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AutoCAD Architecture 2010 - 32bit verses 64bit

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Message 1 of 12
JJKennedy03
2775 Views, 11 Replies

AutoCAD Architecture 2010 - 32bit verses 64bit

All,
I'm looking into upgrading our operating system to Microsoft 7 64 bit for AutoCAD Architecture 2010. I would like to get some feedback based from people that have already made the move to see what they got back for performance.

Currently
I have 10 or so Dell Precision Workstations T3400s that I would like to upgrade the operating system and with that some hardware upgrades too.
Current configurations
Duo E6550 @ 2.33 GHz Processor
4GB of RAM
Quadro FX4600
(2) 80GB SATA 10000rpm drives

The 2 pieces that I would like to upgrade would be jumping the RAM up to a total of 16GB (1033 bus speed I believe) and replacing both hard drives with (2) 160GB S2 10K rpm drives.

Now,
I don't think I really need to upgrade the graphics card, I think the current one is fine and if I would have to, that would put me over budget, but I am thinking about upgrading the processor to 3.2 of which is the highest I can go without replacing the motherboard of which I don't also want to do.

Our drawing files consist of fully ACA modeled residential and multiple family homes projects, aka Master projects (floor plan options, multiple elevations etc...) using the Project Navigator - Elevations generated from the building model with no linework touch ups, no 3rd party apps.

If anyone has experience with upgrading to 64 of which I know there is, I would definitely like to read input from you on your opinions regarding the move.

JJ
11 REPLIES 11
Message 2 of 12
Anonymous
in reply to: JJKennedy03

If you have been receiving out of memory error's 64 bit solves that issue.
Other than that I have noticed very little difference. Processor speed
increase was very small improvement, 10,000 rpm HD basically none


wrote in message news:6302440@discussion.autodesk.com...
All,
I'm looking into upgrading our operating system to Microsoft 7 64 bit for
AutoCAD Architecture 2010. I would like to get some feedback based from
people that have already made the move to see what they got back for
performance.

Currently
I have 10 or so Dell Precision Workstations T3400s that I would like to
upgrade the operating system and with that some hardware upgrades too.
Current configurations
Duo E6550 @ 2.33 GHz Processor
4GB of RAM
Quadro FX4600
(2) 80GB SATA 10000rpm drives

The 2 pieces that I would like to upgrade would be jumping the RAM up to a
total of 16GB (1033 bus speed I believe) and replacing both hard drives with
(2) 160GB S2 10K rpm drives.

Now,
I don't think I really need to upgrade the graphics card, I think the
current one is fine and if I would have to, that would put me over budget,
but I am thinking about upgrading the processor to 3.2 of which is the
highest I can go without replacing the motherboard of which I don't also
want to do.

Our drawing files consist of fully ACA modeled residential and multiple
family homes projects, aka Master projects (floor plan options, multiple
elevations etc...) using the Project Navigator - Elevations generated from
the building model with no linework touch ups, no 3rd party apps.

If anyone has experience with upgrading to 64 of which I know there is, I
would definitely like to read input from you on your opinions regarding the
move.

JJ
Message 3 of 12
Anonymous
in reply to: JJKennedy03

the only difference between 64 and 32 bit is you get more memory with 64bit.
At a minimum for 64 bit I would use 6gigs of ram. Also with 64bit you will
need to have and use 64bit drivers and software for things in the office. If
you have a older plotter, printer, scanner, virus software or any other apps
used in those office they may not have a 64bit driver or version for them.
So check into all that before switching to 64bit!

wrote in message news:6302440@discussion.autodesk.com...
All,
I'm looking into upgrading our operating system to Microsoft 7 64 bit for
AutoCAD Architecture 2010. I would like to get some feedback based from
people that have already made the move to see what they got back for
performance.

Currently
I have 10 or so Dell Precision Workstations T3400s that I would like to
upgrade the operating system and with that some hardware upgrades too.
Current configurations
Duo E6550 @ 2.33 GHz Processor
4GB of RAM
Quadro FX4600
(2) 80GB SATA 10000rpm drives

The 2 pieces that I would like to upgrade would be jumping the RAM up to a
total of 16GB (1033 bus speed I believe) and replacing both hard drives with
(2) 160GB S2 10K rpm drives.

Now,
I don't think I really need to upgrade the graphics card, I think the
current one is fine and if I would have to, that would put me over budget,
but I am thinking about upgrading the processor to 3.2 of which is the
highest I can go without replacing the motherboard of which I don't also
want to do.

