CAD Workstation

[bob4432]

Originally posted by: Twinpeaksr
Currently using 160 with a Cheetah Drive and Dual Plextor CD and CDRW. After almost 5 years it is still very fast!

is that 10 or 15K?

in my closet sits a plextor ultraplex40max one of the best cd-roms i have ever owned

 

[Twinpeaksr]

That would be a 10K, and I have a Plextor PlexWriter 12/10/32S, as well as a Plextor UltraPlex40! This is one fast BUS, almost don't want to sell it!

 

[bob4432]

cant you bring over some of the older items? those are some sweet "old skool" items and considering they are decently fast by todays standards, it must have been a crazy fast rig in its day..

 

[Twinpeaksr]

I can, it has Ol' Skool Speed, but with it is some of the Ol' Skool problems. Adding 30-60s to boot time for SCSI BUS load, the occational failure to detect BUS on reboot, and though fast my CD Drives can not keep up with the new generation drives (as I found out yesterday when I benchmarked them). That and lack of support for DVD-RW drives (have not had much luck finding them), DVD DL RW, as well as price are all making me look elseware. Sold stable and fast, but not with out thier share of problems. I love my SCSI setup, but with my soon-to-be-built Terabyte RAID system, It is becomeing less of a requirement.

And yes, It was the fastest system I had ever seen when built, and still is very fast for a over 5 year old system! Never thought I would have one make it this long and still be able to run all the new stuff!

 

[dmw16]

what CAD package?

I run CAD @ work on a 2.8GHz w/ 2GB of ram and a regular old HD and it runs plenty fast.

 

[bob4432]

i hear you. i do however like a 10-15K scsi boot drive with os and apps on it i don't worry too much arout the boot up times, my bios has a setting that lets me set the computer to turn on everyday at a certain time, then my backups are schedule to run automatically and everything is done before i even wake up

 

[Twinpeaksr]

I don't think my BIOS has that, but a 10K boot drive is nice! I am hoping with the RAID 5 that My data will be secure, especially if it is not managed my Windows!

 

[Twinpeaksr]

The CAD that I run is DataCAD. That is not what I need the speed for, I use Xilinx ISE and Model Sim, and simulating large designs can take a while. Also use L-Edit and OrCAD, a 3000 Transistor design can take quite some time to simulate. I guess most of this can be considered CAD though depending on what field you are working in! Also have been know to play with AutoCAD from time to time.

 

[OSX]

Sadly, the AIC-7890 in my linux box is mostly unused. It's got an old HP CD-R in it, and there's this mythical 10K RPM disk drive my friend is selling me. That should use up the rest of the Ultra2 bandwidth.

 

[Twinpeaksr]

That is why I am thinking of selling it off, I don't think I will maximze the BUS and since it is a 64Bit 66Mhz CAD and it is hard to find a MB with that slot any more, I will take a performance Hit unless I upgrade the card. I think save the money and get 2 monitors!

 

[markten]

I've been going through an identical exercise - here's what I found:

My app is Autodesk Inventor so it's not multi threading and can't take advantage of more than one CPU so that made my initital twin Opteron CPU on a Tyan K8WE idea superflous.

C2D are the best value in performance at the moment (August) and the E6600 seems adequate and with the right mobo can be OC'd. Inventor only responds to faster clock speed.
Cost $370

The mobo I specked was an ASUS G2 WS Pro. This can be used to OC the CPU and memory.
Cost $270

GPU; now this is really interesting. Like anyone I wanted a Nvidia Quadro 4500 but not at $1500!!!!! It seems that the Nvidia Geforce 6800 is identical and can be soft modded to bring it back up to the spec of of the Quadro 4500. And look at the cost....
Cost $130

2Gb of DDR2 RAM
Cost <$200

I decided on a 23" LCD monitor and found the Sony SDM-P234/B has power autosensing and is £850 here in the UK but lower $$$'s in the US.
Cost $750

HDD is subjective but RAID-0 is my choice.
Cost $250 ish

The whole system came out around $2200.

Now the dilema. The MacPro just came out and has two Xeons and all the bells & whistles I would want plus OSX which I like. I can run XP on it for Inventor. It costs about $1800 more than my specked rig but would last me a lot longer - like ten years!. And it's an Apple. And it has OSX!

It won't run Inventor any faster but I'm really, really tempted. And if Apple put the four core CPU's on it later this year maybe they will drop the price.

Upshot - I've decided to wait until years end when Leopard will be out, Intel's four core CPU's may be out and more mobos for Xeons and C2D's are available then decide what to do.

