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Plant Design Suite 2013 Ultimate hardware

6 REPLIES 6
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Message 1 of 7
JPBrady
666 Views, 6 Replies

Plant Design Suite 2013 Ultimate hardware

About to upgrade to plant ultimate suite 2013, also about to upgrade hardware X 6 machines. Have to use Dell workstations (no choice) so xeon processor, I can get a six core blah blah one as long as its xeon. The graphics card or cards Nividia Quadro 4000. All on Windows 7 64bit with 16gb ram. Have to run inventor mainly frame analysis, plant, PID, AutoCAD for 3D, showcase and Navisworks. Will my hardware set up do the job? Anyone with any comments much appreciated especially interested in CPU and GPU (dual quadro 4000 or single 5000) comments.

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Message 2 of 7
dgorsman
in reply to: JPBrady

Dual Quadro 4000's or a single Quadro 5000 is probably overkill on both counts.  You'll only be able to leverage that kind of graphics processing power using media software like 3D Studio or Maya.  If you can get something lower-spec'd (ie. CHEAPER) go for it.

 

The rest looks reasonable for your needs, with Inventor being the driving factor followed by Navisworks if you are going to do any large-area rendering/animation.  If you can get a faster quad-core instead of a 6-core, do it.  In all cases your software will do better with faster CPUs with fewer cores.  If you can, get a single computer ahead of the others and do some load testing to make sure it will suit your own work environment.  Not much worse than dropping tens of thousands on hardware capitalization only to realize its not doing what you want...

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If you are going to fly by the seat of your pants, expect friction burns.
"I don't know" is the beginning of knowledge, not the end.


Message 3 of 7
Arun_Kumar_K
in reply to: dgorsman

Worked in Graphics card Quadro 2000 and Quadro 600. Didn't find any big difference.

 

Price of Quadro 2000 is Indian Rupee 25,000 ($450)

 

Price of Quadro 600 is INR 6,000($110)

 

 

Message 4 of 7

Hi John,

 

There is no whitepaper with recommendations about the best hardware for those products here because the recommendations are depending on your needs (small or big projects, etc.) but I can give you some other links.

 

  • For each product you will find information about the system requirements of the product on the Autodesk website. Here is the link for the system requirements of Plant 3D: http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/ps/dl/item?siteID=123112&id=18819272&linkID=14116967. Just go to each product and look for them.
  • I recommend the following site to use it especially for graphic cards. You can look for which graphic card is certified and recommended by Autodesk, also which driver, which you can download here, too. Be aware that in the selection list there is no Plant 3D available. You have to select here AutoCAD because Plant 3D is a vertical of AutoCAD and uses the same engine. http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/syscert?siteID=123112&id=18844534
  • AutoCAD and the verticals of AutoCAD like Plant 3D and P&ID only use one core (ok, some unimportant exceptions here). So for those products hardware with less cores but with faster speed are better.
  • But Showcase can use every core of your processor. Special licenses of Showcase can also cluster the cores. So here the recommendations are different to those of AutoCAD plus verticals related to the processor.

 

Please, inform me, if I could help you here or if you have further questions.

 

Regards

Bernd



Bernd G.

Senior Product Support Specialist


Message 5 of 7
ccaviel
in reply to: JPBrady

One thing you should keep in mind is Acad only uses one core, I would opt for a very fast gaming cpu, their is little benifit using ecc ram, and I recommend a a revo drive. GPU go with a gaming card they have proven to out run the quadro line, the quadro 4000 does not support sli and most dell motherboard dont support sli or crossfire.This might sound odd but i would opt for a dell gaming pc overclocked 2011lga i7, 16+gb ram make a 8 gb ramdisk, have my OS installed on a revodrive, and geforce gtx 680. If you keep your procject on a network. i would have your IT guy check your network switch and make sure its 1Gb swich and redesign your current topo. send me a email if you have anyquestions.

 

 

ccaviel@plant3d.com

Message 6 of 7
dgorsman
in reply to: ccaviel

SLI support may be irrelevant for CAD work - as far as I know, only one of the AutoCAD clones supports it.

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If you are going to fly by the seat of your pants, expect friction burns.
"I don't know" is the beginning of knowledge, not the end.


Message 7 of 7
ccaviel
in reply to: dgorsman

there was a youtune with a guy running crossfire on 5700 firepros, and i think it stems from the openGL optimizer they once had.

That would autocad 2009 back dowards.

"Off the topic" I always wanted to vm a server on a Telsa card and use that as my Plant3d SQL Server i think that would stop the data read/write bottle neck you do the same on a high powered graphic card. 

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