CAD applications are not very threaded today, that might change in the future as software vendors start take advantage of multiple cores. I assume you have a 2 Xeon's 5160s (3Ghz) in your workstation already? You have a total for 4 threads (with 2 Xeons) which is quite sufficient for CAD. You have pretty good high core frequency Xeons which are ideal for the single threaded nature of CAD. You already have a pretty high end graphics card (Quadro FX3500) as well. If you are looking to future proof your workstation, I might suggest the Xeon 5400 Quad core series as your next investment, if you are looking beyond CAD work for your workstation. This would bring the total number of threads/core to 8, double of what you have today. To get any benefit for CAD beyond the Xeons 5160 you have, you'd have to upgrade Quad core processors that are > 3GHz, otherwise, you'd be downgrading as far as CAD workloads are concerned. One benefit of upgrading to Quad cores is that these new processors would have larger L2 caches and if you are models are pretty big, they would minimize the load from memory/disk access, but like I said, I would also look to at least match the core frequency of the Xeons you have today.

I've consulted with the experts and the easiest way to do this would be to load PXE via the Boot Options tab on DMiX and use the FLB file on the CD. That should change the eeprom and get DMiX to release the iscsi block on the teaming and vlan tabs. Optionally, you could boot to DOS and run the IBAUtil DOS utility to load the PXE image. Thanks and please let us know if this answers your question.

Thanks for your question on enterprise servers. To properly answer, we would need to know much more about how you plan to use the servers. Could you please provide more details on what is the purpose for your servers? In the meantime, you could check out the Server Configurator Tool to get an idea on some of the possible solutions you may want to consider.

John-

We'd love to send you collaterals and posters. We have the new campaign posters that we can send you right away. I am also reaching out to Intel Education to see if there is any processor evoluation type of collateral that I can send you.

More updates to come.

Seems like you are asking two separate questions, so I'll address individually. If your code is truly serial only, then multi-core will not benefit you. First approach would be to consider parallelizing as much as possible. Check out this SITE to find out if you can take advantage of threading tools. On the second part of your question, XEON is designed to support Server applications at the enterprise level whereas Extreme is more for the power gamer and advanced desktop users. Hope this helps.