Dedicated CAD computer?

Can't comment on the particular requirements for that software but here are my general guidelines for the systems I build. Note that I hand build all systems and would never ever consider going to a store to buy a computer.

Motherboards of choice for me are MSI, never have had problems with them, always been rock solid and stable to me. Whatever motherboard you get, I would make sure it has PCI-Express slots for the video card.

CPU - Intel P4 3.0GHz or greater or AMD if you prefer. I think a debate on "which is better" is pointless. I wouldn't waste my money on Dual Core, most apps are single threaded and don't benefit from it. If you had need for Dual Core you would know why.

Hard drive - Serial ATA 7,200 rpm minimum, whatever capacity suits you. RAID setups are options too but probably overkill for your needs.

Ram - 1 gig...minimum. 2 gigs reccomended. 4 gigs if you got a little spare cash. You cannot have enough of the stuff. Anything past 4 gigs though is a waste even for a 64-bit CPU because most applications are still 32-bit and cannot address memory above 4 gigs.

Video card - I would get a reasonably priced PCI-Express based card...nVidia is my choice there. Anything in the 100 bucks range is probably going to be sufficient fast enough...I doubt that AD6 takes advantage of any hardware acceleration much if at all.

Power Supply - My estimate..300W...400W maybe. Depends a little on the chosen video card. Bigger is better...wouldn't get exactly the cheapest either. Spend the extra 40 bucks and get something decent, make sure it comes with plugs for the serial ATA drives (not all do) and (if required for the video card such as my 7800 GT) with power plugs for the video card.

Case - My choice generally is Thermaltake, various models available. Pick one you like. Short of the motherboard and power supply, everything else generally snaps into their cases eliminating the need for screws. It's great, I love it. Cooling is very good too.

-- Stephan

kimi no koto omoidasu hi nante nai no wa kimi no koto wasureta toki ga nai kara

Howdy Mike, So you are liking AD6.

One suggestion regarding your faults/GPF faults. Years ago any number of P99SE users were getting numbers of crashes and faults. After much discussion, trials and testing, the problems were generally eliminated by one of two things. Rigorous memory testing (long periods of in-depth pattern testing) showed intermittent faults. Also video cards were the cause of a lot of the faults. The guys either updated video drivers or bought other video cards. Those two solutions have always seemed to relieve the problems for most Altium/Protel users.

To assist in your quest you could check the Altium user forum, I know that not that long back (maybe 3 or 4 weeks max) there was a similar discussion when someone asked the same question regarding what was a good machine for running AD6. I believe that a significant number of the responses were running Nvidia Quattro 4400 video cards (don't quote me on that though).

As Stephan mentioned, don't bother with a dual core processor because AD6 definitely doesn't use it and probably never will. Some users were even turning off their dual core capabilities through their Bios and claiming improvements in speed. I don't know if that makes sense or not, but that is what they claimed.

While Altium suggests a certain machine config, it is probably overkill for your use as mentioned previously. They state a 3GHz P4 but you could surely get away with a 2.5 - 3 GHz Celeron without noticing a significant lag. I am sure the Altium specs are set-up for doing everyhting the package could possibly do, FPGA, autorouting, Tasking realtime tasks and all of the advanced features where you may want the best processing speed available. I would go with 2Gig of RAM though, today that is very cheap.

Have you read the Query introduction paper from the Altium website? I assume that you probably have, so what you really need is the advanced guide that outlines and lists all the query functions and how they work, doesn't everybody? One thing that some users over look too often is the FSO (find similar object) command, it either replaces the need for queries or helps in building queries when you first start out. There is also the query builder tool if I remember correctly, remember that I don't presently use the AD tool. When all else fails, post a question to the Altium forum, typically I would think you would have an answer inside of 6 hours, 24/7, with all the users around the world that are on the list.

Yeah, I reckon so. If there is a problem with memory causing this problem, well, I had Protel crashing on two machines here, and none of the other programs, even memory intensive editing of my Canon 20D 16Mb RAW files, causes crashing, so I dunno. Both machines are laptops, and it's surprising that neither has updates available for the video "cards" or drivers, but that's what I got. Of course I've not installed AD on both machines, but my guess is that some background program that I like and which interferes with none of my other programs is causing the problem. I run the same set of utilities (AV, OOo Quick Launcher, Flash Card readers, background backup systems, and other system tray items) on both machines. And rather than fritter away time removing them and trying to find programs that do the same job as well as I like and which do not interfere w/ AD, it would be simpler just to set up a relatively clean machine. I will take Stephen's suggestions with me to my computer builder and see what they can do with it.

Thanks for the suggestion about the user forum. It's right there on the Help menu, among the KB and KC options -- I need to check out the support on the forum and will.

I like Find Similar Items a lot. It's right powerful. Altium will be having two days on online training next week and I think many of my User

Best regards,

Mike Elliott

It actually does make sense. When Dual Core is enabled there is additional overhead required to distribute the workload across the two cores, whichever way you slice it and dice it, this requires additional CPU time.

Now if you have multiple tasks running in parallel then this overhead is irrelevant because the benefits by far outweigh it.

But in case of a single threaded app the other core sits there idle while you still have the overhead to check and see if there is something that the other core could do (and the answer is always no). So this time ends up wasted slowing the app down.

Sadly from a programming perspective, multithreading is "difficult" to implement for someone that's been writing single threaded all their life. There are many things that need to be taken into consideration that you just don't need to worry about when writing single threaded apps (deadlocks for example) and it's easy to make a mistake.

In addition to that algorithms also need to be written very differently to be able to even take advantage of multi threading.

