Hi All,
I know this same question has been asked and answered many times before, but at the speed technology changes, I thought I would solicited the experience of this fine forum again.
I have been stuck in the Solidworks world for the past 4 or 5 years. But am now with a new company and back on Inventor:-)
I am specifying new CAD stations. We are using Autodesk Product Design Suite Ultimate 2012, but mainly Inventor 2012 64.
Below are my minimum requirements so far.
Did I miss anything?
Do any of the specs fall short?
Any other areas I can get a good value for the buck in?
Also, I plan on getting quotes from Dell and HP. Are there any other companies I should be getting quotes from? We are trying to keep the price around $4000 +/-
Windows 7 Pro 64
22inch Widescreen LCD monitor 1920x1080
Per my (admittedly limited) understanding, there is no longer a need to use the Quadro OpenGL cards for Inventor. Since Inventor is now DirectX, you're better off with a card that leverages that technology better. A GeForce GTX 580 is a high-end DirectX card that costs about half the Quadro 4000 and will blow it away in DirectX benchmarks.
Not sure about OpenGL and any of the other PDS Applications, but if Inventor has moved away from it, seems reasonable to assume that's the right direction at the moment.
Going to be some nice machines!! I'm about ready to replace my faithful "workstation in a bag" laptop. It's amazingly functional but almost 3 years old now, time for new toys! 🙂
You shouldn't need a 500GB HD if you are using network storage and Vault, if you are doing a lot of local work, then that size is okay. What would help there might be a Solid State hard drive instead for loading times.
Did you find this reply helpful ? If so please use the Accept as Solution or Kudos button below.
Mark Flayler - Engagement Engineer
IMAGINiT Manufacturing Solutions Blog: https://resources.imaginit.com/manufacturing-solutions-blog
This blog post is kind of old but there is some good information here:
http://ellipsis-autodesk.typepad.com/blog/2010/06/more-hardware-spec-goodness.html
We just ordered four of these.
Xi® MTower™ PCIe Workstation
Intel® Core™ i7 980 3.33GHz 12MB Shared L3 Cache 1x4.8GT/s QPI Six-Core 12-Threads VT EM64T
12228MB DDR3 @1333MHz Triple Rank Interleave
nVidia® EVGA® GeForce® GTX 580 (Fermi) 1536MB GDDR5 PCIe SLI-Ready Dual Head 2xDVI-1xMini-HDMI PhysX™
500GB 7200RPM SATA II 64MB Cache 4.2ms Latency WD RE4 Generation
DVD+RW/DL/+R-R/CD-RW Double Media 4.7/8.5GB 18x w/Software-media
Microsoft® Windows® 7 Professional Edition 64Bit
EVGA® X58 SLI® 3 Intel® X58-2xPCIe 16x-Triple Channel DDR3 1333-1600+-1Gb Ethernet-2xUSB3.0-12xUSB2.0-2xSATA6Gb-6xSATA3Gb RAID 0/1/10/5-1394-HD Audio 8CH
850W Corsair® TX Series Ultra-Quiet BB 12cm Fan 80%+efficiency 99% APFC UL
$2,403.00
Hi Rick:
I represent HP Workstations. You can easily configure a system for $4,000 that will work very well with Inventor. In our experience, we’ve found that Inventor performance is dependent on processing power, so you will benefit the most from high speed processors. If your primarily function is to design then you could order a Z400 with a W3670 3.2 GHz 12MB/1066 6Core CPU. This will give you additional cores for any rendering, analysis, simulation or animation (with hyper-threading this could act as 12 cores).
The rest of the configuration would include NVIDIA Quadro 2000, which is excellent for Inventor, along with:
12 GB (3x4GB) DDR3-133 ECC Ram
1000 GB HDD 7200 rpm
DVD +RW
Windows 7 Professional 64
ZR24w monitor
You can visit www.hp.com/go/hpautodesk for more information, and call the SMB store for any special deals we are currently offering to save money. Please let me know if you have any other questions – I’m happy to help.
Tom Salomone
HP Workstation Representative
Can't find what you're looking for? Ask the community or share your knowledge.