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's 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
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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
10 parts or so in fact i'd go as far as to say that it'll be plenty to get you
through engineering 1003
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ranges from pretty good to super outdated all the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 alphacool 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's g-force 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 lineup they get completely
stomped at times the real world performance between the
two is actually usually similar to what
you might expect with a gtx 1070 being
within spitting distance of a 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 tank the consumer-grade g-force drivers
with all of that said team red shouldn't act too high and mighty here because
big and hot vega 64's 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 quadro p1000
that stomped all over all but the highest end consumer cards
and then from there the quadros 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 three
thousand dollar card and a prosumer one at that
the only real oddity here was that the p5000 and the p6000 ended up beating the
gp100 maybe this was thanks to our particular workload favoring higher
clock speeds over higher memory bandwidth
with all of that said not everyone can afford a thousand plus dollars for a
mid-tier quadro 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 p4000 it's relatively affordable and its
performance allows you to create massive models with 500 plus components in 4k
without drops in frame rate with that said if your firm wants to
throw some of that sweet sweet engineering money your way a p5000 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
8700k should be the winner and in the
real world it is and by 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 cores that you can throw at the problem and
this makes Intel's core i9s and xeon w's
and AMD's Threadripper 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 hyperworks 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 hedt lineup lacks support for
ecc memory xeon ws will have a hard time justifying
their trade-off in terms of price and threadripper 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 zeon w for modeling the core i7 8700k is still
our recommendation as for AMD's ryzen processors they're
just unfortunately not an optimal choice for solidworks an 8700k in our testing
with a quadro p5000 scored eight percent better than an r7
1800 x with a quadro p6000
and the 1800x also loses in multi-threaded workloads as for system
memory you're going to need 16 gigs of RAM 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
optane 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 8700k a quadro p4000
16 gigs of RAM and a 512 gig SSD placed
in whatever case is quiet with great airflow so for our workstation which
we'll be keeping together we've got a silverstone ft04
now when and if entry level six core
coffee lake xeons 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 p4000
with a p1000 or a p2000 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 a xeon w 2195 which is the 18 core
equivalent to the core i9 extreme edition and a quadro p6000 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
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