What manufacturer PC are you running?

[marvins_dad]

Wow - after all of this I finally placed my order for a Dell Precision T5500 Workstation. - Just over $4k.

The system consists of:

Dual Quad Core E5520 2.26ghz
12 gb ram
ATi FirePro V8700 1gb
80 gb Intel x25m SSD
80 gb 10k rpm HD
1 tb Segate Barracuda 7200 rpm HD
Win 7 OS

Hoping I can kill on the "Worm" test after getting it up and running!

I went with Dell after looking at the links provided here, Boxx (which I currently have) and HP. Dell is really good about stocking parts for the machines so 3-4 years down the road, if the machine is still a valid workstation, you can get exact parts and not the latest version of the part that is off the shelf. We had that issue with the Boxx systems and I think that is why currently I am having serious issues with Sketchup crashing on the Box while my lesser spec machine at home can chug right though the same task.

From what I am working with it made more sense to go to a Mid level graphics card instead of a gaming card. The ATi out performs the Nvidia that contains more ram. Not looking forward to going back to ATi, because I don't like their user interface...but I have had issues with my current FX3400 card.

Opted for 12gb over 6gb so I wouldn't have to worry about running out of ram when working with huge textures - got the upgrade cost cut from Dell to make it worth the upgrade in order to make the sale.

I will be checking out the SSD for the primary, I did do the upgrade to the 10k for a swap drive for photoshop and other programs that I can point to the drive for temporary swap files since the SSD write times can be slower in some cases....then, of course, the 1TB drive for storage.

We just added 5 more seats of Twilight so the office has converted to Twilight for our main render engine!

Looks like it will be a 28th ship date so an after Christmas present...unless it gets here sooner.

Bring on the Worm!

[Fletch]

Hi Marvins_Dad,
Sounds like a nice machine!

SketchUp is a 32bit program. So therefore Twilight will be limited to 32bit address space even with 64bit system... in plain English, even if you have 4Gb or 12Gb of ram, you are stuck with the limitations of 32bit system = less than 3Gb of RAM and even then if you are on WinXP or any 32bit operating system you must manually activate the :>: /3Gb switch. Since you will be using a 64bit system, you will, I believe, not need to worry about that part... your SketchUp should use up to 3Gb on your system.

The above is at least how I understand it, but I could be wrong.

2.26ghz is a slowish processor...

8 threads x 2.26 Ghz = 18 ghz of processing power
8 threads x 2.66 Ghz = 21ghz of processing power = approx. equiv. of more than one extra thread

You will note in the speed tests, the fastest machine was one i7 that was manually overclocked and contains the cooling equipment to be able to handle such things.

[notareal]

SketchUp is a 32bit program. So therefore Twilight will be limited to 32bit address space even with 64bit system... in plain English, even if you have 4Gb or 12Gb of ram, you are stuck with the limitations of 32bit system = less than 3Gb of RAM and even then if you are on WinXP or any 32bit operating system you must manually activate the :>: /3Gb switch. Since you will be using a 64bit system, you will, I believe, not need to worry about that part... your SketchUp should use up to 3Gb on your system.

Let me clarify a bit.
32-bit program under 32-bit Win OS:
- The virtual address space for 32-bit Windows is 4 gigabytes (GB) in size and divided into two partitions: one for use by the process and the other reserved for use by the system.
- If a program is linked with a /LARGEADDRESSAWARE switch (sets IMAGE_FILE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE flag), then it can use 3GB of virtual address space (system will then have 1GB in use), but only if /3GB switch is enabled in boot.ini.
- > In real system SU & TWL will never have 2 GB of memory to use.

32-bit program under 64-bit Win OS:
- If the application has the IMAGE_FILE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE flag set in the image header, each 32-bit application receives 4 GB of virtual address space in the WOW64 environment. If the IMAGE_FILE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE flag is not set, each 32-bit application receives 2 GB of virtual address space in the WOW64 environment.
- to my knowledge SU or TWL have not enabled IMAGE_FILE_LARGE_ADDRESS_AWARE flag

The best scenario is to run SU & TWL under 64-bit OS, as then you can run multiple apps that each have 2 GB of virtual address space in use.

@Marvins_Dad, that sounds like a great machine.

[marvins_dad]

notareal - I will definitely be pm-ing you about settings once I get the machine...if there are settings that need to be configured to optimize. I'm clueless with the 64 bit OS - we have one machine running XP 64 bit because we were testing to see if Revit gained any bump from the OS.
We are currently running the 3gb switch on all of our machines, so if there is some sort of trick to allocating in Win 7 - let me know, I am assuming that Win 7 automatically takes care of this for me, right?

