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P4 vs Xeon vs Athlon vs Opteron for AutoCAD
- Thread starter josedawg
- Start date
jacktesterson
Diamond Member
Opertons or MP's will be the fastest
What kind of CAD do you do? I do civil engineering CAD 40+ hours per week. Most of this is 2D stuff. We have 3D lines and do a lot of surface modeling in 3D, but it's nowhere near as 3D intensive as someone who renders parts in 3D for a mechanical application. If you're doing more of the civil-type stuff, I use an XP2000 chip and have NEVER had a bottleneck from the processor. I'm currently working on a sewer project that encompasses an entire town plus a 4 mile line to another town and I have no problems regenerating and panning around the entire drawing with my processor. I firmly believe that a good video card and decent RAM will get you farther than a processor for the type of work I do. If you're going to be doing a lot of rendering, etc. you will likely need a good processor as well.
very good point here. 2D CAD has been around a LONG time. I can remember people doing a lot of mechanical drawings (specs for pumps and blowers) on P2-350s using AutoCAD14 without much trouble. So, basically, if you're doing 2D, it doesn't matter.
If you're doing 3D, its far more GPU dependent than CPU dependent. The "calculations" for the CAD (not the rendering) are pretty simple--any modern CPU should be fine. Rendering, on the other hand, is a different story--and basically, from my limited knowledge, that is VERY method dependent (the rendering benchmarks I've seen can sway drastically from processor to processor). But you usually render at the end--and have more time then. For the drawing, I don't think it really makes much difference. I would get whatever you can get a good deal on--and put a decent GPU in it. an ATI Fire GX1 or something.
Good luck!
Wtf are you smoking? You can easily bottleneck the top of the line system with a 2D drawing. My 2D drawings take well over 1GB of raw memory with the largest models taking an estimated ~10GB. We're still waiting for a decent 64bit solution.
AutoCAD used to be the AXP's crowning field. I dont know about it anymore, because no one seems to bother with CAD benchmarks.
to my knowledge AutoCAD is a CPU/Memory intensive program, which is why i'm debating whether or not an opteron system, with on-dye memory controller which provides very low latency, can trump over a p4 paired with ddr400+ memory, or if a dual setup would go best for this type of work (xeon vs mp. dual opterons wont fit the budget). and not only will the system be used for AutoCAD, it will also be a part-time gaming machine (although the AutoCAD comes first), so there will need to be a top of the line gaming video card in there (radeon 9800 pro vs nvidia 5800 ultra. anyone wanna benchmark these in AutoCAD 😀 ) able to run the next generation of games (hl2/doom3).
yes dexvx, i agree. i havent seen many CAD benchmarks in quite some time. i wonder why they stopped using it? if anyone has access to opteron, athlon xp/mp's, p4's and xeons, and can do some benchmarks with CAD, that would be awesome. if not, someone pass this thread along to Anand and tell him to do a quick review, seeing as no one else will.
yes dexvx, i agree. i havent seen many CAD benchmarks in quite some time. i wonder why they stopped using it? if anyone has access to opteron, athlon xp/mp's, p4's and xeons, and can do some benchmarks with CAD, that would be awesome. if not, someone pass this thread along to Anand and tell him to do a quick review, seeing as no one else will.
It always depends on what you're drawing. My computational models are using close to 12GB of RAM right now on ASCI White at Lawrence Livermore. So no matter how fast computers are, SOME people will bottleneck them. But it is a small percentage.... and growing smaller. Of course, are you actually bottlenecking the processor, or do you just need more physical memory? You never know, a 500MHz processor with 20GB of addressable memory (if something like that existed) might be just fine. 🙂
Like I said to the original poster--it depends on what you're doing. SOME people think that drawing a house plan is "intense" CAD. Other people (like you) are doing ACTUAL intense CAD--and bottlenecking the processor/RAM. Knowing what you need to do is the most important thing.
As far as CAD benchmarks--keep in mind I don't do much CAD anymore, but do a LOT of floating point work--it could be an odd thing. I thought, hey, I'm doing a lot of FPU work, an Athlon XP would be GREAT.... and then I turned around and bought an Athlon XP 2800+ (when they were brand new) to 'replace' my P4 2.26B. But, shockingly enough, the P4 was MUCH faster (read: close to 20%) because of the better memory performance--apparently, the bottleneck was the memory interface. I think you'd have to really benchmark it quite a bit to understand what the limiting factors are.
I did CAD for 3 years in School and I have been using CAD since R14.
I found that the AMDs did perform better, however unless you are doing heavy 3D building (Say in Desktop 3.3 or higher) I wouldn't waste the cash on a high end PC. I found a P4 2.4 ghz or an AMD 2400xp does fine for standard 2d Autocad. I work in CAD all day sometimes with files up to 20mb-100mb and I am constantly doing hatching, attributed blocks, custom line types and even some custom commands (big system suckers). A good standard PC works fine and if you get a 1/2 ok graphics card then you are set.
