For the next years I am going to do CFD work related to multiphase flows within turbo compressors. I am looking for a high performance Windows based computer. What do you recommend regarding to processor, memory etc.?

Dear Trond: you have not detemined your problem specifications such as steady or unsteady, mesh size and number, asnd turbulence model you want to use. However if you have an workstation in your university I recommend to use that. otherwise I recommend a 64 bit AMD processor working at 2800 Mhz and at least 512 MB ram. Also, graphic card is very important. You will need a lot of post processing for presenting you work results. I recommend at least an ATI 9200 processor with at least 128Mb memory.

Thanks for replying. At this moment I do not really know all the problem specifications. The problem is unsteady and the k-e turbulence model will we used. For this kind of problem I can only guess about mesh number, about 1 million. Today I am using a laptop with 1.6 GHz Intel Centrion processor and 512 MB DDR.

At least 1gb of ram, maybe 2gb. Ram is pretty cheap these days and you can never have enough. A mesh with more than 400k cells, and unsteady will stomp on 512mb of ram and start cashing to hard drive...which is bad.

My 1 million node cases use about 1.4Gb of ram (k-e, steady,2nd order) and my unsteady cases (k-e,unsteady,2nd order) can use close to 2Gb.

with this I think you need 2gb ram, 256 mbyte ram on VGA card and I prefer an AMD opteron 64bit processor. You know that fluent 6.2.12 use 64bit and AMD opteron processors operates faster than Intel(see benchmarking sites for 64 bit applications). Good luck.