Engineering Desktop Systems

There are three flavors of these high performance systems, with only one difference - the graphics subsystem.

November 27, 2000

by Eric Svetcov

I had intended to write the November Engineering Desktop recommendation last week; however, with the introduction of the Intel P4 just around the corner (at the time), I wanted to see if I would need to make a change in my recommendation. From the perspective of an additional week, the answer is an unequivocal and resounding thumbs down for the P4 as far as Engineering systems go.

When approaching high performance systems, it is clear that price is less important than raw performance (at least up to a point). The reason you are planning to purchase a high-performance system is to reduce the amount of waiting that is done while the system is processing your work. Spending extra money to reduce this time can really pay off. So, what I will present here is how to architect a system that will improve performance significantly, but still not break the bank.

Our high-end system will be built around some serious computing power; however, we will stick with a single processor system for now in order to better balance price and performance.

Without sounding repetitive, the four important criteria when choosing the system are as follows:

• Stability
• Availability
• Price
• Performance

For this system, we will not be sacrificing stability or availability to add performance. We are going to spend a bit more to get the increased performance we need.

Click here for the recommended high performance system architecture