 

[Howard]

AFAIK only the AGP 6800 can be soft-modded to a Quadro.

 

[bob4432]

Originally posted by: markten
I've been going through an identical exercise - here's what I found:

My app is Autodesk Inventor so it's not multi threading and can't take advantage of more than one CPU so that made my initital twin Opteron CPU on a Tyan K8WE idea superflous.

C2D are the best value in performance at the moment (August) and the E6600 seems adequate and with the right mobo can be OC'd. Inventor only responds to faster clock speed.
Cost $370

The mobo I specked was an ASUS G2 WS Pro. This can be used to OC the CPU and memory.
Cost $270

GPU; now this is really interesting. Like anyone I wanted a Nvidia Quadro 4500 but not at $1500!!!!! It seems that the Nvidia Geforce 6800 is identical and can be soft modded to bring it back up to the spec of of the Quadro 4500. And look at the cost....
Cost $130

2Gb of DDR2 RAM
Cost <$200

I decided on a 23" LCD monitor and found the Sony SDM-P234/B has power autosensing and is £850 here in the UK but lower $$$'s in the US.
Cost $750

HDD is subjective but RAID-0 is my choice.
Cost $250 ish

The whole system came out around $2200.

Now the dilema. The MacPro just came out and has two Xeons and all the bells & whistles I would want plus OSX which I like. I can run XP on it for Inventor. It costs about $1800 more than my specked rig but would last me a lot longer - like ten years!. And it's an Apple. And it has OSX!

It won't run Inventor any faster but I'm really, really tempted. And if Apple put the four core CPU's on it later this year maybe they will drop the price.

Upshot - I've decided to wait until years end when Leopard will be out, Intel's four core CPU's may be out and more mobos for Xeons and C2D's are available then decide what to do.

i don't know how inventor works other than this article, but why not go with a extremely fast single core, or are you saying that even 1/2 of a dc would be better? seems like a skt 939 board w/ agp and the highest clocked single core would do the trick since then you could soft mod the gpu to the quadro 4500. also, what makes the quadro 4500 better than say a 7900gtx?

also, for this why raid0? there is no data protection. do large files get moved that often to put your data at risk? again, i am just trying to understand the reasoning behind this.

 

[batmanuel]

My concern with using cheap SCSI drives is that that from my experience they tend to be older drives that in general use benchmarks can't keep up with the newer high-areal density SATA drives, like the 7200.10 series with perpendicular recording or the Caviar SE16 models. Just check out the Storgage Review high end drive benchmark results, and for their test suite the Cheetah 10K.7 drives were WAY down at the bottom of the performance chart. The apps they were using were even more demanding on the drive I/O than your typical CAD app, that from my experience tends to be more RAM and video card limited.

Unless you are going all out for a new 15K drive like the MAU, I just don't see much point in messing around with SCSI, especially when the new Raptors outperform them in non-server tasks. I'm not saying that SCSI is a bad idea in general, just that it's strengths seem to lie more in the server environment than the desktop based on the SR tests I've seen.

 

[jose]

scsi vs sata ...

15k scsi for speed and get 7200rpm raid ed. sata for space....

For example , keep the scsi controller and get a nice 15k Fuj 74gig for the OS & programs. Then use the onboard sata to do mass storage .. in raid 0,1 or 5 depending on the mobo..

Look up some recent threads about 10K vs 7200rpm, I post benchmarks for 15k scsi, 10kscsi, 10k sata, & 7200rpm sata..

As far as processors.. I'd get a dual opteron or single 939 dual core opteron or xeon mobo..

My friend right now is having fits w/ his brand new e6600 Asus p8w-dh build right now... I think it's too bleading edge..

For a dual socket 64bit pci-x mobo I like the Tyan thunder k8we/k8w mobo.s
for a single socket 939 I like the DFI SLI-DR mobo it has 8 sata ports...

Good Luck
Regards,
Jose

 

[markten]

don't know how inventor works other than this article, but why not go with a extremely fast single core, or are you saying that even 1/2 of a dc would be better? seems like a skt 939 board w/ agp and the highest clocked single core would do the trick since then you could soft mod the gpu to the quadro 4500. also, what makes the quadro 4500 better than say a 7900gtx?

also, for this why raid0? there is no data protection. do large files get moved that often to put your data at risk? again, i am just trying to understand the reasoning behind this.

I went through an Iterative process but before I go on I should tell you that up until two weeks ago my knowledge of CPU's ended when the 486 was considered formidable so I had to start over really.

