Workstation specs for new Creo Pro

[ColinFuller]

We recently upgraded from Wildfire 4 & Intralink 3.4 to Creo Elements Pro 5 & PDMlink 9.1. Our current machines are approaching 5 years old and with the newer versions of software we are starting to notice the slow down, occasionally running out of memory.

I have been tasked with pulling together some specs for some replacement workstations. It doesn't need to be a Cray, but I do need something that will be good for another 3-5 years.

Our current machine specs are:

Dell Precision 390

CPU: Core 2 Duo 2.4Ghz

Memory: 4GB ( /3GB switch enabled)

Graphics: Nvidia Quadro FX3500

O/S: Win XP Pro 32bit

HDD: 80GB

We haven't used Mechanica in the past but after dabbling with the Free Mechanca lite in WF4, its something we may start using in the future for runnig simple analysis. We already use moldflow & we will probably upgrade to Creo 1 in the future .

While digging around for some recommended specs I came across a couple of documents which some of you may also find interesting:

Reference Architecture for Creo (Pro/ENGINEER)

http://www.lenovojp.com/thinkstation/support/pdfs/technical_document/creo-reference-architecture.pdf

Implementation Case Study for Creo (Pro/ENGINEER) Performance Gains on Different Hardware Configurations

http://www.lenovojp.com/thinkstation/support/pdfs/technical_document/creo-case-study.pdf

Our IT department has a policy of buying Dell PC's which is not a problem as they can provide PTC certified workstations.

After reading the above docs I am leaning towards the following spec:

Dell Precision 1600T

CPU:Intel® Xeon® E3-1270 (Quad Core, 3.4GHz

Memory: 8GB (4x2GB) 1333MHz DDR3 ECC

Graphics: Nvidia Quadro 2000

O/S: Win 7 Pro 64bit

HDD: 120GB ADATA Solid State Drive 2.5 inch SATA 6Gb/s

Is anyone already using a similar spec workstation and willing to provide some feedback on performance?

Has anyone had any good or bad experiences using solid state drives, as I've never used one before?

Do you think it would be better to use a standard HDD and opt for a faster Intel® Xeon® E3-1280 3.4GHz CPU instead?

I look forward to any comments.

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[sm]

Check out http://www.ptc.com/WCMS/files/96289/en/dell_wf5.pdf

You can navigate to this document from http://www.ptc.com/partners/hardware/current/support.htm

[BurtLand]

Not sure the Lenovo Report is much use ... the benchmark is WF4 and things have moved on since then - for one CREO is heavier on the graphics card - its palpably slower than WF5 on the hardware tested.

just a couple of comments

Hyperthreading doesnt improve the performance of Mechanica and doesnt show any gains on the Lenovo benchmark - performance from the 1220 to 1270 just scales with CPU speed. It may get used for rendering in CREO but Ive seen no reports on it. So unless you have other apps that use it, its of little benefit to CREO.

More cores will help with Mechanica but after 4 its deminishing returns. Parametric doesnt use multicores usefully at this stage - maybe in CREO8. They may be helpful for running several apps at once.

Havent seen any tests on SSDs with Mechanica but they should help so long as you can fit the working files onto the SSD. RAM - buy 2x4G now so you can go to 16G later

Nvidia Graphics - check the Pro-05 benchmarks at http://www.nvidia.com/object/IO_11761.html Not a lot between the cards - CUDA maybe used for rendering with other apps (Bunkspeed) which may affect choice.

Monitor - 16:10 rather than 16:9 - more screen height for ribbon bars

dont skimp too much now - you will be cursing in 3yrs time.