It appears that with Catia V5R18 SP4, Vista x64 is officially supported.  However, when I go to the list of certified workstations (http://www.3ds.com/support/workstations-peripherals/windows/certified-workstations-list/), no Vista x64 configurations exist.  Did I miss something?

What I'm really looking for is a recommendation on the best performing configuration for Catia V5R18 x64 (on the Intel platform).  Is Vista x64 the best OS for the Intel platform?  If it's better than XP x64, why?  Is Catia multi-threaded and able to take advantage of multiple CPUs?  If so, how many CPUs is optimal?  How much memory can Catia take advantage of?  Can Catia benefit from very fast (and very expensive memory)?  What are the best graphics cards / subsystems?  Is a RAID 0 disk configuration a good idea (or RAID 10 for fault tolerance)?

So in short, if money were no object (and, yes, it always is), what would be the most optimal Intel-based configuration for a Catia V5R18 x64 system?  Thanks very much.

CATIA is marginally multi-threaded. Specifically, only DMU Navigator (the Tesselation Process) and FEA will make use of more than one CPU.

As for the best configuration, RAM RAM RAM. Money no object, 12GB. Then Graphics Card. I don't know that you really need one with 512MB of graphics memory, but 128 is definitely worthwhile.

Jim, thanks very much for the response.  Any thoughts regarding the other hardware components I mentioned?  Also, any specific thoughts on specific graphics cards beyond just memory?  This is an area where one can spend a couple hundred or a couple thousand dollars.  Thanks again.

Toms hardware just did a workstation graphics card shootout.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/FireGL-Quadro-Workstation,1995.html

I think most cards nowadays are at least 256MB. Lots are 512MB and 1GB and the ultra high end are 2GB.

Hope this helps,

Great article on 64 bit OS'es here:

http://www.bit-tech.net/bits/2007/10/16/64-bit_more_than_just_the_ram/1

Exerpt:

"All major operating systems these days come with a 64-bit version. Windows Vista is considerably more advanced in 64-bit features than Windows XP x64, it is worth noting, but both are what are known as hybrids. You can also add Mac OS-X (Tiger and Leopard) to this list. Each OS provides both a 32-bit and a 64-bit execution path, allowing both instructions simultaneously and thus not requiring specially coded 64-bit versions of all programs. "

Graphics Cards: either nVidea Quadro or ATI Radeon series. See the DS Certified Hardware list (http://www.3ds.com/support/workstations-peripherals/) for more information.

Thanks to everyone for the responses.  We're going to benchmark our current XP 32-bit systems and see if we can't get improved performance by moving to Vista x64.  This information will help us put together our test system.