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-   -   Dell T7500 greyhound or donkey? (https://www.cfd-online.com/Forums/hardware/79089-dell-t7500-greyhound-donkey.html)

XyraWarriorPrincess August 12, 2010 04:22

Dell T7500 greyhound or donkey?
 
Has anyone else got experience with this particular workstation? Despite having 12G RAM and a Xeon X5570, the performance isn't that great. I'm not interested in CPU benchmarks but in real world performance. Opening even moderate sized CFX models takes an age. Older machines in the office are quicker.

Does anyone know of any tweaks to improve the I/O performance?

hellorishi August 12, 2010 05:17

I am using a T7500 with single X5680 and 24GB RAM. As per my observation it is faster compared to my previous box with Xeon X5480. I cannot quantify the factor. But qualitatively definately YES !

Do you happen to you Window$ ? Then you might want to consider the "Best Performance" settings instead of "Best Appearance".

I am using it for pure performance with SUSE Enterprise Desktop 11 with CFX. Although I had issue with SSD. As per my experience CFX has some speed issues with SSD. It works well with "normal" HDD.

Go Linux !

XyraWarriorPrincess August 12, 2010 07:14

I am running Windows XP 64-bit. Is is my only machine at work so has Outlook etc loaded on it too. Not much chance for another operating system.

What is the acronym SSD?

hellorishi August 12, 2010 07:26

SSD is Solid State Disk. These are apparently faster for read/write operations compared to the older technology due to absence of moving parts.

What kind of hard disk configuration are you using ? RAID 0 ? RAID 1 ?
Is it only reading/writing that is slow or even CFX5SOLVE is slower ?

XyraWarriorPrincess August 12, 2010 08:13

I don't have Raid. Device driver says I have: ATA WDC xxxx SCSI drive. I presume that is SATA.

Model prep is the bottleneck. Opening modules from workbench e.g. design modeller takes an age. I usually work with an internet Explorer window open so I have something to read while it does its thing. I don't usually bother looking at the solver, I am either at home or doing something else during the solution.

hellorishi August 12, 2010 09:05

It takes me ~12 seconds to read a 10M element (2.6M Nodes) Mesh (tet/prism). CFX-Pre (.cfx) file size is 128MB.

What mesh/file size do you use and approx. time?

XyraWarriorPrincess August 12, 2010 09:48

Definitely a donkey
 
I have a 5.75M element 0.99M node file of about 88Meg. This takes 2 minutes 50 seconds to load.


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