[Darshiva]

Dear All,

I want to select a home desktop PC/Workstation for ANSYS Fluent modelling. Models would be for coal combustion/furnace modelling up to 10 Mcells.

I wam looking for the follwoign options:

Option 1

HP 820 workstation with the following features

2 x Xeon E5-2660 V2 2.2 GHz 8 core
4x8 GB DDR3 DIMMs
300 SSD HDD
2 TB 7.2K 3.5" SATA HDD
NVidia Quadro K4000 (3 GB)

Cost: 1444 EUR. Uograding GPU to K4200 4GB would be 190 EUR more.

Option 2

Custom made desktop

Intel i7 6850K 6 Cores 3.4 GHz
4x8 GB DDR4-2666 DIMMs
250 SDD HDD Western Digital
2 TB 7.2K 3.5" SATA HDD Western Digital
ASUS GeForce GTX 1050 4GB DDR5

Cost: 1431 EUR

What would be your choice?

Thanks a lot.

[flotus1]

Option 1 is pretty decent basis for a CFD workstation if you have enough parallel licenses for 20 cores. Upgrading the graphics card would be pointless though. What you should upgrade is the memory. You need 8 DIMMs to make use of the 2x4 memory channels these CPUs have. So make sure to get it equipped with 8x8GB DDR3-1866 reg ECC. This way you make best use of the capabilities of this platform and have enough memory to run your cases at all. Memory requirements for combustion modeling can be quite high depending on your solver settings, somewhere in the order of 5GB/million cells for a coupled solver in double precision.

Option 2 will be slower to solve in parallel but faster in single-threaded or lightly threaded workloads like in pre- and post-processing.
But you should change a few things. Compared to the cheaper I7-6800k, the I7-6850k only has more PCI Express lanes which you won't be using anyway. So the I7-6800k is the better choice (or a used I7-5820k or 5960X, depending on your budget).
For the memory I would recommend 4x16GB DDR4-3200.

[Darshiva]

Thanks a lot for your answer, flotus1. Crystal clear.