Building high end workstation, need advice

Hi All, I am building a workstation to use here at work. Its use will be running CFD simulations 24/7, with some CAD modeling.

I am waiting on the july 22 price drop, but want to spec the system now.

My choices seem to be a QX6800,ASUS P5B, 4gb RAM, and dual raptors

or

Dual X5365, Intel server mobo, 4gb FBdimm, and dual raptors.


I know the dual X5365 seems the better choice, however I am concerned about my softwares ability to fully utilize all 8 cores. The QX6800 could be overclocked and uses more available memory.

I am undecided on a video card that works well with CAD and supports dual DVI, something in the 200-300$ range.

Any thoughts or inputs?

ATI FireGLv3350 looks pretty decent for the price, of course getting a slightly better card just ups it. Currently I see prices between $160 and $200 for this one. Or...

ATI FireGL v5200 for $399 is a bit pricier but of course the performance is a big jump from the one above.

On the Nvidia side you've got:

Nvidia Quadro FX3000 coming in around $270 or so, a bit more money would get you the...

Nvidia Quadro FX1500 at $499.

Prices for those things are ridiculous and just keep going up across the board.

A few years ago when the FX3000 cards first hit the market, they were going for well over $1000 for 256MB versions. I went out, knowing that the FX5900 series cards were the same components as the FX3000 series, bought a 256MB FX5900 card, got home and discovered what was in the box turned out to be a 256MB FX5950 Ultra (long story there, but it really was a 5950 Ultra), and then did the driver softmod that basically turned it into a mock FX3000 with the same performance levels as measured by SPECViewperf.

I did the same thing with an ATI X1600 and softmodded the drivers to turn it into the FireGL 5200 with almost exactly the same performance in an iMac I had last year (NOTE: the softmodding of drivers only works on the iMac when you're running Windows with BootCamp, however - no one has ever successfully been able to softmod the actual Apple drivers for ATI or Nvidia products that I'm aware of to unlock the higher performance features).

Softmodding the drivers can get you much MUCH higher performance in CAD/professional 3D workstation applications while saving you a ton of cash in the process. The only downside is you can't call into the company like ATI or Nvidia for support if something is up or there's a driver glitch (some software requires certified drivers, and as long as you softmod them, they work fine on the base hardware, minus a feature or two).

Doing a softmod on those cards does not make them 100% the same in terms of functionality, but for the massive jump in performance (on the Nvidia and ATI softmods I did, the stock hardware compared to the softmod SPECViewperf performance nearly tripled on each) compared to the low cost relative to the actual product you're "emulating" with the softmod (it's not emulation, however), it's worth it to me and many others.

Charging $1000 for the exact same hardware minus a few video BIOS disabled features (like hardware antialiased lines, etc) that costs normal consumers $200-300 is a bit ridiculous in my eyes. I understand the increased cost (24 hour customer support for the high end products, hence the price) but even so... geez

Just suggestions, of course. Hope something might be useful...

mhaskell said:

Hi All, I am building a workstation to use here at work. Its use will be running CFD simulations 24/7, with some CAD modeling.

I am waiting on the july 22 price drop, but want to spec the system now.

My choices seem to be a QX6800,ASUS P5B, 4gb RAM, and dual raptors The QX6800 could be overclocked and uses more available memory.

Click to expand...

Given the price difference between the q6600 and the q6800 ($266 vs $999) thats $1.39/mhz over the q6600. Given that you said you would oc the q6800, why not get a q6600 and oc it and save over $700. Or get 2 and still save ~$400 given the added expense of a multi cpu mobo. The q6600 can easily oc to 3ghz+ without sacrificing reliability/stability.

Just what I would do unless you're spending company money and that's not an issue....but then you could save them some money as well and be a hero.

Get the QX6800 and desktop board Much cooler and efficient.