New Computer
I got my new computer today. The old one was 3+ years, and it was time. Several SolidWorks models brought it to its knees. Here are the specs for the new one:
It did the punch holder in 41.5 seconds, which isn’t the fastest on the list, but it’s the fastest using 2012, and #2 overall.
This is the second machine I’ve purchased from Xi. I just like these guys. The box as listed and shipped was $2281. They put it together, burned it in, and tested it for me. I still don’t have confidence to assemble one of these things from scratch. I can replace any part on it, but not sure I’d want to assemble one. This way I just took it out of the box, added a couple hard drives, ran the wires, and bingo, I’m running. If I built my own and a couple of parts weren’t right, it might take me weeks to get it right, with shipping back and forth, and phone support. I might have paid a few hundred extra to have someone else put it together, but that’s money well spent, in my book.
I could never have spec’ed this on my own. The mobo, memory, cpu, cooler, and case were all inter-related. Bumping up the CPU required special memory which required a bump to the mobo. The cooler wouldn’t fit in the stock case. If I had to sort this out on my own, I’d be weeks getting the right parts. The guy at Xi knows the parts cold, and was able to adjust my requests to meet reality. My hat’s off to guys who can spec and assemble their own machines.
Because it’s overclocked, everything has a heat sink on it. The water cooler was smaller than I thought it would be. You can see it right in the middle of the mobo between the ranks of RAM. The two hoses run up to a radiator. But check out the fans. There is the small one at the back (upper left), then 4 small ones on the top for the water cooler radiator, and you can just barely see a huge 10″ fan at the bottom right in front of the hard drive bays. It’s surprisingly quiet. Not even as loud as my previous machine, which was more basic. I added a 1 Tb drive just for backup, and a 750 Gb drive for storage. I may also add a sound card, but I’m going to see what the mobo based sound circuit sounds like.
One thing I don’t like about the case is that the connectors on the back are recessed too deep, and some are hard to get to. The case also looks like a gaming rig. Oh, and it’s huge. Did I mention the case is huge? 22.20″ x 10.00″ x 19.70″ and 19 lbs empty. That big red thing at the bottom is a single huge fan. Fortunately it fits behind my monitors, and I don’t have to look at it.
On the good side, it looks to have plenty of USB (2&3) ports, and plenty of stuff I can’t identify. And that 850 W power supply ought to be enough juice ;o)
The mobo (Asus Sabertooth) is pretty nice, with some retro PS2 connectors for mouse and keyboard. Tons of connections on the back. It was probably a bit overkill, but the bumped up cpu and RAM made it necessary.
Also I was a little iffy on the video card, but people say these things are ok now. It helps that they replaced the ATI name with AMD. One thing that was strange about the Fire Pro V4800 is that it has a single DVI connector, and 2 Display Port connectors. The machine came with a DVI => Display Port adapter. So I’m running 2 monitors, one on straight DVI and the other through the adapter. I didn’t have Display Port wires for my monitors. You can’t just go out and replace all your stuff every time technology changes.
Anyway, this one should last me for a while.
I would like to comment about the eDrawings viewer for iPad. My wife could not do without one of those cute little $1100 devices. The new iPad has outstanding screen resolution. It is a very fine web cruising device.
The eDrawings viewer functions as a viewer. It seems slow. It takes about 10 seconds to open a 9MB easm. The viewer does not render transparent surfaces. The touch gesture control works very well to orient, shift and scale the view. During motion many of the surfaces disappear. The control drawer covers a bunch of the screen when open.
The eDrawings viewer is not as nice as the Rhino viewer. It is a good start. The sample parts have nice images as the file preview. How do they do it?
@asdf
Oh I disagree completely. During the past 14 years or so, I’ve built and over clocked a dozen machines, including the CPU and the video card. I’ve never had a problem due to overclocking and I can’t recall ever hearing about one either. Just sayin’ 🙂 All 6 machines in our office are overclocked.
However, if the machine is built incorrectly and/or has the wrong components when overclocked, you’ll have a problem, no doubt.
overclocked = more current
more current = more heat
manage the heat = no problem
it’s not a good idea to overclock production machines imo, except with the turbo boost…
Looks good. 41.5 sounds about right, enjoy.
If anyone does want to build this rig themselves, I priced all the parts above on newegg.com for about $1617 give or take some for shipping. I might’ve missed a fan or something as I’m not sure if XI added any but it shouldn’t be much more.
Nice rig Matt. As you know I’ve built many computers over the years, including 2 ‘live’ builds at SolidWorks World. I recommend it, I think it’s fun and you save a boat load of money. But I do understand how you feel. Anyway, enjoy the new hot rod!
