Dear all,

The company I work for has finally decided to upgrade my computer and are currently looking into new machines as processing time is taking too long as most of the work we do involves large multiphase simulations. Does anyone have any recommendations?

Currently they are looking at something like this:

Dell Precision 530 Workstation Dual Xeon 2.4 Ghz processors 1024 Mb Rd Ram 36 Gb Scsi HD

You should max out the memory, 4GB.

It may be worthwhile to look into the AMD Opteron, they are 64 bit CPU's but will run 32 bit code as well. The 64 bits will allow you to increase address space to 8 GB or more, useful for future considerations.

Since Dell is shipping 3.2 GHz machines now, why not go up to at least 3.0 GHz. It's only a couple of hundred $$$ more. Also, get at least 2 GB of RAM. One trick with Dell is to buy the machine with empty slots and buy the extra RAM from them separately. It'll save about $200.

I recken 2GB ram with 60G HD with 3+Ghz speed, it will give you more flexibility to store more data and case files.

Alamgir

As others have pointed out, 2.4 GHz Xeon is not much to get excited about anymore. You should point out to management (if they are prepared to listen) that the cost of even a much better workstation is very small compared to software license and salary costs, and the faster workstation allows you to get more value out of the software and salary expenditure. You do want to load the workstation with as much memory as you can get though, which is an argument in favour of AMD64 processors, although you will have to wait for Fluent to release a version of the code for it. The other alternative is an HP zx6000 with Itanium CPU's. It's not that expensive, but it also has the 64-bit memory advantage, is a really strong performer, and is currently supported by Fluent.