Sluggish Solidworks

I need help livening up my solidworks performance.

I'm running SW 2005 sp 3.0. with a Radeon 9600, AMD Athlon 64 2.4ghz,
4gb ram, Windows XP pro SP 2.

For starters, SW 2005 with 4gb is a lot more sluggish than SW 2004 with
1gb memory. I notice this most when I try to rotate views.

Both SW 2005 and SW 2004 run slower with the /3gb switch enabled, but SW
2005 slows to a crawl. My times for ship in a bottle:
SW 2005 /3gb: 46 seconds for 10 rebuilds
SW 2004 /3gb: 35 seconds for 50 rebuilds
SW 2005: 30 seconds for 50 rebuilds
SW 2004: 30 seconds for 50 rebuilds

I had a similar problem when I "upgraded" my video driver, I had to roll
back to the old driver.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
--
J Kimmel

www.metalinnovations.com

"Cuius testiculos habes, habeas cardia et cerebellum." - When you have
their full attention in your grip, their hearts and minds will follow.

 

The first and most obvious problem is that you are using a gamming card
to do 3D CAD. You need to get a fully certified video card before, but
if not make sure that your driver version is 8.121-050322a per the
SolidWorks site.

There are also a lot of atricles where people are having problems with
XP SP2 and AMD 64.

 

Can you provide a link to these articles?

KM

 

get rid of the radeon card. It's the bottleneck.

ca

 

The first step is to find out whether it is you or SW. To do this run
some benchmarks. You will find some benchmarks at:

http://www.engtran.com/SWBM001.html

Post your results here. STAR2.1 should be sufficient to tell whether
your system is up to snuff as the video card is out of the loop for
that test. If you get good STAR result and not so good SIB results then
you probably are looking at a decent CAD video card in the future. Also
run Patbench at 12 iterations and watch task manager. If SW crashes at
around 2.6 Gb or more then your 3Gb switch is working.

First baseline your system. Then go through it using a guide like XPTC
(which can be found with Google). Benchmark again to see what
improvements may have occured.

I will say that SW2005 benchmarks quite a bit slower than 2004 in my
experience.

Also post SIB results using the procedure found at the above website.
It will help determine whether it is video card or something else.

 

Glad I'm not one of them. 2004, 2005 and 2006 all run fine on my setup.

Here is a list of problems after one year:

1. Bad power supply (replaced on warranty)
2. Over heated RAM ($15 fan to fix, no sticks actually went bad) after
installing 2GB in addition to the 2Gb already there. This required
reinstalling XP because the RAM flaked out and corrupted some things that
couldn't be healed. SP2 was installed with the clean install.
3. We did have lots of problems with a Dell when SP2 installed itself.

Note that 1 and 2 were very difficult to diagnose. With 3 we haven't heard a
peep from Dell. Moral of the story, there are lots of problems in the world
and 50% of them have the MSoft logo attached to them.


SWX-VAR-JP wrote:

 

Thanks for the suggestions. It turns out my Nvidia Quadro got swapped
out during some troubleshooting and never got re-installed.

--
J Kimmel

www.metalinnovations.com

"Cuius testiculos habes, habeas cardia et cerebellum." - When you have
their full attention in your grip, their hearts and minds will follow.