Devon
I was on Home Premium (and SolidWorks ’11)and if you are working on single parts it fine but more then one parts open and you do a save on the current part you working on it doest work. The computer just goes “ding”, that’s it but you can do a save all. Its pretty annoying. After I upgraded to Windows Pro. the problem went away.
Matt,
The punch holder benchmark is something I have spent a lot of time looking at. There is a lot about performance that can be learned from it. But before I speak about that I’ll ask if you know what Northbridge and Southbridge are used in that motherboard? You might try it with a Quadro FX1400 and see if that bumps you up to the top of the list.
They built your machine with the least expensive i7 38xx version of the “Sandy Bridge E” architecture ($299). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_i7_microprocessors Had they used one the other two versions of the Sandy Bridge E you would have had 6 cores instead of 4. This wouldn’t make much difference with SW but would have given a 50% boost in PhotoView rendering speed.
Since 2009 the punch holder benchmark seems to be running faster (statistically) on each new release whether on Core2 Duo or i7 processors. Perhaps SW online performance reporting has helped a little.
The processor you have, like most of the newer crop of Intel processors uses much less power. Xi is overclocking this chip quite a bit (4.5Ghz vs 3.6Ghz) which is why you are able to place in the top of the list with a water cooler that is so small. I still think heat pipes are more efficient than water though.
It would be interesting to see the BIOS settings for this machine if they are available. Newer motherboards allow tweaking a lot of things on the CPU that nobody ever heard of 3 years ago. That is the real trick to running fast.
There is a lesson to be learned from the Punch holder bench mark. That lesson is that the processor doesn’t matter near as much as the modeler. Using the TOOLS/FEATURE STATISTICS dialog as a gauge suppress pattern 4 and move pattern 5 to the end of the feature tree (with it’s seed feature.) There are a few other features you can move around in the feature tree that will likely double the rebuild speed.
A little over a year ago I wrote a macro that builds the punch holder from scratch so that I could have a fresh copy of the punch holder on any new release. Since I was building the part programmatically I could turn off certain things that normally are part of a model. One thing that is really telling is that by turning off all dimensions and relations, in other words building a pure “dumb” model, I could run the benchmark in 21 seconds on an AMD 3000XP machine. The normal benchmark ran in 600+ seconds on that machine. This suggests that the real bottleneck in SW is the relationship solver. If SW worked on speeding up that one part of the program they could improve rebuild times massively.
One last thing. The processor architecture and clock speed only explain about 70% of the rebuild time variation. The effect of graphics cards varies from release to release. So there has to be some other aspect of the hardware that on this benchmark that account for the other 30% of variation in rebuild times.
Congrats, Matt. Looks like an excellent system, and great for the money. I’ve had two previous Xi systems, and both were excellent, and the guys at Xi know their stuff. I’ll be eager to hear how you like the machine after using it for a while.
I’ve used the same ATI graphics card in my previous system, and for SolidWorks, it appears to give the same performance as the FX 4000 I’m using now. Might as well save the money, even using two of those cards.
Watercooled @4.5 ghz…come on Matt all you need for SWv6 is something basic to run a browser… 😉
AMD graphics card too eh? I remember it used to be the drivers that let ATI down more than anything but probably they are fine these days. 40 secs is a pretty decent performer however….should be a really useful SW machine. 🙂
Actually 10 years ago I airfreighted a Xi to NZ because suitable hardware wasnt available locally. It was a decent machine in its time. They were good folks to deal with too. Still have it around although a few bits got replaced along the way.
About the only thing its good for now though is running a….browser….hmmm…. 😉
I wonder how hardware manufacturers will regard CAD in the cloud then if people can get by keeping their hardware well past its usual replacement date? Fear not guys some of us will still be looking to buy workstns in the future even if it is only to run SE… 😀
Home will not cause issues with Solidworks. The only thing the var cannot do is if you have an issue that needs to be brought to SolidWorks, SolidWorks won’t take the case if you are not on a “supported OS”. Domain support is the only real difference.
@Eric
The only thing I’ll really miss is remote desktop. Plus, I’ve got a couple unused licenses of Professional in the closet. If the remote desktop annoys me enough, I’ll just upgrade the license. I intended to wipe the drive as soon as it arrived, but I’m gonna give it a go.
For reference, here’s a chart showing the differences. Maybe you can send this to your reseller friend:
http://www.neowin.net/news/windows-7-whats-the-difference-between-the-editions
A Solidworks user I know was told by GoEngineer that Windows 7 Home can cause problems with Solidworks. Do you have any concerns with that? Other than that, it looks very similar to the computer I just built. Nice choice, I like mine a lot!