Civil 3D

[woodman78]

I have a question about a pc for Civil. I am running Civil 2011 3D on XP with 4GB ram. The machine is old and has a Pentium®4 2.8GHz chip. I am thinking of taking advantage of a machine running Win7 with 4GB and a Athlonx2 64. I don't know much about this stuff and am wondering if it would be faster?

[ReMark]

I think you'll notice a difference.

[sinc]

From your post, it kind of sounds like you already have the other computer, and are thinking of switching to it. If it's an old Athlon 64, you may notice only minimal improvement over the Pentium 4. The Athlon 64 and Pentium 4 were competing products, and both are quite old now. You'll probably notice a difference, but it may not be really satisfying difference.

 

If you're buying a new machine and want to go AMD, you would want a Phenom II X2, as fast as possible. The most critical component for C3D is the CPU, so you want a fast one. Multiple cores don't help, so X2's are fine (you get no added benefit from X3, X4, or X6, at least for C3D; something like a Phenom II X2 565 is ideal). Also make sure it's Win 7 x64, and preferably with more than 4GB of RAM. 8GB works well right now.

[woodman78]

I was mainly interested in the Windows. We got one of the machines here moved from XP to 7 and Civil is flying on it with the same spec as before. Does win 7 improve things a lot? I was also thinking of adding a decent graphics card. Would this help?

 

I am funding a ram upgrade and graphics card from my own pocket as my employer is not interested in raising the spec.

[ReMark]

Many users complain their software runs slower when moved to a Win7 machine. Count yourself lucky.

[Organic]

Civil 3D works fine here on Windows 7. There is the odd glitch in the program although those are due to bugs in the program and occur in Xp or 7.

 

I wouldn't say Windows 7 makes software markedly faster than Windows Xp though.

[woodman78]

Thanks for the replies everyone. A question for sinc. Is the Athlonx2 63 Dual Core? Does this mean that Civil will only be using half the power of the processor? Would I be better off with the pentium chip so?

[sinc]

You would have to specify exactly which chips you're talking about. There is quite a variation.

 

The Athlon64 and Pentium chips were roughly the same "class" of CPUs, with similar performance. The critical part is the clock speed, but the Athlon64s typically had a lower clock speed than a similar-performance Pentium. So you might get the same performance out of a 2.4GHz Athlon64 as out of a 3.2GHz Pentium. Or maybe not exactly those numbers; I don't actually remember which speeds were equivalent. The important part is you can't simply compare clock speeds between Athlon and Pentium to identify which one is better. Athlons and Pentiums work differently, and Athlons give superior performance compared to a Pentium that is running at the same speed, but Pentiums typically had higher clock speeds, so they were roughly equivalent.

 

Athlon64 X2 and Pentium-D chips are the same things as Athlon64 and Pentium, except with two cores. When you have two cores, Autocad products completely (well, almost completely) ignore one of them. So when you add cores, you see no significant improvement in Autocad. However, if Autocad is doing something that is using 100% of one core, the OS and any other programs you're using can use the remaining core, leaving Autocad to use the first core at 100% without interruption. So a dual-core computer is better than a single-core, even though Autocad can only use one of them. But a slower dual-core is NOT better...

 

That leaves us back where we started. The only way to say which chip will work better is to know exactly which ones you're talking about. Autocad will work better on a high-end Pentium 4 than on a low-end Athlon64 X2, even though the X2 has two processor cores vs. the Pentium's single core.

 

In any case, my guess is that you will see minimal improvements, no matter what you do to either system. If you're really talking about old Athlon64 X2 and Pentium systems, then those are really outdated, and no good for C3D. More RAM, new OS, and new graphics card will probably help, but only minimally, and could easily cost $500 for that very minimal improvement. And you might not even be able to do that, since on those really old computers, 4GB might be the maximum you can install. You really need a new computer. Civil 3D works best on the new 2nd-Gen Intel chips, and it's possible to get a pretty good C3D computer these days for not much more than $1000. Something like an i3-2120 works very well, but doesn't have a turbo mode, so something like an i5-2500 is even better.

 

The thing that has me confused is that you say you changed the OS on one machine, and now it "is flying". What system did you upgrade? It sounds very strange that you would notice that big a difference in speed. I presume you disabled the Aero themes...? That will make Win 7 perform a bit faster. But still, it sounds odd... The big difference in C3D between XP and Win7 is that memory management in Win7 is better, which means you tend to see a lot less crashing in C3D, since C3D hits the memory management system really hard. So most people see more of an improvement in stability, rather than in speed. However, really old XP systems often build up lots of "garbage", and the systems start working slower over time. Reinstalling XP on such a system will cause a noticeable improvement in speed. So if your old computer had XP on it for a long time and had built up its "garbage", that might be the speed difference you notice. You would have noticed the same thing, though, if you had simply reinstalled XP. I suspect that had something to do with it. But if C3D 2011 is "flying" on this machine, I suspect it has better specs than a Pentium 4 or old Athlon64... Again, it comes back to the fact that we really need to know exact model numbers of the CPU.

[woodman78]

sinc,

 

Thank you for the very comprehensive answer. I appreciate that you took the time to write that for me. I did a CPU-Z on the pc I currently have (Pentium 4) and the 2 possibilities I have. These are the results. I did notice the core speed on the AMD jump to over 2000 when I opened some software. Don't know if that means anything?

 

I hope this make things clearer.

 

Thanks again.

[sinc]

Those were hot chips... in 2005!

 

The Pentium 4 520 is not even 64-bit capable, so it should definitely be discarded (you want Win 7 x64). I believe the 4200+ was a direct competitor to the Pentium D 840, which was a bit better than your 820, so the AMD would probably yield the best performance of those three.

 

But personally, I wouldn't consider any of them usable, and any money spent on upgrading them is mostly-wasted. Instead, I'd pump that money into a new computer purchase.

[woodman78]

Thanks Sinc. And if only I could get our IT dept to think the same way. I work for a local authority where spending at the moment is a very dirty word!!!!

 

Thanks again for your help.

[sinc]

Unfortunately, they're still spending, because it can easily take you twice as long (or more) to get things done on insufficient hardware. But bean counters are often penny-wise and pound-foolish, unfortunately...