CAD Workstations for SolidWorks

With the advances in computer technology you no longer need to spend mega bucks to get a decent workstation that will run Solidworks and won't have your design engineers cursing and swearing because it takes too long to update a fillet.

What should you buy?

Unfortunately, there is no simple answer to this question. Selecting a workstation specification for Solidworks depends heavily on how and what you plan to do with SolidWorks. This compiled with the constantly evolving PC market, makes it difficult to know what to buy. If you ask your SolidWorks sales rep they will probably direct you to the hardware requirements page on the SolidWorks website which doesn't help that much. The reasons they do this is they cannot recommend one brand over another as that would not be fair to all suppliers. If they did recommend a particular piece of hardware or a graphics card and for some reason it didn't worth with their setup then you'd be annoyed and on the phone complaining to them straight away. The other reasons is they guys do have the time to spend testing and trying all the new products in the market to see what works and what doesn't. Thirdly, everybody uses Solidworks for a different purposes so everyone has different requirments.

Having been in the design field for many years, I've been using SolidWorks since 2001 on all kinds of machines. Over time I have developed a pretty good idea of what works and what's a waste of money. What it all boils down to is 3 things;

1) CPU (Central Processor Unit)

2) Ram (Memory)

3) Storage (Hard Drive)

1. The CPU

The CPU is the core of any computer and is the component that does most of the work. The faster the processor the quicker your computer can process data. What does this mean for Solidworks? Features can be applied and will rebuilt faster, scope for bigger more complex models and general operation is smoother (faster). Due to the development of CPU's hitting a wall in the last few years the fastest CPU's you can get are roughly around 3.0Ghz. In response to this, CPU manufacturers went back to the drawing board, spent many hours and millions of dollars and came up with a brilliant solution of "use more cores", That why their paid the big bucks. Nowdays a dual core CPU is pretty much standard, with quad, 8 and even 12 core chips becoming more afforable. High end workstation are even starting to use multiple CPU's to boost the speed even further. eg 2 x 8-core CPU's gives you 16 cores or ram processing power! grrrrr.

By using multiple cores the software developers could make use of multiple threads to share the load accross the cores. The down side of this is that programs need to be written in a particular way to work with multiple cores and the multiple cores need to be managed which is not an easy process. As a senior developer at Apple put it, "Its really hard".

Multithreading being realtively new requires software to be written to take advantage of the additional processing power. To rewrite an application to utilise multiple cores is a big job and as such a lot of existing software does not take advantage of multithreading. Unfortnately Solidworks is one of them. However, newer parts of Solidworks are multithreaded and can take advantage of the multicore CPU's. I have show the applications that are single and multithreaded below in a table as I hope I will be able to add more features as time goes by.

If your not using Simulation or Photoview then it would make sence to buy the fastest single core you can afford, however in normal operation of Solidworks you never really stress the CPU to its limits so your not really going to notice massive performance increases between a 2.6Ghz and a 3.0Ghz CPU. As the price of CPUs goes up exponentially as they get faster your better off going mid range and use the extra money else where (like a a faster hard drive). However iIf you're right into FEA Simulations or you do a lot of photo realistic rendering with Photoview 360 then a multicore CPU is going to slash your simulation and rendering times dramatically and is a much better choice the a stupidly quick single core CPU.

Page 2 - Memory >