Gadgetory

okay so you're looking to get into computer-aided design or CAD but you're not quite sure what kind of a system that you need do you really need one of those multi-thousand dollar workstations stuffed with pricey professional-grade hardware or can you scrape by with consumer gear to find out we loaded up SolidWorks his website and looked at their suggested system requirements which were basically useless so then we took it a step further and asked SolidWorks to provide a license and nvidia to provide some of their Quadro graphics cards which they both graciously provided and we resolved to test it ourselves today's video is brought to you by ZOTAC their mech one PC is an ultra slim desktop built for gaming featuring a sleek robotic styled design check it out now at the link below let's get this out of the way right off the bat SolidWorks can be run on lower end hardware a laptop with a core i5 CPU integrated graphics and eight gigs of RAM will actually get the job done just fine if you're making single parts or small assemblies let's say up to around ten parts or so in fact I go as far as to say that it'll be plenty to get you through engineering one thousand three but you won't get much further than that the performance won't be optimal and while on a desktop running a simulation or a render for a day isn't going to be an issue hitting a laptop with a hundred percent load for 20 hours at a time could end very poorly in fact that's how Alex the writer of this episode lost his first laptop back when he was in school so you will need a desktop at some point but there's a ton of information out there about how that desktop should be configured and it ranges from pretty good - super outdated all the way to downright misleading so to cut through the BS we did a bunch of testing to give you an idea of what kind of experience you can expect with different classes of hardware we used both spec view perf which gives you an accurate look at CPU and GPU performance while manipulating a model and a render of this alpha cool 360 radiator to give us a feel for rendering performance we'll discuss different GPU choices first since a small misstep here could easily cause you to pay a high price for terrible performance on that subject NVIDIA GeForce lineup might look pretty good on paper or when compared to intel's integrated graphics for example but once you line it up against AMD's rx 580 and Vega line up they get completely stomped at times the real-world performance between the two is actually you Julie similar to what you might expect with a gtx 1070 being within spitting distance of uh vega 56 and so on and so forth but this changes dramatically when you throw contours and shaded edges into the mix which for some reason completely tanked the consumer grade GeForce drivers with all of that said team red shouldn't act too high and mighty here because big and hot Vega 64 is impressive lead melts away immediately when you pull out the big guns or rather the really small guns this is the entry level and power sipping quadrille p1000 that stomped all over all but the highest end consumer cards and then from there the quad Rose which also have extra features like real view rendering continue their dominance thanks to their superior driver pathway like the p2000 a $600 card was able to beat out the Titan V which is a $3,000 card and a prosumer one at that the only real oddity here was that the P 5000 and the P 6,000 ended up beating the GP 100 maybe this was thanks to our particular workload favoring higher clock speeds over higher memory bandwidth with all that said not everyone can afford a thousand plus dollars for a mid tier quad row so our budget recommendation is an rx 580 if you're a student who plans to mostly game and occasionally solidworks it up you'll be really happy with its excellent bang for the buck but if you're doing any kind of professional work you need to get a Quadro the sweet spot seems to be the P 4000 it's relatively affordable and its performance allows you to create massive models with 500 plus components in 4k without drops in framerate with that said if your firm wants to throw some of that sweet sweet engineering money your way a P 5000 will tear through just about anything that you could throw at it as a side note here by the way SolidWorks doesn't support multiple GPUs so SLI won't give you any benefit whatsoever moving on to CPU options for modeling in theory all you should be concerned about is single core performance meaning that the core i7 8700 K should be the winner and in the real world it is and buy a lot now that's not to say that multi-threaded muscle will go completely unused though for simulations and for rendering the time to complete goes down nearly directly proportionally to the number of course that you can throw at the problem and this makes Intel's Core I 9s and Xeon W's and AMD's thread ripper chips look pretty attractive for folks who plan on doing this kind of work regularly with that being said if you're doing lots of rendering it will probably be in keyShot or blender and simulations will probably be taken care of by abacus or Altair hyper works in which case high multi-threaded performance yeah it's still definitely a good thing but a core i9 is out of the question because intel's h EDT lineup lacks support for ECC memory xeon W's will have a hard time justifying their trade-off in terms of price and thread Ripper single threaded performance makes it far less appealing besides for most CAD designers these types of workloads can easily be set to run after hours and usually with help from other nodes on the network bottom line then unless you're trying to build a one-size-fits-all type of machine in which case you might have to spring for a Xeon w4 modeling the core i7 8700 k is still our recommendation as for AMD's Rison processors they're just unfortunately not an optimal choice for SolidWorks and 8700 K in our testing with a quadrille P 5000 scored eight percent better than an r7 1800 x with a Quadro piece 6000 and the 1800 X also losses in multi-threaded workloads as for system memory you're going to need 16 gigs ran as a minimum but you won't need more than that until you're working with models that are well over 500 parts in size and as for SSDs we found that nvme or obtain SSDs didn't have an appreciable impact on performance beyond how quickly your model will load though as a reminder here we were really focused on modeling rather than simulation performance so in summary then if we were to recommend a computer for SolidWorks we consider the best bang for the buck budget workstation right now to be an intel core i7 8700 k a quadrille p 4,000 16 gigs of ram and a 512 gig SSD placed in whatever case is quiet with great airflow so for our workstation which will be keeping together we've got a silverstone fto for now when and if entry-level 6-core coffee lake Zeon's show up they could change our recommendation here depending on pricing but for the time being they don't exist so they're not an option now if you want to scale our build down you can save a buck with a core i5 8400 but I wouldn't go much lower and you can swap out that P 4000 with ap1000 or a P 2000 as your budget allows if you want to scale our build up however because maybe you convinced your boss that well time is money you know and he or she gave you a blank check for a build then you will get some more benefit all the way up to the top end like yeah Xeon w21 95 which is the 18 core equivalent to the core on an Extreme Edition and a Quadro p6 thousands so if for whatever reason you've got that option then go for it not because it actually makes a ton of sense we talked about that already but rather because that's sick hardware and if you're allowed to buy it you should do it speaking of doing things if your job is to like do stuff you're a small business owner or a freelancer and you're looking for an accounting solution 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