My EDA app actually is multi threaded where it makes sense to do so such as my rendering loop for PCB Boards. The rendering loop is setup to distribute the workload across all available CPUs (in case of hyperthreading, dual core, or multiple CPUs) and both threads load the GPU with video data in parallel as well. Allows me to render a board with almost 20,000 objects (lines, vias, pads, text, etc.) including all necessary triangulation resulting in almost 100k triangles in less than 90ms. Layer sorting included (done via hardware z-buffering).

I only worry about this though to that extend for the PCB rendering pipeline. Pattern editor, symbol editor, and schematic capture all run single threaded as I've yet to come across a data set that requires me to get that fancy =)

-- Stephan

kimi no koto omoidasu hi nante nai no wa kimi no koto wasureta toki ga nai kara

Hi Mike,

When you specify a DirectX9.0c graphics card make sure it supports shader model 3.0. You will then be able to utilise the accelerated graphics in the PCB editor of Altium Designer release 6.3. Here is the info about it:

Cheers, James

Hi Mike, who is your favorite support person? It isn't that low life Derek, is it... 8-)

Charlie

I am impressed that finally someone managed to utilize DirectX in an EDA app but umm...Shader Model 3.0!?!? What the heck they need that for...not like they are doing real-time HDR lighting or something...

-- Stephan

kimi no koto omoidasu hi nante nai no wa kimi no koto wasureta toki ga nai kara

Oh I see what they are doing. Instead of triangulating the rounded ends of the tracks they are using pixel shaders to do it. Performance-wise probably a little faster than my method as much more work is offloaded to the GPU but I dunno...I think I prefer my method of triangulation as it works on the cheapst 19.95 video card as long as it supports DX9.0c and therefore has a much broader spectrum of compatability.

-- Stephan

kimi no koto omoidasu hi nante nai no wa kimi no koto wasureta toki ga nai kara

I'll just make believe that I know what you're talking about here.

-- mike elliott

Stephan, The one thing that Altium is doing that I believe involves the shader functions is selectively highlighting and shading user selections. When you select something they dim or shade the other nonselected items, the user can vary the level of shading. It works very well because frankly, there are too few sufficiently contrasting colors for layer colors, selection and shading/highlighting once you get past simple 4 or 6 layer multilayers. Sure there are hundreds of colors but they don't contrast well enough against similar colors on a typical monitor.

-- S>

Should not really require shader functions to do so though.

The thing is that altium using Pixel Shader 3.0 would work on exactly ONE out of my dozen computers I have. My method works on our 5 year old laptop with only a small performance difference compared to my high-end system.

Matter of fact I am at the point where I actually ditched software support entirely (except for the DirectX reference rasterizer if available on the target machine which is software) because I feel that if our 5 year old bone-stock laptop can support my hardware requirements, that's good enough.

Dunno if you have checked out the preview I posted of my app a few weeks ago, a new post will be coming up in the near future though.

I don't dim other layers at this point in time but I do highlight the current selection. You are right though, colors do become scarce past

But reading their description they are also drawing their lines using PS3.0 because they say all they do is tell the video card the endpoints and width of the line. Which essentially means they are creating an axis-aligned rectangle covering the area of the line and using the Pixel Shader to determine where to place pixels. At this point in time, adding the ability for shading is pretty convenient.

It's pretty simple really. Both altium and I require DirectX 9.0c for hardware support. But our rendering techniques vastly differ.

Altium's method is essentially on the bleeding edge of technology. Since a trace generally has round end caps, it is difficult for a video card to draw something like this as a video card can only draw triangles, it can't actually draw anything round. So they solve this problem by creating a rectangular area (via 2 triangles) that is axis-aligned with the line. This means that the long sides of the rectangle are parallel to the line itself and the rectangle is as wide as the line needs to be. So normally when you pass this to the video hardware, you would get something that looks like your line, but would have no round end caps. This is where PS3.0 comes in which stands for Pixel Shader 3.0. A Pixel Shader program is a small program that is run for every pixel that is drawn by the video hardware. This started with version 1.0 and the latest is 3.0 and has quite advanced in features over the past few years. So altium is using this pixel shader program to determine for every drawn pixel of this line, if they allow this pixel to be drawn or if they reject it. This allows them to reject the pixels at the ends of the line that don't belong to the round end cap...result is a line with round end caps. As an added bonus, they can easily modify the drawn pixel color in the program to do all sorts of effects such as highlighting, shading, etc.

My approach is a little more old-school. Instead of using pixel shaders I triangulate all the geometric features of the line. Meaning I create my triangles that compose the main body of the line and I triangulate the round end caps. So I don't use any pixel shaders at all, I just create a lot more triangles to the video hardware to render.

Stephan, I don't currently use Altium's AD versions so my knowledge is not the greatest at this time. I have it on my desktop at work but I have only used it for some file conversions because my employer has not committed to deploying it since shelling out the initial cash. And I don't have time to bother learning it until they make some form of commitment to it.

My earlier comment about the use of the Shader just shows that I am definitely not a software person. Why would something called Shader not be something to control shading. lighting, intensity? Well only a programmer could answer that one. I don't need an answer, I will remain happy in my ignorance of software, particularly anything other than enough knowledge required to suitably operate and maintain my PC.

However with reference to your comment below, I don't believe they just dim "other layers", they dim everything except for what is selected. So select a net and the whole net stays visible at normal intensity across all layers while 'everything' not selected dims or fades by the user adjusted amount, allowing for a better view of the selected items.

The other problem with 'typical' highlighting is that the highlight color takes away your ability to visually determine which layer something is on without queries of the individual primitives/items. Just like with Altium's older P99SE. That is one way that the new Altium system would really help.