I'm sure this has been asked before...

....but would dual processors be of benefit to Solidworks? We're getting
ready to start looking at purchasing a new system, and I'd like to know if
anyone is seeing a performance increase from a "dualie". 8`) TIA

 

To my knowledge it is less than 10% improvement. If you do rendering I know
that Photoworks does have quite a bit of improvement with a "dualie".

 

Unless you do other things (email, word processing, etc.) while in SW and SW
is really using the CPU (FEA. photoworks) the gains do not justify the cost.
I recently spoke to Greg Jankowski from SW and he stated installing a second
hard drive dedicated to virtual memory was one of the greatest payoffs for
performance per cost that most users overlook.

Keith Streich

 

Hmmm--that's interesting. Can you offer any further specifics? I'm not
clear on how (or why) this would help. Also--does HD#2 need to be anything
special?

 

Well, what addons are you using? If you are using addon's like PW or
FEA often,.. they should be worth it.
If you are "not using addons" than the benefit for just SW alone is nil.

If you are using other apps along with SW often, 2 or more cpu's should
help but the balance of cost rewards is marginal.

As someone mentioned, they offer a small margin of performance increase
with normal use so if you do not use addons or the use of other apps
along with SW, the trade off with the cost is minimal.

Otherwise, invest in more memory, a faster harddrive and a higher end
graphics card or if on a network, faster O/I connections.

...

 

I find this interesting as well because most of my data is all in system
memory (not swapping) or not virtual memory (swapping) so a extra hdrive
dedicated to virtual memory (swapping) is not going to help me or most
users at all.

This most likely has to do with users pushing more data than what the
system memory can handle or they are swapping to the hdrive (virtual
memory)? Also, this may be a networking issue or swapping data in/out
via the network?

Most of these issues would/should go away if MicroSoft made a decent OS
or if SW Corp was not dependent on M$!?

...

 

We do not work off of our hard drives we don't have a PDM system. Would a
second drive really help if we aren't really saving much to our harddrives
anyway. How big of a hard drive are we talking and how fast.

 

We do not work off of our hard drives we don't have a PDM system. Would a
second drive really help if we aren't really saving much to our harddrives
anyway. How big of a hard drive are we talking and how fast.

 

I'm running dual xeon 3.06 w/hyperthreading enabled at home. While I
don't see any direct benefit to SoiledWorks(sp intentional), if you
are running any other services or applications, there is a benefit in
dedicating one CPU to SoiledWorks and the other to background
tasks/services. Rendering pegs all four cpu meters.

If given the choice, get every last drop of power you can.

 

You'd better buy AMD 64-bit processor. Much more faster with new Win XP-64
and the newest CAD programs.........

 

He was talking about how to increase performance if you didn't have 2 Gigs
on board. As models of assemblies become more and more complex, virtual
memory is becoming more of a factor until MS goes beyond a 3 Gig limit (I
thinks it's 3 with XP pro, but you have to set a switch in boot.ini). He
said a small, fast, cheap drive would make all the difference in the world
(10 Gigs or so). His next article (January) is moving to Cadalyst (from
Cadence) because of the merger and will address this performance issue.

Keith

 

This makes absolutely no sense to me. If you are hitting swap space at all,
no matter how fast your disk is, you are going to be slowing down a lot.
Buying more RAM is the answer, not a small, fast hard disk.

Having said that, I still run into problems even though I have 1.5GB of RAM.
Sometimes (say when trying to do a STEP translation of a relatively large
assembly), SW will tell me it can't get any memory, even though I am at less
than 1.5GB and have an additional 1.5GB of swap space available.

Jerry Steiger
Tripod Data Systems

 

Jerry

I think this is the same problem as the one I ran into when trying to render
some pretty large pic's.
MS can't handle more then 2 gigs of ram/application.....in reality somewhere
between 1,5 to 1,7 GB. I have 2Gig ram on both my machines and I hit the
roof at about 1,5-1,7 >Gig ...then Sw tells me it doesn't obtain enough
memory....and I almost taired my hair off before I understood what was
happening.... many thanks to Edward T Eaton who helped me off......but
that's the limit I believe

Krister L

 

I've seen that same memory limit, 1.7mb, while trying to import
very large IGS models (last occurence was with sw2001
or 2001+). A general Windows limit, I suppose.
It doesn't seem that physical memory is relevant to
the problem.

bill

 

It is a "per process" limitation of 2 GB. If you use Win XP, I believe that
you can set a 3 GB switch to allow up to 3 GB of memory per process.

 

Yes, you can set the 3GB switch, and it really works if you have the
physical RAM. I am not sure about the virtual memory, though - we will try
to test that sometime this month, I think.
Just remember - do not enable the switch without getting the patch first!
XP, SP1 will not reboot at all if the /3GB modification has been made
without also doing the patch. There was a thread on this back in October
that gives explicit detail on exactly what to do.

 

As I mentioned earlier, Greg Jankowski's article will be address performance
issues in this months Cadalyst, including this 3 GB switch. On a side note,
the next version of XP (Windows XP 64) will be able to access 16 GB of
memory on board and 16 TB of virtual memory. I remember the days when 640
KB was huge and an extra 1 MB on an expansion card was high end, back then
people would have ask what GB meant, not to mention TB!

Keith

 

OK, I was mislead. He doesn't have an article in this month's (January
2004) Cadalyst and his online article in Cadalyst is about using toolbox on
a network. I was hoping his performance list would be documented soon for
all to review. I would list them myself in this newsgroup, but my notes
were rather messy and specific for my needs.

Sorry for the misinformation,
Keith Streich

 

OK, I was mislead. He doesn't have an article in this month's (January
2004) Cadalyst and his online article in Cadalyst is about using toolbox on
a network. I was hoping his performance list would be documented soon for
all to review. I would list them myself in this newsgroup, but my notes
were rather messy and specific for my needs.

Sorry for the misinformation,
Keith Streich

 

Keith,

Could you post a link to the Toolbox on the network article.
I can't seem to find it.

Thanks,

Aaron