Our drawing files consist of fully ACA modeled residential and multiple
family homes projects, aka Master projects (floor plan options, multiple
elevations etc...) using the Project Navigator - Elevations generated from
the building model with no linework touch ups, no 3rd party apps.

If anyone has experience with upgrading to 64 of which I know there is, I
would definitely like to read input from you on your opinions regarding the
move.

JJ
Message 4 of 12
Anonymous
in reply to: JJKennedy03

There is no need to go 16Gig of RAM ever if you currently are running 32bit
and not seeing any choke points: and why change out the HDs? Just curious on
both items. Do you do that much 3D and rendering?

As others noted, 6-8Gig RAM is plenty and make sure you have 64bit drivers
for all of your peripherals. Browse the print-plot discussion area for what
works and does not.

--
Dean Saadallah
http://LTisACAD.blogspot.com
--
Message 5 of 12
Anonymous
in reply to: JJKennedy03

JJ,

Comments below.

On Wed, 9 Dec 2009 23:02:40 -0800, JJKennedy03 <> wrote:

>I have 10 or so Dell Precision Workstations T3400s that I would like to upgrade the operating system and with that some hardware upgrades too.
>Current configurations
>Duo E6550 @ 2.33 GHz Processor
>4GB of RAM
>Quadro FX4600
>(2) 80GB SATA 10000rpm drives

>The 2 pieces that I would like to upgrade would be jumping the RAM up to a total of 16GB (1033 bus speed I believe) and replacing both hard drives with (2) 160GB S2 10K rpm drives.

Uprades are tricky, because it's easy to price yourself to a point where buying
a new machine is a better investment. Particularly with the i7 "Lynnfield" CPU
architecture that blows the old Core 2 Duos out of the water.

4GB is the minimum, but still acceptable amount for ACA + Windows 7 x64. When
you go to a 64-bit OS + application, your memory headroom goes through the roof,
so you don't get the same kind of out of resources issues as you will under
32-bit XP. Even without any RAM upgrade, moving to Windows 7 and ACA x64 can
solve a lot of issues.

Note that to go to 16GB requires (4) 4GB DDR2 chips, which isn't exactly cheap -
you would be at ~$550 per machine. The bang for the buck is pretty low once you
go past 8GB.

If your current RAM setup is a 2x2GB configuration, you could optimize your
upgrades by shuffling RAM around to give everyone 8GB, using 4x2GB chips for a
total of 8GB. You can get a set of 4x2GB chips for about $300.

The hard disks would only need upgrading if you are running out of space (80GB
is pretty small but viable for many CAD systems when all of your data in on a
server). You didn't say the RAID setup, but you could put the two together in a
very fast RAID 0 config for 160MB.

>I don't think I really need to upgrade the graphics card, I think the current one is fine and if I would have to, that would put me over budget, but I am thinking about upgrading the processor to 3.2 of which is the highest I can go without replacing the motherboard of which I don't also want to do.

The graphics card is fine. Beyond fine, actually.

At 2.3GHz, the Core 2 Duo CPU is quite on the slow side; a bump to over 3GHz
should be noticable to the end user, and should be worth the $200 upgrade cost.
It should be using 1333Mhz RAM, not 1033 MHz, I believe.

So, at a bare minimum, you are talking about $300 for RAM, $200 for the CPU, and
another $140 for Windows 7 professional 64-bit = $640 per machine to bring it up
to speed. But it's still only a dual-core, older CPU architecture. But still
much cheaper than buying new PCs.

>If anyone has experience with upgrading to 64 of which I know there is, I would definitely like to read input from you on your opinions regarding the move.

Have been running ACA x64, Revit 2010 x64 under Win7 x64 for some time now with
great success. Any other OS is, IMO, simply not an option.

Matt
matt@stachoni.com
Message 6 of 12
jmcintyre
in reply to: JJKennedy03

I've been using XP64 for a few years, not win7, but I bought a dedicated 64 bit machine. Solid as a rock with 8gb of RAM, which I need for rendering.
Not sure how you'll go upgrading to a 64 bit OS with an old motherboard and processor, there may be driver issues.
Message 7 of 12
Anonymous
in reply to: JJKennedy03

wrote in message ...
>Not sure how you'll go upgrading to a 64 bit OS with an old motherboard
>and processor, there may be driver issues.

