integrated combo if you have some extra pocket change to throw at this. The integrated SDD/HDD combo is pretty new, and I don't know anything about their reliability, but performance is supposed to be simply wonderful. Almost like moving up from a two floppy disk PC to one with a 10 MB HDD was... um... a few years ago.
I like Nvidia video cards too, but I can't decide which one to get. I know I want to drive two LCD color widescreen flat panel monitors, but with what? HDMI? Might want to watch a Blu-Ray movie in between re-gens of a largish AD model. I don't think Alibre Design takes advantage of GPUs on the video card, so no need for a bunch of those.
Here is a suggestion: visit places like Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Vision Computers, and the like. Configure your "dream" system at each site and see what it would cost. Leave off the bells and whistles for now. Just CPU, RAM, HDD and video card. The price will probably vary according to the mobo in each system. I am partial to AsusTEK but there are plenty of other good ones out there. Plenty of reviews on the Web too.
Now visit the mobo vendor of your choice and see what they have to offer. Not everyone wants to put in the work of building a PC from scratch. You don't save gobs of money rolling your own, but you do get what you pay for, and hopefully exactly what you want. If you can decide on a mobo, check back with the all-in-one vendors to see what kind of deal they will offer using that mobo and a range of peripherals. These guys make their money on the add-ins like CD-ROM drives, SDD and HDD drives, monitors, sound cards, and the like. You might do better ordering a minimalist system and upgrading it yourself. Or configure and then talk to someone in person to see what kind of deal they can offer. Be willing to make small configuration changes that don't affect the usability of your system but may have a huge effect on the vendor's profitability. But be wary of BS artists who just want to load you up with high-profit junk you don't want or need.
If you plan to purchase an assembled, ready-to-go system, get it in writing that the all-in-one vendor will provide the installation media for the operating system, so you can re-install Windows when the HDD fails. Not IF it fails but WHEN it fails. Windows 7 upgrades (from Vista or XP) and OEM OS distributions are okay, but the pre-installed OEM distros often come with a lot of bloatware you don't need and will have to un-install later. Spend a few hundred bucks extra now for a full version Windows 7 distribution, that is a distro for a PC without an operating system. If you choose to buy a system with an OS already installed you won't need this right away, but a few years down the road you might wish you had it.
Hop
build one ur self... its worth the trouble, you learn a lot, YOU know exactly what your putting in there, its kind fun, you can brag around that you built your own computer, and its usually A LOT cheaper
http://www.newegg.com/Store/Computer.as ... r-Hardware
http://www.newegg.com/Store/Computer.as ... r-Hardware
Hop
Senior Member
RocketNut said:
Wisdom? Ha! Read on...
As I said, if you build your own you know what you have. But is it really cheaper? Not in my experience. If you purchase an integrated system from Dell, HP, Vision Computers or whomever, you know what the cost will be. About the only easy "upgrade" path you will have is to add another and/or larger hard disk drive (HDD) or more memory. End of story. Put a lid on the money pit.
But, when you start to build your own, there is no end in sight. Because you immediately acquire an intimate familiarity and confidence in taking the covers off and playing around inside the box, there is no limit to what you can eventually spend on your new PC, especially if you start with a high-end motherboard (mobo). How about a better cooling system so you can tweak up the overclock speed? Maybe a faster unlocked CPU with more cores would be nice a year or so from now. Or, if the gaming bug bites you, how about another video card with gobs of RAM and several GPUs? Oh, are 8GB RAM sticks available later this year? Swap out those puny 4GB sticks and double your memory. Do you need to add RAID 5 quad-terabyte capability for those really BIG Alibre models? And so on, yada, yada, yada. Be prepared to spend some big bucks over the next few years until you again need a "new" PC.
