New computer systems, XPS or Precision...

[Anonymous]

We are looing at updating some more of our computers.  For the past few years we have gone wtih Dell Precision workstations.  I am wondering if I can get more bang for my buck by going to a XPS system though Dell.  (we always purchase through dell, so that is the only variable that has to stay the same)

Here are a couple of machines that I am looking at.  It seems that I can get much more from an XPS system than the precision.  The concert that I have is on the video card.  With the one listed with the XPS sytem be alright with Civil 3D?

Any opinions would be greatly appreciated

1:  Dell XPS 9100

PROCESSORS	Intel® Core™i7-960 processor(8MB L2 Cache, 3.20GHz)	edit
OPERATING SYSTEM	Genuine Windows® 7 Professional, 64bit, English	edit
WARRANTY AND SERVICE	1 Yr Ltd Hardware Warranty, InHome Service after Remote Diagnosis	edit
MEMORY	12GB Tri Channel DDR3 SDRAM at 1333MHz - 6 DIMMs	edit
MONITOR	No Monitor	edit
VIDEO CARD	ATI Radeon HD 5870 1GB GDDR5	edit
HARD DRIVE	1.5TB - SATA-II, 3Gb/s, 7,200 RPM, 32MB Cache HDD	edit
OPTICAL DRIVE	Single Drive: 16X CD/DVD burner (DVD+/-RW) w/double layer write capability	edit
OFFICE SOFTWARE	Microsoft® Office Professional 2010	edit
SECURITY SOFTWARE	McAfee SecurityCenter, 15-Months	edit
SPEAKERS	Dell AX210 Stereo Speakers	edit
KEYBOARD	Dell Consumer Multimedia Keyboard	edit
MOUSE	Dell Laser Mouse	edit
SOUND CARD	THX® TruStudio PC™	edit
MODEM	No Dial Up Modem Option

2: Precision T5500 Workstation

BASE	Dell Precision T5500 Workstation	edit
OPERATING SYSTEM	Genuine Windows® 7 Professional, No Media, 64-bit, English	edit
PROCESSORS	Quad Core Intel® Xeon® Processor E5630, 2.53GHz,12M L3, 5.86GT/s, turbo	edit
OFFICE SOFTWARE	Microsoft® Office Professional 2010 with Adobe Acrobat STD, English	edit
SERVICES & WARRANTY	3 Year Basic Limited Warranty and 3 Year NBD On-Site Service	edit
POWER SUPPLY	Precision T5500 Power Supply, C2 Motherboard	edit
MEMORY	4GB, DDR3 Memory,1333MHz, ECC (4 DIMMS)	edit
CHASSIS CONFIGURATION	Mini-Tower Chassis Configuration	edit
VIDEO CARD	512MB NVIDIA® Quadro® FX 580, DUAL MON, 2 DP & 1 DVI	edit
RAID CONFIGURATION	C1 All SATA or SSD drives, Non-RAID, 1 drive total configuration	edit
HARD DRIVE INTERNAL CONTROLLER	Integrated Intel chipset SATA 3.0Gb/s controller	edit
HARD DRIVE	320GB SATA 3.0Gb/s with NCQ and 16MB DataBurst Cache™	edit
OPTICAL DRIVE	16X DVD+/-RW w/ Cyberlink PowerDVD™/Roxio Creator™, No Media	edit
MONITOR	No Monitor	edit
FLOPPY & MEDIA READER	Internal 19:1 USB Media Card Reader	edit
SYSTEM RECOVERY OPTIONS	Recovery Media for Cyberlink Power DVD™ and Roxio Creator Dell Edition for DVD+/-RW	edit
SYSTEM RECOVERY OPTIONS	Recovery Media for Genuine Windows® 7 Professional,64bit,Multiple Language	edit
SYSTEM RECOVERY OPTIONS	Resource DVD - contains Diagnostics and Drivers

[Anonymous]

Whats the cost difference?

I noticed the T5500 comes with Office software - Do you need it?  Do you need the speakers?

