SW 2003 + lo-end graphics card?

If anyone has any experience on running Solidworks 2003 (or similar) on
PC with a cheap graphics card like GeForce6600/256MB/PCI-E, I'd like to
hear about it. Or should I spend 150 EUR (USD 200) more and invest in
Quadro FX 540 PCI-E? The models that I plan to work with will be pretty
simple.

PC: Athlon XP 3200+ / 1 GB RAM.

JL

 

The GeForce cards have always seemed to work well. Some people apply a
hack called SoftQuadro in order to emulate a Quadro. That being said
there are limitations and no guarantees that it will work well
especially as SW gui gets more and more sophisticated. If you are
doing work for money I would strongly suggest the FX540 or similar
listed card.

 

For 5 years I've been using SW on an old Dell office computer hand me down.
(Alway confused me - the company is willing to spend $23,000 + on CAD/CAM
software, plus the yearly service fees - but give us a computer that they no
longer want in the upstairs office to run it on, and refuse to spend the
$1000.00 or so to get us a decent worstation - @#!#$% Mangement!?)

Dell 433Mhz PII, 349Mb RAM, 16Mb ATI Video card. Joke, Hah?
SolidWorks runs (If slowly!) Have a few assemblies running up to 30 or 40
components, have some mediocre complexity lofted components - It works -
just takes a lot of patience!

Just hit the end of the line with this baby, though - the latest version of
Surcam we just got won't even load. We called tech support, told them what
we were running, and the guy laughed. Kinda embarassing even telling him -
HahHah! Feel that, rather than buying us a decent computer, we'll probably
be cancelling our subscriptions. Once again - @#!#$% Mangement!?

I just bought an Alien Notebook (- 3.4GhzP4, 2Gb RAM, 256MB NVidia Quadro -)
for myself. What a difference!

So you can see how litlle SW will actually run on, but is it worth the
frustration (lots and lotsa frustration at times)? Fork out the extra cake
is my advice.

 

Sounds like they don't put much value on what you do for the company. Last
time I looked, It's the guy's doing the design and manufacturing that
generate the revenue, not the paper pushers up front.

The company is obiously run by idiots. This is usually a very short lived
scenario, followed by a liqudation sale.

Mark

 

Hear hear!
My company was the same until they started needing drawings for a £40,000
machine very quickly.
When they saw that each drawing was taking a awful long time to get up on
the screen, let alone print, they finally gave in and spent some money on
some spanking new systems.
Management are ok, it's the stupid directors who need to get their brains
fixed.
They were getting the management and the service engineers some lovely new
cars and expecting the design team to use crappy PC's!
Idiots!
Show your company these replies and maybe then they just might "manage" to
see sense!, lol

 

Nah - what'd happen is I'd get an attitude for bad talking mangement.

 

Dell 433Mhz PII, 349Mb RAM, 16Mb ATI Video card. Joke, Hah?

Just tried the ship in the bottle test for shits and giggles - 265.??
seconds for 50 iterations. What a screamer, Hah?

Came up with 42 seconds for my new AlienWare laptop