New System for Autodesk Inventor

itech

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Hey everyone,

I am looking to purchase some new pc's for our company design engineers who use Autodesk Inventor as there 3D modelling package.

Please could someone offer me some advice on a couple of hardware choices.

My choice of CPU is either the Core i5 670 or the core i7 860, which one would perform better when using 3D modelling?

Also would a single SSD outperform 2 10K SATA drives in RAID 0? The engineers would not be writing much data to the disks as drawings are saved on a network drive so it's really just application performance that's important.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

 
^ Well no doubt the Intel i7 is a very good choice for the Autodesk, but the newer 6-core AMD Phenom II X6 1090T actually beats the i7 930 in those apps...
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/amd-phenom-ii-x6-1090t-890fx,2613-8.html
http://techgage.com/article/phenom_ii_x6_1090t_-_amd_enters_the_six-core_arena/4
http://www.extremeoverclocking.com/reviews/processors/AMD_Phenom_II_X6_1090T_9.html

And am sure it will perform better on other 3D modelling softwares as well...

And as for the storage, Yes SSDs are a good option, but again you have to choose the proper one...
The newer SSDs from OCZ like the Vertex 2 has very high I/O per sec and offfer very high Read/ Write even for smaller 4KB size...
http://www.guru3d.com/article/ocz-vertex-2-ssd-review/7
But these cost little more than other SSDs though...
 

itech

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Well as were buying from Dell the 6 Core AMD is not an option so its just between the two Intels.

Unfortunately the dell website does not specify what make and model the SSD's are.
 

itech

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if it were my choice then yes I would be buidling it myself but as a company we only buy from Dell. The reason I posted it here is because it is the closest match to the topic I posted about but if you can think of a more appropriate section then by all means suggest it.
 

itech

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We are using 2008 pro at the moment.

This task is made more difficult as I need to purchase a PC that will run Inventor 2008 well but also 2011 when we come to upgrade. Also we have not yet upgraded from Windows XP and not yet in a position to do so.

Therefore my current thinking is to go for a:

Dell Optiplex 980
3.46GHz i5 670 (instead of the 2.8GHz i7 860 as I believe the clock speed will be more beneficial)
Windows 7 64 bit (format with Windows XP 32 bit until we are in a position to upgrade to win 7)
8GB DDR3 memory (32 bit will only see 3-4GB but when we upgrade to win 7 it will be available)
64GB SSD (instead of 2 10K SATA in raid 0 as I believe the SSD may be faster)
Quadro FX580 (gaming card will be no good for Inventor 2008 which we currently use)

I think this system should run Inventor 2008 fine, then in the near future I will upgrade to Inventor 2011 and Windows 7 64bit at the same time.

If anyone has a different opinion your advice is more than welcome.
 

itech

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I was told by our Autodesk reseller that even Inventor 2011 will be a single threaded application therefore clock speed is more important than number of cores.

The i5 670 is 3.4GHz whereas the i7 860 runs at 2.8GHz but would the turbo boost on the i7 allow it to compete with the 670 on a single threaded application?
 

SHANEMARINES

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+1^