I thought that the fastest CPU was good but two were better so started from this point of view. I looked at Intel's web site and followed their recommendations for a workstation and selected a Pentium 4 or Xeon 5080. Then I read all the comparisons against AMD's and this is were I got confused as I the AMD always came out ahead of Intel. At this point I didn't know about C2D (this is how out of touch I was) or that the new Xeon was also a C2D but for multi CPU boards. This wasn't explained clearly enough (for me!) on Intel's site. As the C2D is new out all those test were out of date but anyways, I then went the AMD route.

I thought an AMD Opteron 285 (two of 'em) on a Tyan K8WE workstation board was about the best cost/performance compromise. I then looked at the app (Inventor) and found it was a 32bit app with really no multi threading capability so would not exploit a multi core CPU let alone two of them. So I then went the route of a lower cost single core Opeteron 252 but still on a K8WE reasoning that if at some point I had need of two dual core CPU's I could simply drop 'em in.

I put this spec on a few boards for feedback and it was explained to me that the 252 and 940 socket was coming to the end of its life and maybe a year down the road 252's and 285's may be hard to come by.

So I did indeed reason that a single core CPU would be best but even so, Intel's E6600 is cheaper than AMD's 252 and will run Inventor faster and accommodate any other app I might have and run them faster. So QED - that's how I ended up going Intel.

And - if the CPU can be made to run faster then so can Inventor. It appears that the C2D E6600 on the ASUS can be made to run much faster if I wanted to try.

RAID 0 is my minimum at this point as I tend to work on the same file for a long time. HDD choice is something I'm still looking at.

I started out looking for the ultimate single app CAD workstation but I'm afraid I succumbed to mission creep when I saw what was out there to the extent that I really want that MacPro even though it's £1k more and won't run Inventor any faster than the spec I came up with. It will last me the best part of ten years though. See - I'm starting to find ways I can justify it already.

The Quadro 4500 is really good for 3D visualisation of rendered models.

You are correct though, for Inventor a fast single core CPU on a board with good GPU bus would be perfect. As I say - mission creep....


At thsi point I've decided to hold off until years end when the C2D isn't so new and the market has settled down, motherboards are sorted, Leopard is out and maybe some prices have dropped.

 

[bob4432]

Originally posted by: markten
don't know how inventor works other than this article, but why not go with a extremely fast single core, or are you saying that even 1/2 of a dc would be better? seems like a skt 939 board w/ agp and the highest clocked single core would do the trick since then you could soft mod the gpu to the quadro 4500. also, what makes the quadro 4500 better than say a 7900gtx?

also, for this why raid0? there is no data protection. do large files get moved that often to put your data at risk? again, i am just trying to understand the reasoning behind this.

I went through an Iterative process but before I go on I should tell you that up until two weeks ago my knowledge of CPU's ended when the 486 was considered formidable so I had to start over really.

I thought that the fastest CPU was good but two were better so started from this point of view. I looked at Intel's web site and followed their recommendations for a workstation and selected a Pentium 4 or Xeon 5080. Then I read all the comparisons against AMD's and this is were I got confused as I the AMD always came out ahead of Intel. At this point I didn't know about C2D (this is how out of touch I was) or that the new Xeon was also a C2D but for multi CPU boards. This wasn't explained clearly enough (for me!) on Intel's site. As the C2D is new out all those test were out of date but anyways, I then went the AMD route.

I thought an AMD Opteron 285 (two of 'em) on a Tyan K8WE workstation board was about the best cost/performance compromise. I then looked at the app (Inventor) and found it was a 32bit app with really no multi threading capability so would not exploit a multi core CPU let alone two of them. So I then went the route of a lower cost single core Opeteron 252 but still on a K8WE reasoning that if at some point I had need of two dual core CPU's I could simply drop 'em in.

I put this spec on a few boards for feedback and it was explained to me that the 252 and 940 socket was coming to the end of its life and maybe a year down the road 252's and 285's may be hard to come by.

So I did indeed reason that a single core CPU would be best but even so, Intel's E6600 is cheaper than AMD's 252 and will run Inventor faster and accommodate any other app I might have and run them faster. So QED - that's how I ended up going Intel.

And - if the CPU can be made to run faster then so can Inventor. It appears that the C2D E6600 on the ASUS can be made to run much faster if I wanted to try.

RAID 0 is my minimum at this point as I tend to work on the same file for a long time. HDD choice is something I'm still looking at.