How do I know the above is true? Well, my wife bought me a perfectly good used PC for my birthday several years ago. It came all buttoned up in a nice case with multiple fans, transparent plastic sides and spiffy colored LED lights inside, built by a techie for his mother who then sold it (because she replaced it with a Dell laptop) to my wife for $300. It also came with a nice "flat screen" color CRT monitor. It was configured with an ASUS P4B266 mobo supporting an Intel Pentium 4 single-core CPU running at 1.6 GHz with 1 GB of DRAM and two 40 GB HDDs. Not bad for three hundred bucks, eh?
Then one day the darned thing stopped working. I could have just bought a new PC then for maybe $500 or less and purchased the same or better capability... but maybe I could just open it up and see what's wrong. After all, I know my way around inside a PC case. It turned out one of the cheap plastic latches holding the heatsink against the CPU had broken, allowing the heatsink to separate from the CPU package. Fortunately, the CPU was "smart" enough to shut itself down when it started to overheat. And the ASUS BIOS is smart enough to tell me that.
It seemed to take forever to find a replacement latch mechanism because that design as well as the CPU socket is obsolete. But I eventually found one locally, although I had to buy a new heatsink and fan too. I installed it and got the PC working again after only a few days of downtime. That should have been the end of the story. Put everything back in the box and continue as before.
The mobo was, of course, now lying out bare on my computer desk, where the CRT color monitor would normally be, along with the ATX power supply, two HDDs, an optical disk drive (ODD), and a 3.5" floppy disk drive (FDD) arrayed spider-web like around it. I have the mobo propped up on various plastic "parts of opportunity" to prevent stray screws, nuts, etc. that might roll under it from shorting things out on the bottom. My wife is horrified when she sees this, but I tell her it is standard computer nerd practice and everything will be back in the case "real soon now."
Of course, with the mobo temporarily occupying the space normally reserved for the CRT monitor, I needed to visit Best Buy to purchase an inexpensive MAG 22" widescreen LCD color flatscreen monitor that would mount on a little shelf above the keyboard and mouse. There is no space on that shelf for a CRT. This was maybe two or three years ago. The old CRT monitor did come in handy to replace an ancient NEC CRT monitor that was failing on my Windows 98 SE Pentium 2 PC. I could possibly have fixed the NEC monitor by opening it up and cleaning out with isopropyl alcohol all the goop that condenses inside CRT monitors because of the high voltage present therein acting like an electrostatic precipitator, but LCD monitors are so cheap, so small, and so light... why bother? I just purchased another LCD monitor at Wally-World (Wal-Mart) to use while I work on another Windows 98 SE PC. Soon I won’t have any CRTs left in the house at all, except in my Tektronix oscilloscopes and the one televison in the upstairs guest bedroom that can now only play DVDs or VHS videos.
During this period a change, I decided the ODD that came with the PC was inadequate to my needs. So off to a local computer store to purchase a Plexstor ODD. Installation was simple: unplug the cables, plug in the cables. Install the software driver. It sits nicely on the desk under the FDD.
The ATX supply is a switching power supply with multiple outputs (+5, +12, -12) and 300 watts of power crammed into a 100 W sized box. There has been no substantial change in the ATX power supply form-factor in the last ten years or so. It is basically the same size as it was when the 12 MHz 80386 PC-AT was king. But the amount of power has tripled and quadrupled and there is no end in sight. A bigger, more powerful, fan helped some at first, but that just seems to beat the dust out of the air and deposit it faster. Eventually enough heat-insulating dust coats all the components inside that even a hurricane-force fan wouldn't help. The power supply then dies from overheating. Fortunately, switching power supplies are dirt-cheap, being mostly built in China now instead of Japan. So when mine died, soon after replacing the CPU heatsink, it was no big deal to purchase a $40 replacement. Of course I bought a somewhat larger replacement than the original, that is, one having greater power capability, but the case size is still the same.
