I'd like to buy a new computer and want the most performance with a limited amount of money. I am planning on buying a P3 dual 933 Mhz computer. My questions: 1) Would a P3 dual 933 Xeon computer be significantly faster with Fluent? 2) If so, is it worth the extra $1000?

No, Xeon doen't make a dent on Fluent calculation.

Thanks, all I could find was intel claiming that Xeon was faster for floating point calculations, but they never specified how much faster...

Just to further confirm this - we've also benchmarked PIIIs against Xeons. With Fluent there was no performance difference at all.

Why not an 1,2GHz Athlon ?

Here are the reasons that I was looking into the P3 computers:

1) I've worked with two non-Intel computers at home and find that they have had about triple the problems - crashes and incompatable hardware - than my Intel computers (this was for games not Fluent though). 2) This computer is to train students at my university. In a year, if I want to upgrade to >933 Mhz, I can take free processors from the university inventory (which is almost exclusively Intel). 3) I haven't looked too hard, but where do you get good dual processor Athlons?

I had this same question about speed of PIII and PIII Xeons for running fluent. Thanks for all the replies. What I would really like to know now is how does a PIII Xeon 1GHZ processor compare to the equivalent AMD Athlon. Any one has any fluent benchmark for a medium size problem (~ 300 K cells)

We ran some benchmarks on a 1 GHz Athalon machine for Fluent cases of about 300,000 cells. For cases this size, the Athalon machine was about the same speed as our old 300 MHz PII computer. For small test cases (a few thousand cells) indeed the Athalon was about 3 times faster.

After spending a few months with Fluent support, we bought a box with 1.5 GHz P4 processor. It runs just over 4 times faster than the 300 MHz PII with no slow down for larger cases.

What type is the memory ? sd-ram, ddr or rambus ? how much memory (enough memory) ? I'm also interested in such a benchmark, but sorry: I couldn't believe that a 1Ghz Athlon = P2 300 MHz with an identical fluent-case and the same hardware around the processor....