The OP's hardware is not that old (only first introduced 2 years ago), and
it's all 64-bit compatible (as is pretty much everything that's been out for
the past 3-4 years now).
Message 8 of 12
JJKennedy03
in reply to: JJKennedy03

Thank you all for your feedback, it was very helpful.

Dells Precision T3400 is actually rather new and I had the option for XP64 when I purchased but that was when Autodesk just came out with 64 bit on ACA2009 I believe of which I didn't want to dork with since it just came out...

I'm going to have to check into my Xerox 6403 or so plotter regarding drivers along some other printers but other than that I'm most likely just go with 8GB of RAM for each workstation.

We do some extreme rendering/animations with Max 2010 but for the actual finish animations I've been sourcing that out to Rendering Farms since its not worth running 5 or so computers here with backburner continously for 3 weeks to get a final run...

You all have a good time,
JJ Kennedy
Message 9 of 12
BOBKELLERMAN
in reply to: JJKennedy03

You got great answers from the others, and seem to know what you need, so my comments are minor: I was puzzled that you wanted to upgrade both hard drives, rather than paying less to make one of them 240 gb or more. ... and maybe exceed 8 gb memory in the machines of the heaviest Max users only???

BOB
Message 10 of 12
JJKennedy03
in reply to: JJKennedy03

Bob,
The dual hard drives was something I started doing after having an opportunity to do consulting work @ Autodesk a couple years ago. Their IT guy for the floor I was working on gave me a list of recommendations of hardware and modifications to the operating system's settings of which he did for all of the ADT (ACA) workstations on the floor. They never would post those changes publicly because of liability reasons, and more obvious was the specifications dealt with hardware from specific manufacturers... but long story short I would get (2) hard drives at Raid 0 I believe (C and then D drive, independent drives). From there I would put obviously the software on the C drive but I would modify XP to write all of the systems, software, internet and so forth temp files to write to the D drive.

The purpose of that would be to minimize the amount of directories the software has to navigate through to access and write temp files. With also making sure the hard drives are fast (7200rpm to 10k rpm satas you will completely see a difference in opening/saving files...)

It sounds wild and overkill, but when I followed all of his recommendations and so forth, I did notice a big difference, crashes where at a minimum (maybe 1 crash every other month per computer) meaning if it was a crash it was software related and not memory/ hardware etc...
All of our projects are based from the Project Navigator, so, you'll deal with opening and navigating through a lot of xrefs (they write to you're temp drive)

So far I've used that configuration for the following releases 05, 06, 07, 08 without failure... as for 09 version, my opinion was that release was by far the worst release regarding bugs, I just got memory crashes consistently in 45 minutes until Service Pack 1 came out and was the first release I upgraded to of which I then un-installed on all computers and then went back to 2008. I didn't upgrade to 2009 till March of this year and this weekend will finally be upgrading to ACA2010. Since this is the 2nd release of the supported 64bit platform I feel its time to upgrade.

As for Max, I would agree with you, I was actually looking at Dell Rack Stations (24Unit) to run MAX but with the economy, I'm okay where I'm at with MAX for now and will wait till the visualization sector picks up since its really dead right now...
JJ
Message 11 of 12

Another thing to keep in mind is that if you are upgrading customization content, you need the new versions of your customization tools, if you use these, of course:
a 64 version of DOSLIB ( DOSLib18x64.arx ) at http://download.rhino3d.com/download.asp?id=doslib
a 64 version of ObjectDCL ( ObjectDCL-ARX64-7.2.0-Setup.msi ) at http://www.objectdcl.com/en/arx.html
a 64 enabler of VBA ( AutoCAD VBA module 64-bit ) at http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/item?siteID=123112&id=12715668&linkID=9240618
Also, after installing the VBA enabler, the old VBA routines have to be checked one by one. Most of them will work, but some lines of code might need to be changed. Some of them might cause AutoCAD to have a very slow performance while saving. It is recommended to migrate these routines to the new VSTA programming tools.
The very old, good, and simple AutoLisp will still work, as always.

Alfredo Medina
info@planta1.com
http://www.planta1.com

Alfredo Medina _________________________________________________________________ ______
Licensed Architect (Florida) | Freelance Instructor | Autodesk Expert Elite (on Revit) | Profile on Linkedin
Message 12 of 12
jmcintyre
in reply to: JJKennedy03

If hard drives do make that much differance, have you considered solid-state drives? I've seen some impressive speed tests.

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