Can you find out who makes the hard drives?  Western digital Velociraptors are going to be the "best available", and Seagates are not "if but when" they will fail.  (Have that from a guy who makes hard drive assy equipment).

Reid

[rl_jackson]

If your working in a network enviroment the HD will have little effect on performace within the drawing. But will affect the boot performance and startup of C3D.

I have a SSD, and store all project data on a 1TB Drive, and the performace is controlled by the second drive, so I would expect the same in a network.

[peterfunkautodesk]

The first machine has the following going for it over the second:

1. Faster clock speed. Civil 3D / AutoCAD can't really make use of 4 cores so the faster the speed of a single core, the better

2. The first machine has 12 gig of ram and the second only has 4. WIth W7x64 you can make use of all the ram on the machine, so more is better.

The payoff for the other items is far less than these two. The other most important factor is the OS and in both cases you have the best one.

Cheers,

Peter Funk

Autodesk, Inc.

[neilyj666]

I have a T5500 with 8Gb Ram and a 1GB video card and it runs fine - much depends on what you use C3D for and the size of your projects/corridors/gradings as well as what you have displayed on screen at any time...pay your money and take your choice ultimately

[Anonymous]

Right now my current machine is a T5500 w/ 4gb of memory.  I feel that I could use a little more power, but it does run very well.

We usualy don't have extremely large coridors, but we do a large amount of Lidar Modeling (base ground surface) and use photos (large .sid and .tif files) quite often.  Some of our gradings can get kind of large, but my current machine has handled it so far.

With them being at the same price point, I feel that the XPS is a better system.  Should I be worried that the graphics card is not listed on the on the Graphics Hardware list?  It is quite a bit more $ to get the same speed of a machine with the Precision T5500.

[Anonymous]

All of the machines that I get have to have the full office software on them.  We are a small firm, and the draftsmen/designers get to do some of everything.

I think I will order the XPS machines, unless I find other info out about that video card.  I have a week or so before I'm going to order, will give me some more research time.

[justin.ziemba]

Peter pointed out the big difference: 4gb vs 12gb.  The i7 is obviously faster, but the Xeon is no slouch either.  

Do you have the option to omit the Radeon and purchase something seperately?  It is not listed on the Graphics Hardware List and has not been tested by Autodesk.

I just wrote this yesterday for another customer - you may find some of this info helpful:

http://beingcivil.typepad.com/my_weblog/2011/02/time-to-build-a-new-computer.html

[Sinc]

For the graphics card, I haven't tried any of the HD 5800 series.  But we've seen quite good results from the nVidia GeForce 400 series, even though they are not yet on Autodesk's list.

[Anonymous]

Those are just a couple systems that I put together on the Dell Website.  I will eventually call them with the order.  I like the added speed, more memory, etc of the XPS system.  The video card has me 2nd guessing, and I will see if I can switch it out for something else when I talk with them.  No other options on the web. 

That article has some very good insights in it.  We use our machines for 3 years and then purchase new.  We have been in this rotation for the last 11 years and it has worked well for us.  We have only been using Civil 3d for the past year.  It definently take some horsepower to run.

What would be the minimum memory of the video card that I should look for?  We don't do any renderings, but use photos all the time.

Thanks

[Anonymous]

Another questions would be the HD.  Everything that we do is stored on our file server.  Would I benefit from trying to get a SSD drive? Should I just get the fastest possible?

[Sinc]

An SSD is most noticeable in that it speeds up system boot time and application load times.  It doesn't so much affect the performance of C3D if your drawings are on a remote server, but it makes it start up faster.

[gccdaemon]

Go with the XPS. It's a mid tier I7 chip and 3 times the ram, plus the ram is tripple channel. I'm running a beefed up T3500 as you can see from my stats below. Also, the XPS MOBO's are better for upgrades than workstations. Try running tripple 1 gig ATI firepro's....sweeeeeet...lol. Or better yet build your own. Grab a dual proc I7 MOBO and let it fly, or better yet wait a couple months for intels new chip to hit the streets.