Solidworks performance?

Hi, everybody,

I know that this question was probably already asked, but I'll ask again.
Solidworks 2006 sp5.0 is installed.

When working in assembly mode adding more than 50 parts in an assembly,
the performance is really going down, with very often crashes.
Working in drawing mode becomes impossible, refreshing of assembly views
takes forever...

To tell you honestly, very often I think to go back on Autocad...

My question is, is it really hardware, or also this version is unstable?

The hardware that is used:
Pentium 4 CPU 2.80 GHz, 512 Mb of RAM
Graphic card: ATI RADEON 9600


Thanks for the answers.

 

Your computer is simply... not up to the task. It barely meets absolute
minimum system requirements. More than anything it looks as if you'd
benefit greatly from more ram. Then an appropriate graphics card.

 

I agree. Up the RAM to at least 1 GB and replace that video card. I
personally like the nVidia line better than ATI, although I had ATI in
a laptop for 2 years that worked great - I just didn't have a pretty
graphics picture because it didn't have full OpenGL capabilities.

In the meantime, make sure you don't a lot of crap running in the
background (check Task Manager for a list of processes running) so you
can free up the RAM SolidWorks needs.

Good luck,

Steve O

 

Around the office we treat 1GB as the bare minimum these days for
Solidworks. We aim for 2GB for most systems and 3GB or higher for the
heavier use systems.

NVidia has been working way better for us the past while with 2007 than
the ATI cards.

And things run much better when HyperThreading is turned off on the
Intel chips.

Just a couple of things that so far we've learned here that do make a
difference in how fast and how well things run.

 

I remember doing quite well with a Pentium 166, 300 Mb Ram and a
Synergy II graphics card. Oh, well, that was SW 96 when crashes were
unusual and tech support was direct to Concord.

We are running a 2.8GHz acceptably for mundane jobs although large
assembly work and esp. drawings are done elsewhere. So focus on RAM and
graphics card. 2Gb is cheap and well worth it. NVidia seems much more
appropriate to me than the Radeons too. Even before doing that set up
the 3Gb switch. Even with little RAM it seems to help. And make sure
you set your pagefile min and max to at lest 2Gb.

 

I have an assembly with 23000 components (500 different parts). my
computer is p4 3.0Ghz, 1GB RAM, Graphic card: Nvidea FX500 128MB,
Solidworks 2006 sp5.0
Change your Graphic card, I already had problems with this (Graphic
card: ATI RADEON 9600)

RICARDO ROSSI