It ran that way for a few years, laid out on the desk. I eventually replaced the original four 256 MB sticks of RAM with two 1 GB sticks, purchased online for a reasonable price. About this same time I purchased at Office Max a Western Digital 300 GB USB external HDD for my office PC. Turned out it didn't work on the USB1 ports I had on my office computer at the time, so I took it home to try it out there. It worked fine on the ASUS mobo which supports USB2, so I took it back to work and requested a USB2 add-in board for my office PC. I liked the Western Digital USB drive so much that I went over to Office Max (or maybe it was Office Depot) and bought one for my home PC. After all, I knew it would work there! The plan was to use it to back-up the two 40 GB HDDs using Norton Ghost, which I had purchased at Best Buy.
Eventually I started having problems with one of the 40 GB hard disk drives. Every hard disk drive ever made eventually fails. The trick is to have moved on to something else when it does. That way it is always someone else’s problem, unless you buy used which of course we had done.
The boot drive was formatted with dual-boot partitions, XP Pro on one and Windows 2000 on the other. I had no use for Windows 2000. I think most if not all of the directories associated with it had been wiped by the previous owner's son, because it wouldn't even boot into Windows 2000, although it kept offering that as an option whenever I tried to boot the machine. I also noticed Microsoft was about to terminate support for XP that year (or so they claimed), so I rushed over to Best Buy and bought the last copy of XP Pro (full install) they happened to still have on the shelf. It was probably the only copy they ever had on the shelf, since most people purchased the upgrade version of XP.
I saved what data I could from the boot drive onto the other 40 GB drive and then re-formatted and re-partitioned the 40 GB boot drive while doing a clean install of XP Pro. I made a really bad mistake then: I gave Windows only a 10 GB partition and left the other 30 GB for programs and data. After about a year, Windows filled up its partition. Then the drive crashed during an online Windows update and wouldn't boot Windows anymore. There is probably some recoverable data on the drive, but I gave up trying to restore XP functionality and bought a new HDD. A larger one of course: 500 GB capacity. Same sized case.
The new 500 GB drive appeared to format and partition just fine using the Windows XP Pro distro I had purchased at Best Buy few years ago. However, when it was "done" Windows wouldn't load. There was some sort of error message at boot time about a certain .dll file that was missing. I did web searches on that file name and got conflicting reports of what could be wrong. Finally I noticed that shortly after the POST (power on self test) completed, after the BIOS had displayed the disk parameters, but before Windows would normally have loaded, there was something peculiar about the hard disk size the BIOS reported. It was way too small for a 500 GB disk. Then it dawned on me: there was no such thing as a $100 500 GB HDD back in the day when this mobo was built. I needed a BIOS upgrade, if a suitable one was available. But before doing that, I needed to try one last thing: reformat and partition the disk during Windows installation with a much smaller partition, say 10 GB. We knew 10 GB worked before. So I did that, and sure enough the installation went as smooth as glass. Windows came up just fine, but my 500 GB HDD was now only 10 GB.
ASUS has a tradition of updating the BIOS on their mobo even when the mobo is technically obsolete and not sold at retail anymore. You need to be careful which one you use though. The latest update may not always be the best update. I looked through the list at the ASUS website and found one update that seemed to solve the problem of the BIOS not recognizing the additional address bits needed for larger HDDs. There were later updates available, but I decided they didn't solve any problem I had. I downloaded and installed an earlier update that did solve my problem.
Re-flashing a mobo BIOS is not for the faint hearted. If something goes wrong, your mobo is basically toast unless you can send it back to the factory to have a new BIOS installed. What can go wrong? Ha, if you can ask that question you need to meet my old friend, Murphy.
But nothing went wrong. I made a DOS-bootable 3.5” diskette (after replacing my FDD which turned out to not be able to read or write anymore) and copied two downloadable files to it that I got from the ASUS website. One was the DOS executable that actually flashed the BIOS ROM, the other was the updated BIOS program. I set the BIOS to boot from floppy (I usually disable that option to prevent someone from “accidentally” booting a floppy with a virus or a root kit into my PC) and ran the flash BIOS program from the DOS command line prompt. You should hope and pray that power doesn't fail during the few moments required to run this program. That's it! I'm done until the next "improvement" is needed. That improvement will probably be to put everything back into the case to make room on my computer desk for building a Windows 7 64-bit PC later this year.