I started out looking for the ultimate single app CAD workstation but I'm afraid I succumbed to mission creep when I saw what was out there to the extent that I really want that MacPro even though it's £1k more and won't run Inventor any faster than the spec I came up with. It will last me the best part of ten years though. See - I'm starting to find ways I can justify it already.

The Quadro 4500 is really good for 3D visualisation of rendered models.

You are correct though, for Inventor a fast single core CPU on a board with good GPU bus would be perfect. As I say - mission creep....


At thsi point I've decided to hold off until years end when the C2D isn't so new and the market has settled down, motherboards are sorted, Leopard is out and maybe some prices have dropped.

sounds good, but why raid0? are the files that large and need to be written to that much? usually raid0 benefits only when you can transfer over gigabit ethernet or to another raid0 array. maybe it is because i don't know about inventor but i have messed around with solidworks looking at some other peoples files and my machine was most definately cpu limited, but these were not very large files as they were models of ar15 parts and complete rifles.

 

[markten]

as I said, I'm still looking into the most appropriate HDD for this app and whatever else I might put on there in the future but RAID 0 is at the very least fast for file access. To be honest, I don't know either how often I will access files or how large my files are going to be at this point as I'm not yet using the app 'cos my current PC won't run it. I know on my current CAD app I'm opening and closing files by the minute it seems.

Funny you should say that about the AR15's as I will be using this app to design ceramic rifles.

 

[bob4432]

Originally posted by: markten
as I said, I'm still looking into the most appropriate HDD for this app and whatever else I might put on there in the future but RAID 0 is at the very least fast for file access. To be honest, I don't know either how often I will access files or how large my files are going to be at this point as I'm not yet using the app 'cos my current PC won't run it. I know on my current CAD app I'm opening and closing files by the minute it seems.

Funny you should say that about the AR15's as I will be using this app to design ceramic rifles.

just remember that with raid0 you have double the chance or losing your data since it is striped between 2 drives. i would think you may want to go at least raid 1 or 5 so there is redundancy in case 1 hdd fails. this is just my opinon, but is shared by quite a few members - basically if the data you are working on is not that important and you need the utmost speed and have a good backup then people will use raid0, but if the data is important raid0 is a no-no. going a 15k scsi system hdd, newer series of course then a large, raid1 setup for the data may be the way to go. the seagate 7200.10s are nice drives and offer excellent speed for a sata non-enterprise hdd, plus they have a 5yr warranty.

interesting about the ceramic rifles - anything you could talk about? all i need is to get my hands on a cnc machine and get the correct atf stamp and put out a couple of lowers and uppers.....but that is not going to happen, just cheaper to buy the parts by at least $90K+ haha

i was also going to model some sound supressors since again, all you need is the correct stamp, but again i would need a cnc lathe or find a trustworty person with a standard lathe that i could do the work at and i would only do 22lr as the pressure for 223/308 is extremely high as you know. it is nice the patent office lets you look at the designs of all the patents

 

[Howard]

Ceramic rifle parts, you mean? What material will you be working with that is sufficiently tough? Something like Technox?

 

[jose]

Go w/ raid 5...

Doing raid 0 and raid 5 w/ 3 wd 250g raid ed. drives we are getting 228MB/s raid 0 and 208MB/s raid 5 on a asus P5W DH mobo..

The access time on both is 13.5ms .. Thus you only get 20MB/s more w/ raid 0 which is not much difference.

You are better off w/ raid 5 running of the ich7r controller..

Regards,
Jose

 

[markten]

I think you are right about RAID0, at least with WD drives. In theory, RAID0 is said to be faster but I read a test on WD Raptor HDD which were compared to a Seagate RAID0 setup and the WD was actually faster. In looking at the WD web site I was unable to find the WD Raptor 1500 AD drive mentioned in the article. If this is the case it must make more sense to go RAID1 or just use one HDD and some form of backup?

http://tomshardware.co.uk/2006/02/06/wd1500ad_raptor_xtends_performance_lead_uk/



Re. the ceramic target rifle, the class of ceramics are in general, Sialons but the high tensile areas will be ceramic/ceramic composites which are a mixture of ceramic materials that when correctly blended and sintered offer otherwise unobtainable properties.

Examples of these composites are silicon carbide whisker reinforced alumina, zirconia toughened alumina, titanium carbide reinforced alumina and alumina bonded silicon carbide to name but a few.

There should be very litle machining to be done but some sialons can be machined with EDM techniques. Sialons are extremely hard, more so than steel so tools are expensive.

