[naveedgt]

Hi everyone,

My company is looking to upgrade our current workstations and I was wondering what recommendations you guys have.

These workstations won't be primarily used to solve the CFD problems as we have a dedicated cluster for that. They will mostly be used to handle CAD, meshing etc and on occasion small simulations up to a million or two cells.

So potent single core performance is required. I'm just not sure what the status of the current crop of processors is.

Budget is up to £6k.

Many thanks

[flotus1]

One of the best CAD-only CPUs right now is the I7-8700k thanks to its high clock speed and performance per clock. But it lacks two things: ECC support and memory bandwidth for CFD simulations. Well three things: it only handles a maximum of 64GB of memory. You know best if you need more, e.g. for meshing.
So you might have to do a trade-off: slightly lower single-core performance (for CAD) versus significantly better simulation performance.

Option 1) Intel Core I7-7800x (6 cores) or 7820x (8 cores). Still lacks ECC support, you decide if you need it
Option 2) Intel Xeon W-2135 (6 cores) or Xeon W-2145 (8 cores)
[Option 3) Xeon Gold 6146 (12 cores). Not exactly the best value for your money at over $3000, but will outperform the other options in simulation workloads.]