Ansys workstation recommendation needed

[mibo]

Hi workstation-experts,

I have to build a 2,5kEuro workstation for a colleague to do some mechanical simulations with Ansys.
I already read some recommendations to buy a dual socket 1366 board with x5550 cpus, BUT now another colleague showed me that our Ansys License (Academic) allows to use 2 cpus and Ansys actually means "core" when it says "cpu". That means, my 2x X5550 workstation with 16cores will be a complete waste of money that I should rather invest into memory or multiple ssds.
I tried to figure out the official number-of-cores-restrictions of Ansys, but did not find a single hint on their polished homepage :-(

Maybe I could upgrade our academic Ansys license to use 4 instead of 2 cores - but even then one i7-960 with 8 virtual cores would be more then enough.
I will contact the official "license manager" in January to get some more info about our Ansys license. Maybe you could give me some recommendation for a workstation.

My current idea looks like follows:

Intel Core i7-960 480Euro
ASRock X58 Extreme 130Euro
3x G.Skill RipJaws DIMM Kit 8GB PC3-10667U CL9-9-9-24 (DDR3-1333) 930Euro
2x Intel X25-M G2 Postville 160GB 760Euro
Sapphire Vapor-X Radeon HD 5770 150Euro
1,5TB hdd 100Euro
Chassis 100Euro

Sum 2650Euro - would roughly fit

PS: I would even consider an AMD workstation if there are good arguments over an Intel workstation.

Edit: typos

[kiwi]

Hi,

I remember in past they had loads of benchmarks available on different configs. Now they don't have that much and the only ones worth looking are on Intel, for example this:
http://www.ansys.com/services/ss-intel-bench120.htm

I'd say upgrade license to at least 4 since current Nehalem is quad core with HT (you can disable HT if licensing is an issue) and ansys scales very well with cores.

Also no need for 5770. Better save a bit and get a better board instead of Asrock; Asus WS series comes to mind :)

And I see you forgot PSU? Or 100euro is for chassis + PSU? I hope it is a quality one :)

[mibo]

right, a PSU would be useful ;-)
Enermax PRO82+ 385W 50Euro
Seasonic S12II-380 380W 55Euro
For the 130W cpu and and a <110W gpu that should be sufficient.

As for the board. I like Asrock BIOS support and don't want to pay for features I never will use. The Asus WS-boards seem to have PCI-X or a lot of SLI-capable PCIe slots. The mainboard decision will be mainly driven by the validation of the 4GB memory modules I will use. Other than this I don't want to spend money for 1000 power phases, multiple network adapters or funky colors.

A good point is the grapics card. A cheaper one should do fine. For drawing Ansys models there will be CAD/Inventor involved. Is there a significant driver advantage of Nvidia or Ati known?

Thank you for your comment.

Edit: And thank you for the link.
I just found a document about Ansys 11.0 where they stated that scaling above 2 cores is not very good.
Your document indicates that in Ansys 12 above 4 cores is a drop in performance scaling and they used the distributed Ansys solvers. It seems that it comes down to me asking what licenses we can use - if distributed Ansys is included at all.