I haqve a Toshiba laptop with 3.2 gig processor which I use for antenna
work. I really can't see why I shoulde look for a speedier processor at
this time and really it is not that much faster than what you have, if
they had a processor that doubled the speed then I would be interested.
I use AO-pro which I suppose is a larger program for antennas than NEC4
and sometimes it takes two or three hours to complete a 15 element
array and with the processor going at full speed things get a bit hot
but then again the processor is not going all the time as one has to
print and set things up , so for the total project I see no gain in
getting a faster machine. Had a 5150 dell last year of the same speed
but oh so many problems with Dell and them refusing to give out repair
information that thousands of them were thrown away in anger. They have
been sued for a few million but if a failed one had been opened by
somebody other than them it can be put down to user abuse where they
should not have touched it and waited to see if they were going to be
sued. The lawyers by the way get 3 million to sell out all users. Dell
suffered a tremendous down turn on all sales last year because of bad
service in the face of widespread failures across the board on all
their products where they only allowed repaires by their own repair
places at an inflated price
with no details of repair for DIY.. Their products are produced by
multi suppliers in competition so failures are all over the spectrum
and difficult to isolate.To sum up don't buy a Dell!
Cheers
Art


W1HBQ wrote:
I'm planning to buy a new computer, and its main task will be for
antenna simulations using NEC. The issues appear to be: Intel verses
AMD, single verses dual core, front side bus and RAM speed, and of
course processor speed. I would appreciate any guidance.

It would be interesting to compare computation speeds of various
computers for the same antenna. One possible antenna to use for
comparison is The Grid Yagi from my website:
http://home.comcast.net/~ross_anderson/GridYagi.htm
http://home.comcast.net/~ross_anderson/GridYagiD1.htm
My three year old Dell with a Pentium 4 2.8GHz with HT and 3GB DDR of
RAM at 400MHz using the Nec2dXS*.exe calculating machine gives:
- - - MATRIX TIMING - - -FILL= 12.469 SEC., FACTOR= 11.422 SEC.
I'm interested to see how this compares to more modern computers.

Ross W1HBQ