Although the ThinkStation models just came out, I was wondering if anyone had any experience running Ansys or similar FEA programs, as well as Fluent CFD on any of them? I have a relative who relies on these heavily and his company recently approved some new workstations, however they are undecided as to brand and model. Not sure about any existing IT acquisitions contracts, but this line seems to be an open option. If anyone does have any experience, could you state the model, specs, etc? Any compatibility/performance issues? Much appreciated.

A ThinkStation would handle Ansys Fluent, Ansys: Ansys and all other Ansys products just fine but the basic configuration lenovo offers will not do it, you would need to have Quad Core processor, at least 3GB of memory, nVidia Quadro FX1700 or FX4600 (there is one video adapter nVidia released in between these two which lenovo is not listing for some reason) and SAS storage with 10K rpm or 15K rpm drive.

You may note that the final price will be closer to similar offerings from IBM, HP and other manufacturers, just so to let you know if budget was the reason your friend's company was leaning towards ThinkStations.

Thanks! I'll pass the info along, although truthfully my relative is just plain excited about getting a new workstation of any kind at this moment. Sometimes I wonder just how much "work" gets done on these machines... back in the day the same relative brought home a *cough* suspiciously unlocked *cough* version of the full Wolfenstein 3D that they were passing around at the company. It'd just come out and I always wondered what exactly was going on there