Any comments are welcome. I am thinking about buying an HP Kayak Pentium III 600 system, about 256 MB RAM, and the 3D Labs Oxygen GVX1 graphics card with a 19" Samsung 900NF flat screen monitor. I'll be running turbomachinery applications and have not yet selected the solver--perhaps AEA, Fluent or Numeca. Any comments on if this system would be ok, or how could it be improved will be appreciated. Thanks very much, Bob Harries.

From my experience, the Athlon processor is generally 30% faster than the Penthium III (at the same clock speed) for a CFD code, and costs less ;-). I would definitely suggest a 700-800Mhz Athlon for your WorkStation.. You'll end up with the equivalent of a 1000+Mhz Penthium III, or almost 2 times faster than what you are planning to buy..

just my two cents..

-bernard

I don't know about the speed of all cpu's available (G4, pentium, AMD...). But if you are going to do 3D simulation, you should go for 512-1000meg of memory. I have 1gig and it gives me enough space to do 3D simulation. Don't forget, even if your cpu is fast, if it has to swap, you'll end up losing all your speed.

The processor is OK, the graphics card is also very good, but the memory configuration is too small. 512 MB should be a minimum if you want to perform 3D simulation while still being able to run other applications, like a post processing software,...

Sounds like a nice machine. However, I agree with the others, you should get at least 512 MB RAM. I'd get a a 800 MHz CPU or more - the additional cost is not that big. It is much better to get a 800 MHz (or 1 GHz) PIII than a 600 Mhz Xeon. The Xeon is not much faster than a PIII at the same clock-speed, at least not for CFD allplications. About the graphics card - there was a nice review of Open-GL cards for CAE applications recently at Tom's Hardware Guide. You might want to check it out.

the Athlon's supposed to be faster but regardless of the CPU you should get as much memory as possible. it is not possible to have too much memory for CFD in my experience

I agree with everybody. I personally work on Sun HPC Enterprise 10000 with RAM 2048 MB and 12 processors 400 MHz and cannot say the speed of the computations and the amount of memory are too big for my purpose (especially for 3D cases and big domains with many computational cells). Therefore I can only advise that the better machine will definitely improve your work.

Agreed. I tried swapping grid block in and out of memory in order to save memory but solution times increased by a factor of 5 or more. So I bought more memory to keep the whole grid in memory.

I would also suggest to stay away from Windows; I have had inumerable problems with Windows, mainly with its interaction with the grid gen graphics(ICEM CFD). My impression is that Windows in not stable and reliable for for scientific processing. I plan to switch to Linux