WEBVTT

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okay so you're looking to get into computer-aided design or cad but you're

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not quite sure what kind of a system that you need do you really need one of

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those multi-thousand dollar workstations

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stuffed with pricey professional-grade hardware or can you scrape by with

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consumer gear to find out we loaded up

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solidworks's website and looked at their suggested system requirements

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which were basically useless so then we took it a step further and

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asked solidworks to provide a license and NVIDIA to provide some of their

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quadro graphics cards which they both graciously provided and we resolved to

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test it ourselves today's video is brought to you by zotac

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their mech one pc is an ultra slim desktop built for gaming featuring a

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sleek robotic style design check it out now at the link below

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let's get this out of the way right off the bat solidworks can be run on lower

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end hardware a laptop with a core i5 CPU

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integrated graphics and eight gigs of RAM will actually get the job done just

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fine if you're making single parts or small assemblies let's say up to around

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10 parts or so in fact i'd go as far as to say that it'll be plenty to get you

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through engineering 1003

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but you won't get much further than that the

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performance won't be optimal and while

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on a desktop running a simulation or a render for a day

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isn't going to be an issue hitting a laptop with a hundred percent load for

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20 hours at a time could end very poorly in fact that's how alex the writer of

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this episode lost his first laptop back when he was in school so you will need a

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desktop at some point but there's a ton

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of information out there about how that desktop should be configured and it

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ranges from pretty good to super outdated all the

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way to downright misleading so to cut

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through the bs we did a bunch of testing to give you an idea of what kind of

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experience you can expect with different classes of hardware we used both spec

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view perf which gives you an accurate look at CPU and GPU performance while

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manipulating a model and a render of this alphacool 360 radiator to give us a

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feel for rendering performance we'll discuss different GPU choices first

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since a small misstep here could easily cause you to pay a high price

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for terrible performance on that subject NVIDIA's g-force lineup

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might look pretty good on paper or when compared to Intel's integrated graphics

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for example but once you line it up against AMD's rx

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580 and vega lineup they get completely

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stomped at times the real world performance between the

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two is actually usually similar to what

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you might expect with a gtx 1070 being

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within spitting distance of a vega 56 and so on and so forth

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but this changes dramatically when you throw contours and shaded edges into the

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mix which for some reason completely tank the consumer-grade g-force drivers

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with all of that said team red shouldn't act too high and mighty here because

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big and hot vega 64's impressive lead melts

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away immediately when you pull out the big guns or rather the

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really small guns this is the entry

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level and power sipping quadro p1000

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that stomped all over all but the highest end consumer cards

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and then from there the quadros which also have extra features like real view

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rendering continue their dominance thanks to their superior driver pathway

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like the p2000 a 600 card was able to

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beat out the titan v which is a three

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thousand dollar card and a prosumer one at that

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the only real oddity here was that the p5000 and the p6000 ended up beating the

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gp100 maybe this was thanks to our particular workload favoring higher

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clock speeds over higher memory bandwidth

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with all of that said not everyone can afford a thousand plus dollars for a

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mid-tier quadro so our budget recommendation is an rx 580. if you're a

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student who plans to mostly game and occasionally solidworks it up you'll be

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really happy with its excellent bang for the buck

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but if you're doing any kind of professional work you need to get a

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quadro the sweet spot seems to be the p4000 it's relatively affordable and its

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performance allows you to create massive models with 500 plus components in 4k

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without drops in frame rate with that said if your firm wants to

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throw some of that sweet sweet engineering money your way a p5000 will

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tear through just about anything that you could throw at it

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as a side note here by the way solidworks doesn't support multiple gpus

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so sli won't give you any benefit whatsoever moving on to CPU options

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for modeling in theory all you should be

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concerned about is single core performance meaning that the core i7

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8700k should be the winner and in the

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real world it is and by a lot now that's

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not to say that multi-threaded muscle will go completely unused though for

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simulations and for rendering the time

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to complete goes down nearly directly

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proportionally to the number of cores that you can throw at the problem and

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this makes Intel's core i9s and xeon w's

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and AMD's Threadripper chips look pretty attractive for folks who plan on

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doing this kind of work regularly with that being said if you're doing

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lots of rendering it will probably be in keyshot or blender and simulations will

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probably be taken care of by abacus or altair hyperworks in which case high

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multi-threaded performance yeah it's still definitely a good thing but a core

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i9 is out of the question because Intel's hedt lineup lacks support for

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ecc memory xeon ws will have a hard time justifying

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their trade-off in terms of price and threadripper single-threaded

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performance makes it far less appealing

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besides for most cad designers these

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types of workloads can easily be set to run after hours and usually with help

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from other nodes on the network bottom line then unless you're trying to build

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a one-size-fits-all type of machine in which case you might have to spring for

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a zeon w for modeling the core i7 8700k is still

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our recommendation as for AMD's ryzen processors they're

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just unfortunately not an optimal choice for solidworks an 8700k in our testing

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with a quadro p5000 scored eight percent better than an r7

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1800 x with a quadro p6000

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and the 1800x also loses in multi-threaded workloads as for system

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memory you're going to need 16 gigs of RAM as a minimum but you won't need more

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than that until you're working with models that are well over 500 parts in

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size and as for ssds we found that NVMe or

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optane ssds didn't have an appreciable impact on performance beyond how quickly

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your model will load though as a reminder here we were really focused on

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modeling rather than simulation performance so in summary then if we

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were to recommend a computer for solidworks we consider the best bang for

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the buck budget workstation right now to be an Intel core i7 8700k a quadro p4000

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16 gigs of RAM and a 512 gig SSD placed

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in whatever case is quiet with great airflow so for our workstation which

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we'll be keeping together we've got a silverstone ft04

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now when and if entry level six core

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coffee lake xeons show up they could change our recommendation

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here depending on pricing but for the time being they don't exist so they're

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not an option now if you want to scale our build down you can save a buck with

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a core i5 8400 but i wouldn't go much lower and you can swap out that p4000

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with a p1000 or a p2000 as your budget

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allows if you want to scale our build up however because maybe you convinced your

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boss that well time is money you know

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and he or she gave you a blank check for a build then you will get some more

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benefit all the way up to the top end like a xeon w 2195 which is the 18 core

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equivalent to the core i9 extreme edition and a quadro p6000 so

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if for whatever reason you've got that option then go for it not because it

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actually makes a ton of sense we talked about that already but rather because

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that's sick hardware and if you're allowed to buy it

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you should do it speaking of doing things if your job is

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