Solidworks Station

[diluzio91]

Anyone have reccomendations for a solidworks work station? I have a customer who is running a 4 year old station and wants to update. He doesn't know current specs, and i've never worked with solid works before, so im clueless. My thoughts and questions so far.

I'm thinking a 1366 socket board for the following reasons.
1) More ram slots
2) Availibility of multi socket boards
3) ability to step up to a 6 core i7/ xenon processors

For ram i was told 32 gb was a reasonable amount, but i don't know

For hard drives i was thinking some kind of raid to help seek times, but i'm not sure what would be best. i was thinking 3 way raid 0 would be best with a large mirror disk, but i don't know if you would need a dedicated raid card for that.

Questions

Would a large solid state be a good idea.

Would it be better to get a high end consumer graphics card, or a professional series card like the quadro or fire pro.

Thanks guys, its always cool to be building something for a local buisness. :D

[xr4man]

i would suggest the following:


fastest dual core processor available
as much ram as possible
either 10000rpm sata 6 hard drive or ssd with a hdd for storage (solidworks takes a long time to load so help here is good)
for video, you need a workstation card. either a quadro or amd's equivalent, but quadros are best.

you can go to the solidworks website and get a list of compatible cards.

i'd say the single most expensive part of the build will be the video card. don't scrimp here, it will show if you do.

[crenn]

Dual core at least
4GB of RAM MINIMUM, 8GB of RAM recommended for smallish designs, 32GB could be the in the realm of possibility
A SSD for OS and Applications including solidworks, and a 7200rpm HDD for storage.
I have used my 9800GTX+ GPU before, but solidworks is designed for workstation cards.

[OvRiDe]

What!?!?! No Bulldozer!?!? I mean what the hell.. it has 8 cores! :rolleyes:
:twisted:

Beware that just because a motherboard has a 1366 socket, doesn't mean you can put a XEON processor on it. As far as I know the only "desktop" board that supports the 1366 XEON is the EVGA SR-2 board, and it has 2 of them on it. Also most 1366 socket "desktop" boards or consumer level boards only support up to 24GB of RAM. (6 sets of 4GB DIMMS). The SR-2 and maybe one or two others support all the way up to 48GB of RAM.

[xr4man]

i wouldn't worry too much about the processor. solid works is mainly a video and ram hog. so there's no need to go for an over the top server processor or anything.

[Twigsoffury]

You better dump 3/4 of the budget for the video card if your messing with solid works.

That program RAPES gpu memory lol

I'd probably shoot for some of these

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814133324


But i mean if you really want to Bedazzle his ass with a over the top computer (the only way i roll damnit)

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814195094

Throw down with a 4 monitor span and he'll sh@# his pants.

[Diamon]

I think you're overestimating the system requirements, I've never had any problems with SolidWorks on my system. A quadcore i7, a gtx 560ti and 8gb ram should be more then enough. Unless you're building very extreme 3D representations.

[Twigsoffury]

Unless you're building very extreme 3D representations.

don't be limiting the inspirational abilities of his client with sub par hardware.

[/sarcasm]

[diluzio91]

eerm. from what was described to me he's dealing with models that are millions and millions of points.

[Diamon]

Ask him to load up his largest model and take a screenshot of the system performance tab.

[Kayin]

Ask him to load up his largest model and take a screenshot of the system performance tab.

This.

Also, never put anything mission critical on SSDs. Any failure and they're unrecoverable.