Hi every body. I am getting a separate work station for CFX . I am considering a desktop with Intel 64 bit machine with 8 GB memory, 300GB hard disk and 2 processors.Actually I need help on three things:

1. Shall I go for 2.8 GHZ dual processor or 3.8 GHZ single processor for each of the two processors. Which one will have better and faster performance with CFX . 2. I am considering a 256MB PCIe*16 nVidia Quadro FX3450 card. Is this card supported by CFX? Any other suggestions/feed back on card selection will be appreciated. 3. Is Intel em64t with window XP64 bit the best compared with the Opteron and others hardware and operating systems and within the same price range (~$10,000). Your help and feedback will be much appreciated. Thank you.

Hi,

1) CFX does not support 64 bit operation in WindowsXP 64bit yet. You will be running in 32 bit mode. If you want to run 64 bit you will need Linux 2) If you are windows and therefore 32bit then you will not be able to access 8GB memory. 3) I have not seen any benchmarks of the dual core CPUs on CFX yet. 4) There is some benchmark results on the CFX community wepage in the solver forum. 5) Graphics cards are the least of your worries. Just about any OpenGL card is OK, no need to get a really expensive one. Not unless you want to play Doom3 in your lunch break.

Glenn Horrocks

I have benchmarked a dual-core Pentium 4 vs. a dual-CPU Xeon using Fluent. The P4D was 3.0 GHz, the Xeon 3.6. Performance scaled pretty much with clockspeed, i.e. the P4D's performance was about 83% of that of the Xeon. This is different from the SPECfp rate benchmark, which rates them almost identical! A dual-CPU Opteron 252 was about 15% faster than the Xeon. I see no reason to believe that the performance differences will be different in CFX. But of course the P4D was WAY cheaper than the other two systems. If you are comparing 2 X dual-core vs. 2 X single core, remember to factor in the cost of the parallel licences. In a commercial environment (as aopposed to academic) software is much more expensive than hardware, so it's worth spending more on hardware to maximise the software value.

Hi Charles,

Is there any chance you can post your benchmark results on the CFX-Community forum topic on solver benchmarks?

Glenn Horrocks

Glen,

Well, these are Fluent results ..... I could run similar benchmarks for CFX if I get bored, but unfortunately I don't have access to the P4D 830 anymore.