My advisor will buy a new PC and let me to provide information:

I will do Computational Fluid Dynamics on this PC, the software will be CFD-ACE, so the first thing I should refer to is to ask the CFDRC company what is the best hardware and OS is for their software, blah, blah....it is no problem.

Here I want to know:

1. Gateway or Dell or HP or Compaq, which is better, in your opinion, for using in the office for computing? it seems that many faculty will choose Dell, is there some good reasons? or just there is big rebate?

2, if Dell, Do i need to choose Dimension 8200? it is the newest, but I think the memory is more important to me than the CPU speed in my case, because I have to store tons of data in RAM during the computing. Is some guy here knows the compromise bwtween the CPU speed and the RAM? If i have a big money budget, I won't have this problem. Thank you very much.

I think the brand is not important, because different manufactures use the same CPU, hard disk and RAM,so the performances are very similiar for the same configuration.

The most important is the RAM ( memory), RDRAM is the fastest for computing, DDR comes second and SDRAM is the slowest.

Also choose high speed hard disk ( scsi HD is best or 7200rpm IDE )

For the CPU, Intel P4 is the best for the PC.

But now the limitation is that the maxium momory supported by PC is only 2G for DDR RAM or 3G for DDR.