TonyBurns

iTrader: (3)

My Mate is an engineer and uses CAD to do any specs for a large motor company they get work from, he prefers the Intel over the AMD for this sort of work and subsequently bought himself a 2.4 fsb533 chip.
If you mate that up with an ASUS motherboard and lots of memory (plus he has plans for a Geforce4 4600 chipset card to replace the Geforce2 he currently has, then it will be pretty unbeatable

Tony

[Edited by TonyBurns - 12/3/2002 10:54:44 AM]

Mr Footlong

iTrader: (7)

Well, my answer to that would be:







[Edited by Mr Footlong - 12/4/2002 2:31:03 PM]

Davey P

iTrader: (1)

Would you have an AMD processor or the equivlent Intel.

The machine will be used for some gaming but mostly CAD.

Foot_Tapper

I would probably go for a dual processor pentium seeing as it's CAD. just my preference.

andym172

AMD every time for me...

super_si

Really depends on the speed you want.

Amd doesnt rival the P4 2.8 or P3.06.

Then again for cad 2*p3 1000's are ment to kick ****

Si

DominicA

AMD 2700 on an Nforce2 board with DDR333 will kick the *** of a P4 2.8

ChrisB

Yawn... Depends which set of benchmarks you run.

super_si

doubt it.

try looking at tomshardware.

P4 running 32bit rd or DDR400 would kick its ****

All about the ££

mark_h

The P4 will beat the Athlon on raw clock speed. Internally, the Althlon is more efficient, so it'll outperform a P4 of the same clock speed.

The other thing is memory. It's a while since I looked into this in too much detail, so I could be wrong, but I think the P4 boards tend to use RIMMs, while the Athlons use DDR RAM which is generally a lot cheaper.

SimonH

Tell me more about this dual 1000s for CAD please......

Anything clever needed to set this up on a home PC? (apart from a motherboard and 2 CPUs )

ChrisB

P4s have the option of using RAMBUS (ie Intel 850 chipset) or DDR (ie Intel 845).

You'll just need an OS that supports SMP Simon ie Win 2000 Pro or XP Pro.

super_si

Mark - look at tomshardware comparision on the 2.8 i think youll find the XP2800 only beats it on 1 out of about 30 tests

DominicA

sorry, couldn't resist....

interesting to see the replys these days though... more and more people have moved back to Intel... I wonder why....

super_si

never left ever

gone from P100 - P3 1000Mhz -> 1800, was off 3060 but want a tv

HHxx

I'm running dual p3 1GHz

SimonH

So why are dual processors so clever for CAD specifically? Is it just the increased the processing power or do dual processors do something else clever?

I'm interested as my father is a bit an amateur CAD-er (is a Dr by trade but had to retire following a stroke) but is presently struggling along on a P3 500 He can't justify a whole new PC at the moment (having just spent £17k on a kitchen..... ) so if dual processors were a cheap way of increasing the performance significantly then I'd be interested in finding out more

super_si

i think its true Dual processing / Multitaking.

But surly thats same as Hyperthreading?

Si

Mr Footlong

iTrader: (7)

Now, I would usually get involved in this and give you one of my semi-novels on all of the above, but quite frankly, My fingers can't be arsed, so you are all in luck!

Cheers,

Nick

R.B.5

Try a Mac, much faster and have better graphics for CAD apps

I recently bought a PowerMac dual G4 which is nice.

Toerag

www.2cpu.com
You need to run windows NT/2000pro/XPpro/linux to take advantage of 2 or more cpus, and also have your CAD software support it. There have been various good reviews on www.aceshardware.com www.tomshardware.com
The AMD dual CPU stuff is supposed to be pretty good, just make sure the PSU is good enough to supply the juice needed.

Attu

12 months ago i would have said AMD,6 months ago i would have said Intel but now id say AMD again.
To be honest you wouldnt be able to tell the difference between the two if you bought the fastest they both do.
Id go for the AMD setup and spend what you save on a decent Raid setup which you definitely would notice.

Andy