So, how much did I "save" by re-building my $300 PC versus just buying a new one to replace it? I do have a robust 32-bit system that runs AD just fine, has plenty of room for editing as well as storing models, and will be "good enough" until I can afford a 64-bit system, hopefully sometime this year. I won't be cannibalizing this 32-bit system to build the 64-bit system. Instead I will "pass it down" to replace that Pentium 2 running Windows 98 SE.
But do I buy or build the new system? :?
It is so much more fun to build. Plus, I don't have to pay for it all at once. :mrgreen:
Hop
bigseb
Alibre Super User
Here in South Africa buying a PC at a major IT store is generally a complete rip-off. That was prime motivator for me building my own. Then there was the issue that the 'store-bought' PC's were never quite perfect ie there was always a component (or sometimes two components) that were out of place and ade it a lesser PC.
I wanted a PC that would do everything I threw at it without breaking a sweat and not have to be upgraded for at least three years. Currently my rig consists of a Core i7-870 @ 2.93GHz (quadcore), Intel Whitesburg P55 mobo, 8Gb DDR3 1333MHz RAM, Nvidia GTS250, 700W PSU, optical drive,Windows 7 Ultimate, mouse and keyboard, Cooler Master HAF912 case and a 22" LCD monitor. All that for just ZAR10 000!!! <--- That's peanuts for a rig like that SA, the stores would easily charge ZAR18 000 and up for the same thing.
I learnt a lot doing it too. Spent months researching every single component. All in all I'm extremely pleased with my purchase. My wife isn't too happy though 'cos despite my 'three-year-no-upgrade' promise I'm already eyeing a new graphics card... the Nvidia GTX480.
I wanted a PC that would do everything I threw at it without breaking a sweat and not have to be upgraded for at least three years. Currently my rig consists of a Core i7-870 @ 2.93GHz (quadcore), Intel Whitesburg P55 mobo, 8Gb DDR3 1333MHz RAM, Nvidia GTS250, 700W PSU, optical drive,Windows 7 Ultimate, mouse and keyboard, Cooler Master HAF912 case and a 22" LCD monitor. All that for just ZAR10 000!!! <--- That's peanuts for a rig like that SA, the stores would easily charge ZAR18 000 and up for the same thing.
I learnt a lot doing it too. Spent months researching every single component. All in all I'm extremely pleased with my purchase. My wife isn't too happy though 'cos despite my 'three-year-no-upgrade' promise I'm already eyeing a new graphics card... the Nvidia GTX480.
RocketNut said:
+1
Cheaper... depdends on what YOU WANT vs what YOU NEED, and the cost savings kind of scales accordingly. it also kinda depends on HOW YOU use your computer. ex. i consider myself to be a good mulit tasker, saying when i have like a 40+ part assembly open (or anything for that matter), i might have like 10-15 parts of that assembly open (tab between them) in a different window; (taking measurements, quick lil changes ect..) prolly have it doing some rendering in the back ground, or having design check do its thing, as well as a spread sheet or so, prolly a couple refrence docs, prolly a calculator, prolly an internet browser watching my facebook, if not youtube, then i would prolly have iTunes open. if im "plugged in", im making the computer work just as hard, and after a few redbulls im going to straight up make it cry
if you dont do all that then obviously you wont need as powerful as a computer...
ie
a purdy good alibre purpose home built computer... maybe like $800
a purdy good alibre purpose dell... maybe like $750
a really good alibre purpose home built... maybe like $1000
a really good alibre purpose dell... maybe like $1000
a really awesome alibre purpose home built... 1500
a really awesome alibre purpose dell... 2000
ect.. ect..
see my specs below (signature) i bought all of those parts off new egg, and it ended up being like ~1200 bucks, but my system falls under "do whatever you want" catagory (or at least it used to) its getting kinda old for my liking haha