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


Also be advised that one of the best known, best designed set of
antennas, the K1FO series, was done on a PDP-11 (or microVAX?) running a
custom version of BASIC that had been tweaked to do complex math as I
remember. And while he spent what might now be considered large amounts
of time, he still managed to make a series (10 elements through 40) of
practically unimprovable long yagis in a few months.

The speed available nowadays is more than adequate. The memory
available now is probably much more helpful.

tom
K0TAR