[ottokahn]

Hello friends,

I work on 3D design. I use; SolidWorks, CATIA, NX, ProEngineer... and I use analysis programs; ANSYS

I'm going to buy a new system. My alternatives are;

1) 7700K
Asus Z270 motherboard
64 GB DDR4 3200 MHz RAM
GTX 1080 SLI

2) Intel i9-7940x or Threadripper 1950x
Asus x299 Asus X399
DDR4 3000MHz RAM
GTX 1080

If we think about the price, which one should I choose?
Thank you.

[flotus1]

First things first: don't buy an I7-7700k.
It has been replaced quite a while ago with the I7-8700k. 50% more cores, same price. Needs a Z370 motherboard.

With the software selection you mentioned, AMD Threadripper is not the best option due to its lower single-core performance. Most of these programs only use very few cores most of the time.
Compared to the I9-7940x, an I7-7820x is the much more reasonable option. Unless all you do in CAD is CPU rendering, 14 or more cores won't help.
Long story short: I7-8700k is faster for most things you do in CAD, I7-7820x is faster for simulations. You have to decide which is more important to you

Which brings us to GPUs.
Why 1080 SLI? Most software you mentioned does not support SLI. Is this for gaming?
If you want multiple Graphics cards for rendering tasks, SLI is not needed. If you just want more performance than with a single GTX 1080 for anything else than rendering, I would recommend a 1080TI instead.
Rendering aside, I would rather recommend a mid-tier Quadro card for all the CAD you do. Quadro P2000 or P4000 for example.
By the way, consumer graphics card prices are free-falling right now because they are becoming useless for mining. The longer you wait, the cheaper they get.

If you want to know more, I recommend this site: https://www.pugetsystems.com/all_news.php
They have tons of tests for most of the software you mentioned with a wide variety of different hardware

[ottokahn]

Originally Posted by flotus1

First things first: don't buy an I7-7700k.
It has been replaced quite a while ago with the I7-8700k. 50% more cores, same price. Needs a Z370 motherboard.

With the software selection you mentioned, AMD Threadripper is not the best option due to its lower single-core performance. Most of these programs only use very few cores most of the time.
Compared to the I9-7940x, an I7-7820x is the much more reasonable option. Unless all you do in CAD is CPU rendering, 14 or more cores won't help.
Long story short: I7-8700k is faster for most things you do in CAD, I7-7820x is faster for simulations. You have to decide which is more important to you

Which brings us to GPUs.
Why 1080 SLI? Most software you mentioned does not support SLI. Is this for gaming?
If you want multiple Graphics cards for rendering tasks, SLI is not needed. If you just want more performance than with a single GTX 1080 for anything else than rendering, I would recommend a 1080TI instead.
Rendering aside, I would rather recommend a mid-tier Quadro card for all the CAD you do. Quadro P2000 or P4000 for example.
By the way, consumer graphics card prices are free-falling right now because they are becoming useless for mining. The longer you wait, the cheaper they get.

If you want to know more, I recommend this site: https://www.pugetsystems.com/all_news.php
They have tons of tests for most of the software you mentioned with a wide variety of different hardware

First, Thank you for your comment.

I play games sometimes but for computer first purpose business, second games.

I do not have Quadro graphics cards in my country. If I can find it, it is very very expensive. Earlier, We could show the GTX780m as Quadro K5000m through some software. Now, is there any software that can show the GTX 1080 like the Quadro P6000-5000-4000?

Can we use it in ANSYS SLI mod(more CUDA)? Does ANSYS support SLI mode? more importantly, Does ANSYS support the GTX series?

[flotus1]

Quadro cards are expensive everywhere. Prices in my country for P2000 and P4000 are 400€ and 800€ respectively.

Earlier, We could show the GTX780m as Quadro K5000m through some software. Now, is there any software that can show the GTX 1080 like the Quadro P6000-5000-4000?

This was made more or less impossible for the last few generations. I don't think it is feasible any more.

Can we use it in ANSYS SLI mod(more CUDA)?

You seem to be confused about SLI. It is basically useless for compute applications, SLI is designed for rendering an image to the screen. If you want to use multiple GPUs to speed up compute tasks, you don't need (or want) SLI.

Does ANSYS support SLI mode?

Not that I know of.

Does ANSYS support the GTX series?

We should really make a distinction between using the Graphics card for showing what is on the screen and using it as a GPU accelerator for simulations.
The pedants answer is no: Ansys recommends Quadro and Tesla cards for both graphics output and compute. However, using a GTX as a normal graphics card with Ansys is usually no problem.
For compute, things get trickier. Ansys mechanical for example has a few select Quadro and Tesla cards white-listed. It refuses to use any other cards for compute.
Ansys Fluent on the other hand can use any Nvidia graphics card as an accelerator. GPU acceleration in Ansys Fluent
Caveats: not all tasks can be accelerated with a GPU, not all fast GPUs are necessarily good compute cards since most GPUs have crippled double precision performance, VRAM on most graphics cards is scarce, GTX support for Fluent might get removed any time.

Make up your mind about what you really need. Spending a large portion of the budget for a simulation workstation on a compute GPU is usually not the best approach. Unless you are absolutely certain that your workload benefits from GPU acceleration and you have enough VRAM for your models.

[ottokahn]

I have already read this topic that you have created. A really useful topic.