3 Hardware considerations

When it comes to the hardware specification, for all users there are three main concerns:

• cost of the hardware
  
• reliability
  
• performance
  

Usually all these factors depends each of the other. The trick is to find the best compromise between the cost and the performance of the system. And when we say performance, we should notice that the overall system performance actually depends on several components:

Server - its performance and reliability will affect all clients' workstations. The following items must be considered when select the server's hardware:

• Hard disks - to be as quick as possible and on SCSI interface. 10,000 rpm/s and RAID system should be considered.
  
• Operating Memory - 1024 MB of RAM or more
  
• CPU speed - 2GHz Pentium IV or higher. If you do not plan to run TRIBON SURFACE server on this machine, the CPU speed is not of crucial importance
  
• Video card - It will not affect the client's performance in any way. However for the need of the locally running applications a good graphical card should be considered
  
• UPS - strongly recommendable item dedicated for this particular server only but not to provide a power supply to the whole workgroup
  
  

Networking - another important component. Even if you have the most powerful server in the world, if your network is weak you can't achieve good performance and reliability. Please take under consideration network switches or switching hubs on 100MBS interface. If possible arrange 1GBS interface for the server. Very often you could increase the performance of one existing network simply by splitting it on a several VLAN.

Client's workstation - normally its performance will have direct impact only on the processes (applications) which are running locally. The hard disk speed would affect the applications startup but not the whole design process. The most important items to be considered for the client are:

• CPU speed - for Windows 2000 and TRIBON M1v4 Pentium III on 1GHz could be suitable. If you are going to migrate to Windows XP and TRIBON M2 - better consider Pentium IV at 1.5 GHz or higher
  
• Operating Memory - minimum 512 MB
  
• Video Card - this is one of the most important factors especially if you use TRIBON shading facility often. Consider one of the newest RADEON or NVIDIA models with minimum 64 MB memory.