The topic of which pc to buy has come up several times on this forum. I have looked at previous postings on the subject but because of the rapidly changing technology in the pc world I have decided to solicit ideas on the issue once again. Below are the specs.

I want to buy a dual processor pc (AMD vs Pentium) and with operating system Linux, Windows NT, or Windows 2000. The pc is to run fluent applications primarily and matlab with excellent floating point speed. The vendor has to be Dell, please do not ask me why. I have tried reading the fluent benchmark results but I still need your input. Thanks in advance.

Amadou,

We've been running FLUENT on Dell PCs with NT 4.0 for several years now, and have had very few problems and decent performance. If I was in charge, which I'm not, I would probably prefer Liunx, but I'd be OK buying them from Dell. I like the AMD over the Intel, because the AMD is faster and cheaper.

Be careful with the dual-CPU. Some versions of FLUENT actually ran slower on dual-CPU machines because of some communication glitch. Make sure you're running a relatively new version of FLUENT and you should be OK.

Evan, Thanks a lot for your input. Why would you prefer Liunx?

Linux is more stable and free. Fluent was originally developed for Unix/X-Window platforms and still uses "Unix layers" on top of NT like X-window emulators etc. to work, hence the NT version tends to be more buggy. What is the best choice though is of course highly dependent on if you know NT or if you know Unix/Linux youself.

About AMD - if you buy Dell you have to buy Intel since Dell don't sell any AMD systems. Besides, there is no dual-processor platform for the Athlon yet.

I actually have been using unix (AIX) for slightly over six years, so I am a little familiar with it. If I chose Linux as the operating system, are compilers C/C++ and Fortran Compilers available? How about HP printer drivers because I have HP printers? Thanks for your input.

Linux has an excellent free c/c++ compiler - gcc (comes free with virtually all Linux distributions). Fortran is more problematic. There is a free Fortran to C tranlator called f2c which can be useful. However, if you intend to do serious Fortran development you should buy a commercial compiler. There are several alternatives. We use Absoft and we are happy with it. Your HP printer might work. There still are a few Windows-only HP printers which wont work in Linux. Many do work though. Check the harware compatibility list at, for example, www.redhat.com to see if you particular model is supported.

Thanks a lot.