When you step into 3D Max or 3D Viz or Maya then you need a good PC to keep rendering times down to a min.
just my 2 cents
I found that the AMDs did perform better, however unless you are doing heavy 3D building (Say in Desktop 3.3 or higher) I wouldn't waste the cash on a high end PC. I found a P4 2.4 ghz or an AMD 2400xp does fine for standard 2d Autocad. I work in CAD all day sometimes with files up to 20mb-100mb and I am constantly doing hatching, attributed blocks, custom line types and even some custom commands (big system suckers). A good standard PC works fine and if you get a 1/2 ok graphics card then you are set.
When you step into 3D Max or 3D Viz or Maya then you need a good PC to keep rendering times down to a min.
just my 2 cents
Actually in some areas, no it cant, just go to aceshardware.com and look at the cache benchmarks. The P4's and Xeons still have a huge L2 cache bandwidth advantage. Latency generally favors the Opteron.
I just browsed over to Cadalyst, and it seems that P4/PC1066 RDRam 2.8Ghz is about equal to a 2800+/nForce2 system. Seeing that the P4's now have 800FSB and the i875PE chipset, I wouldnt hesitate to say that the P4-C is probably the CAD performance crown.
Intelman07
Senior member
P4 or Xeon...a 3.2C would be nice 😛
Exactly what do you do in AutoCAD? Also, how big are your files? How much 3D do you use? I'm honestly at the point where my 2.53GHz P4 with 1GB of PC1066 RDRAM is pretty much fast enough for any CAD drawing I throw at it. Unless I'm doing a very detailed model of a 3D house, I think that my computer is plenty fast for what I do.
Don't get me wrong...I'm not saying I couldn't create a drawing that would bring my computer to its knees. BUT, for most of what I do (mechanical drafting, architectural drafting), I am held back by how fast I can queue up AutoCAD commands in my head and then spit them out in a rapid fashion.
But yeah, the most you tell us about what your work involves, the better. Telling us you used AutoCAD was a good start...
This is not a formal benchmark.....but.......
I have 3 CAD/CAM boxes
2 are DEll Dimension 4400 1.8 P4's 1gb DDR 2100
1 is a custom built Athlon XP 2000+ 512mb DDR 2100
All are running XP Pro (both Dell systems have had XP reinstalled with fresh clean -no OEM crap- copies) and identical CAD/CAM software (SurfCam- SolidWorks-Rhino)
All work with complex 3D data.
In every respect the Athlon box is faster, Toolpath generation, rendering, general feel and quickness.
Now I do understand there are allot of things that can make things faster/slower.
But this is my experience, take it for what its worth.
I have 3 CAD/CAM boxes
2 are DEll Dimension 4400 1.8 P4's 1gb DDR 2100
1 is a custom built Athlon XP 2000+ 512mb DDR 2100
All are running XP Pro (both Dell systems have had XP reinstalled with fresh clean -no OEM crap- copies) and identical CAD/CAM software (SurfCam- SolidWorks-Rhino)
All work with complex 3D data.
In every respect the Athlon box is faster, Toolpath generation, rendering, general feel and quickness.
Now I do understand there are allot of things that can make things faster/slower.
But this is my experience, take it for what its worth.
Smoke it at what? Do you actually use AutoCAD? I don't know about you, but when I type in "L" and hit enter, it doesn't matter if it's a 233MHz Pentium II or a 2.53GHz Pentium 4, it starts the "line" command in the same amount of time. When I type in "EXT" and hit enter, my hard drive seeks away while it loads the modeling dll's into memory, but my processor sits around twiddling its thumbs. And when I'm dealing with an entire 3D model of a house, my 2.53GHz P4 takes a split second to regen after a zoom, just like an Athlon XP or dual Pentium III. Without more accurate information on what he does in AutoCAD, it's impossible for anyone right now to say which processor would be faster. Even worse, you didn't even link any benchmarks or proof backing up your statement.
So before you start to make highly uneducated statements like "the Athlon smokes the P4 in AutoCAD", maybe you should become a CAD user, and see what's the real bottleneck: you or the processor. I'm guessing the only way to really be able to benchmark a difference between the two processors is to run a complicated AutoLISP or script file, then see which processor finished faster. I wrote a script file that generates 2D projections from a 3D AutoCAD model, and it runs only nominally faster on my 2.53GHz P4 than it does on a 933MHz Pentium III computer.
And UpGrD, while you may find your Athlon faster at parametric 3D modeling, AutoCAD operates in different fashion, so your results might not necessarily be what josedawg might experience in AutoCAD.
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