I currently have Product Design Suite Ultimate 2013 installed on a Vista 64 bit Ultimate machine, an operating system which Autodesk no longer supports. Besides lack of O/S support, the machine itself is 8+ year old and has begun to show it's age.
That being the case, I'm now in need of both a new machine, and an operating system. For the machine itself, I'm looking at towered workstations with an AT form factor motherboard. I have no need for a touch-screen monitor or tablet form factors. It is my intention to run/operate each and every application and each and every module that comes shipped with PDSU 2014. I may also choose to run Adobe Encore and Adobe Premier Pro on this same computer.
Should I be using Windows 7 or Windows 8 for the operating system?
Any particular benefit using a Xeon processor over the fastest Intel Core i7 Extreme processor?
It's my understanding that Xeons are the preferred choice for computational accuracy.
Any tips, suggestions or comments on this particular subject would be most welcomed!
I would be sticking with Win7-64 bit O/S with at least 8Gb of memory. It really depends on what you are doing as what CPU you go with. Straight IPT/IAM modeling go with the fastest CPU you can afford. This portion of Inventor only can use a single core CPU. If you are doing a lot of IDW work, rendering in the Studio environment of Inventor, or Showcase and 3dMax and FEA work, then the more cores the merrier.
Thanks Blair for the reply!
Any particular reason for choosing Windows 7?
If you were to purchase a new computer today, would you give any thought in using Windows 8 as your O/S?
I see the fellows at D&M seem pretty excited about using Windows 8.
I'm a tad concerned about making a purchase with somewhat dated components and technology and such.
Other than cost, any particular reason you've chosen an i7 Core processor instead of a Xeon CPU?
I'd like to hear more about your thoughts on this subject.
Anyone else have some opinions and care to join in?
I know that everything will run on Win7 at the office. We have our ERP software which must run on our machines at work.
I do alot of Rendering in Showcase and a fair bit of FEA in Sim Mech, they take advantage of all the cores.
Blair, a side issue but what ERP software are you running?
We use Syspro, it's a fairly international software.
Does it natively talk with Inventor/Vault, or is there some middleware like Agni-Link?
You would need a 3rd party add-in. The biggest problem, is with some of the "parts" for small assemblies. You give it a XYZ.ipt within the IAM file, but in fact it's profile cut from plate steel.
If you gave each item with the IAM an equivalent part number in the ERP system, then it would work fine. In real life (at least our shop/plant, a lot of these parts are "weldments" and you would never sell that individual part (profile cut item) by itself. Then again other items are sold by themselves and require a Part Number in the ERP BOM system.
Just as easy to manually deal with the transfer from the Inventor BOM into our ERP BOM system manually.