Topic: Minimum System Requirements for Civil 3D

[Dinosaur]

Has anyone else found that the minimum system required for Civil 3D by Autodesk seem to be inadequate to the task for any real work?  We have grown weary of watching the program grind away for minutes at a time on our work stations that should be more than up to the task per the documentation.  Users were frequently assuming it hopelessly locked and would exit via Task Manager.  We are now assembling a new prototype machine to find the most economical component upgrades that will actually run this thing and I was hoping others were having similar problems and might be willing to share some of their problems and findings.
These are the workstations that proved to be inadequate:
AMD XP2500, 512mb, Matrox 16mb AGP video & 60 - 120mb ide HD
We started the new prototype with this:
AMD 64, 1gb, ATI 128mb Raydon AGP Video with the old hard drives.
This provided some performance boost on startup, but still left the program hanging for extended periods before clearing the command.
We have since gone to an AMD 3700 Venus processor with 2gb of memory and N'Videa Quadro 128mb PCI+ video.  The most recent addition of a 72gb SATA WD 10,000 rpm Raptor hard drive has been the most efficent upgrade to date.  At this point, I would suggest this addition first if your system can exploit it while the video card upgrades seemed to have little impact.
One thing we noticed along the way here is that the fresh install of both OS (XP Pro SP2) and design software had nearly as much performance  impact in our early tests as the new hardware we added.  64 bit Windows works well with this, but adequate drivers for both mouse and plotter are not yet ready at last report.

[whdjr]

Have you thought of using an Intel processor?

[Dinosaur]

IT guy has been stuck on AMD since the 650 Athlons came out.  Something about the way the AMD chip handles memory.  I know he spends extra for the lowest Cas Latency memory he can find.  There are certain things he is quite oppinionated on and this would be one of them.

[Dinosaur]

Have you thought of using an Intel processor?

Our (IT's anyway) reasoning is the AMD chip gives the same or slightly better performance with fewer heating problems.  He claims that if a fan dies on an intel chip the chip and board are toasted within minutes while an AMD can get by long enough for him to identify there is a problem.
I don't know . . . it sounds more like a variation on the old Ford vs. Chevy debate to me.

[ronjonp]

I would say go with intel as well....or at least get one machine and compare it  with the AMD. We have 25 computers here all P4's and have never had a "meltdown".

My 2 cents


Ron

[MSTG007]

YUP.... AMDs are a different type of chip then intel. I guess I look at it this way, from experience and longeveity, intel is the way to go.

2 cents

[whdjr]

If you buy them as a package (fan and cpu) the are warrantied for 3 years.  You've made your money back by then if they fail.  We have some old processors running here and they haven't failed.  I think he's using that as a cop-out.  I know it used to be that the AMD's weren't as good as Intel's at the Floating-Point Calculations, you know all the stuff we do on a day to day basis.  I don't know how they fair now.

[Dinosaur]

So far I have had no complaints about the AMDs as they have proven very durable.  I would like to give the Intel a try as well but the kid's dad writes the check so guess who's opinion carries more weight.
The next trick I see us trying is a huge ramdisk if we can spare the memory.  We would either page to this or put program files in it if we can figure out the ones that would be the most benefit.

[Dinosaur]

Well, here is something NOT to try . . .
We decided to specify a fixed 8gb paging file to see what would happen and saw a spectacular series of crashes.  We pushed C3D hard for the firs time and gave it a big surface to rebuild after adding a set of topo points.  Each time the memory usage approached 4gb things would slow dramatically and eventually, wacked out contours apeared where they shouldn't be any before displaying the old "program can't continue . . . " message.  A nearly identical machine was able to build the surface with no problem.  It seems that for now Civil 3D can use a maximum of 4gb memory combined between system and paging.