Workstation recommendation

[esmith]

Hello all,
It's time for a new workstation and I need to select from 2 equally-priced options:

Option 1:

HP Z220

-Intel® Xeon® E3-1240v2 (3.40 GHz, 8 MB cache, 4 cores)

-16 GB 1600MHz DDR3 non-ECC unbuffered RAM

-1 TB 7200 RPM SATA HD

-Quadro 2000

Option 2:

HP Z420

-Intel® Xeon® E5-1620 (3.60 GHz, 10 MB cache, 4 cores)

-12 GB 1600MHz DDR3 ECC unbuffered RAM

-500 GB 7200 RPM SATA HD

-Quadro 600

Any recommendations for which one to choose would be most appreciated.

Cheers,
Ewan

[StephenW]

This is funny because I just got back a quote on a Z420 myself. I am very impressed with the specs but I don't have a cost limitation so I just selected what I wanted.


* If you are running creo 2, it takes much better advantage of the higher end graphics card.

* If you run out of RAM, you would do better with the increased RAM but you get no benefit from "extra" RAM. Pull up your biggest assembly and look at the task manager and see how much RAM you are using. In my experience, RAM does not improve drawing speed, if that is a problem for you.

* Faster processor = faster pro/e





My quote was:
-E5 1620 3.6G
-16GB RAM
-256GB SSD
-500GB SATA 7200rpm HDD
-DVD-RW
-QUADRO 2000 GRAPHICS ( I may bump up to 4000)

[drichards]

Without a doubt I would go with Option 1, the Quadro 600 video card is pretty awful.

[jcrockett-2]

I have a Quadro 600, and it works great onasseblies with over 100k parts. I've tested lots of workstations, and it always comes down to "enough" memory, fastest clock CPU available, and "enough" graphics ho.

The z420 is a fine box for ProE. 16 gig memory is a no-brainer at current memory prices. SSD is also nice.