I'm in the UK so the laws are different here; having a fully auto AR15 or handgun will get you 5 years in jail minimum.

 

[bob4432]

Originally posted by: markten
I think you are right about RAID0, at least with WD drives. In theory, RAID0 is said to be faster but I read a test on WD Raptor HDD which were compared to a Seagate RAID0 setup and the WD was actually faster. In looking at the WD web site I was unable to find the WD Raptor 1500 AD drive mentioned in the article. If this is the case it must make more sense to go RAID1 or just use one HDD and some form of backup?

http://tomshardware.co.uk/2006/02/06/wd1500ad_raptor_xtends_performance_lead_uk/



Re. the ceramic target rifle, the class of ceramics are in general, Sialons but the high tensile areas will be ceramic/ceramic composites which are a mixture of ceramic materials that when correctly blended and sintered offer otherwise unobtainable properties.

Examples of these composites are silicon carbide whisker reinforced alumina, zirconia toughened alumina, titanium carbide reinforced alumina and alumina bonded silicon carbide to name but a few.

There should be very litle machining to be done but some sialons can be machined with EDM techniques. Sialons are extremely hard, more so than steel so tools are expensive.

I'm in the UK so the laws are different here; having a fully auto AR15 or handgun will get you 5 years in jail minimum.

definately go the raid1 or single hdd, personally i wold go the raid 1 along with another backup system as the amount of time working on a drawing is ridiculous.

over here in the states, it depends on what state you live in as to what you can do for weapons. some of the more anti gun states like california really limit what you can have. also, i am not talking full auto, just semi auto as over here i think the general population can only by pre 86 full autos that are trasferable, get a tax stamp and then find the weapon. the price for these weapons is usually more than $10,000, but gun dealers can do it much cheaper. as far as semi auto ar15s, short barrelled rifles and "silenced" weapons, depdending on the state all that is needed is a $200 tax stamp, a pretty thorough background check, a sign off of the local police chief and the $500-700 to buy the suppressor (for the larger suppresors, the 22lr ones are much cheaper). again this in states like AZ where gun laws are pretty lax, although crime is not higher than most for its size and is lower than many states with strict gun laws.

are you guys allowed to even own firearms over there? or are there very strict laws regarding them.

getting back to the composites, are they injection molded or how are they finished being that they are so hard? also, with them being so hard does it make them brittle? i had read about certain types of barrel coatings that certain manf use that claim their barrels will last 50,000+ rnds and this kind of seems like what they were talking about but am not sure.

 

[markten]

I want to explore SCSI drives before I settle on a spec.

the CRC's are made like any other ceramic. They are compacted into the mould under high pressure, at least for the applications I have in mind. At that point they go through a sintering process. After sintering they need no further treatment but for close tolerance surfaces can be machined by tools made from other sialons, diamond and in some cases EDM.

They have hardnesses in the order of 2000 Vickers, fantastic abrasion resistance and stiffness and maintain their properties at elevated temperatures. A barrel may never wear out but my objective is to see if it can maintain accuracy better than a steel barrel. My first objective is to make some pressure vessels to simulate chamber pressures and test them. Then X-ray them then test them to distuction and examine their failure modes. If that goes well I'll design a .50 BMG on the basis that if that holds together anything will!

All barells have to be proofed by law and stamped by the proofing house - not sure how they would do that on a ceramic part that's almost diamond hard....

Fracture or failure modes have to addressed carefully accoring to application. There have been car engines made entirely from ceramics and you can make anything from nails, bearings to springs. You can choose the ceramic accordingly. Generalising, engineering ceramics don't have as good a tensile strength as steel unless you introduce materials to arrest the fracture i.e microm sized whiskers of silicon carbide. In choosing that matrial you can also use it to carry loads. Some people are using nano-tubes. A well known application would be ceramic brake discs. In high pressure areas like the chamber you could also incorporate a braided carbon fiber or aramid mandrel.

Rifles and shotguns are legal here in the UK providing you have legitmate use and you go through the same Police checks as I guess you guys do.

 

[bob4432]

very interesting. let us know how the testing goes after the machine is built. a buddy of mine has a 50bmg single shot rifle - that is one mean round. unfortunately none of the ranges allow him to fire it, so it is off to the desert and there you may get a 100-200yd shot, but that is about it. it annhilates anything it hits and is very accurate, easily 1MOA.

you guys can't have handguns? our police checks, at least in AZ take about 5mins and they just make sure you don't have any felony items on your background. there is the gunshows at the fairgrounds that don't even check for that.....