Fletch - thanks for the response. I'm guessing that SU doesn't have any desire to ever leave the 32-bit world? Is Kerkythea also 32-bit based. Never have had to really think about this before.

I should be able to get quite a gain when using Photoshop...I hope. It accounts for quite a bit of my work. Probably 25% CAD, 50% SU/Rendering and 25% Photoshop.

I remember someone mentioning using Arroway textures were pretty memory taxing, was hoping that cramming extra ram into a machine would allow me to finally be able to use higher res mapping without sacrificing crippling performance.

I did find an article that I thought compared the i7's to the Xeon Nehalem processors. They were pretty neck and neck on almost everything until it got to actual rendering, then the Dual Xeons showed a double bump in performance than the single i7's. And from all I have read you look for the fastest processor and ram you can afford. Unless I really missed something.

[marvins_dad]

Fletch - I found that article...
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/04/01 ... page8.html

I took from that, that the dual Xeons would out perform the i7 by 38%. I guess the programs they used might be tweaked more to take advantage of that configuration. As you know, I am a little redfaced that I didn't get that you couldn't use as much ram as you had to aid in the larger textures and such. Bad assumption on my part, but the extra 6gigs only cost me $150 and hopefully will help out with other programs.

[Ecuadorian]

Well, I guess if you render several images simultaneously in several SketchUp+Twilight instances, you might get to use all that RAM.

[marvins_dad]

That actually would be probable. We had all 6 licenses running this weekend...all weekend!

[notareal]

Fletch - I found that article...
http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2009/04/01 ... page8.html

I took from that, that the dual Xeons would out perform the i7 by 38%. I guess the programs they used might be tweaked more to take advantage of that configuration. As you know, I am a little redfaced that I didn't get that you couldn't use as much ram as you had to aid in the larger textures and such. Bad assumption on my part, but the extra 6gigs only cost me $150 and hopefully will help out with other programs.

Adding more cores wont most likely result linear speed up, contrary to the clock speed. But if I where building a machine I definitely where looking a dual xeon platform (actually I did try to build one, but suitable parts where not available at the time - so I settled to i7 920).

[marvins_dad]

Finally got the machine after almost a 2 month delay - thanks Dell! Apparently they had a shortage of chassis and power supplies.

Looking speedy - 22s Worm test.

Some drive speed tests so you can see the jump from my old machine to this...

Old Machine -
--------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 2.2 (C) 2007-2008 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
--------------------------------------------------
C:WD
Sequential Read : 63.034 MB/s
Sequential Write : 64.281 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 33.040 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 58.120 MB/s
Random Read 4KB : 0.516 MB/s
Random Write 4KB : 1.822 MB/s

Test Size : 100 MB
Date : 2010/02/09 10:03:59
_____________________________________
D:WD
Sequential Read : 80.971 MB/s
Sequential Write : 80.796 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 41.148 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 62.301 MB/s
Random Read 4KB : 0.653 MB/s
Random Write 4KB : 2.206 MB/s

Test Size : 100 MB
Date : 2010/02/09 10:10:31

New Machine -
--------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 2.2 (C) 2007-2008 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
--------------------------------------------------
C: SSD
Sequential Read : 242.766 MB/s
Sequential Write : 88.116 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 187.494 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 88.087 MB/s
Random Read 4KB : 14.372 MB/s
Random Write 4KB : 49.035 MB/s

Test Size : 100 MB
Date : 2010/02/09 9:13:08
_________________________________
D: Velociraptor
Sequential Read : 123.326 MB/s
Sequential Write : 120.407 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 55.729 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 84.535 MB/s
Random Read 4KB : 0.892 MB/s
Random Write 4KB : 2.586 MB/s

Test Size : 100 MB
Date : 2010/02/09 9:31:03
___________________________________
E: Western Digital
Sequential Read : 112.837 MB/s
Sequential Write : 101.410 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 49.501 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 81.419 MB/s
Random Read 4KB : 0.793 MB/s
Random Write 4KB : 1.369 MB/s

Test Size : 100 MB
Date : 2010/02/09 9:35:19

Anyone know what software folks use for the latest Benchmarking? I'd be curious how the old machine compares.

[Fletch]

22s is very nice indeed. those ssd's are quick too!
of course... this will only mean no excuses now...