What computer resources does SolidWorks 2007 typically starve for?

We bought fairly high-end Dell workstations for CAD folks and they
seem to be hurting a little with performance.

They are Dual Xeon 3.0 Ghz 800mhz FSB, 2 Gig and a modest NVidia
graphics card. 7200 SATA drives.

It does not seem to be the Video card because once model is loaded
they can rotate reasonably fast.

It doesn't appear to be memory bound.

And Task Manager doesn't seem to show CPU bound either.

It may be I/O bound, I have not looked too close on that yet.

Is there a general rule of thumb for SolidWorks.

Which generally dominates?

Lots of Memory
Lots of CPU
Lots of RPM
Lots of Cache
Lots of GIPS (Graphics)

We can swap out the machines but possibly a top end graphics card or
15k drives might be a better investment.

 

Just off hand... your "modest" graphics cards is probably your Achiles
heel. Most VARs either sell workstation graphics cards or can put you in
touch with a vendor that does. Either of which may have a loaner/test card
they can lend you a few days for evaluation. You may not need a "top end"
card. Especially if the cards you are using are not open GL cards, a
mid-range workstation card will make a world of difference.

Unless you are doing lots of saving or massive assemblies, 15k drives
are not going to help enough to justify their cost.

SW is a RAM pig. Ram is at least as important as CPU.

 

It's the CPU.

The old "Netburst" Xeons were slow - and 3.0GHz wasn't near the top in
performance for that architecture.

The new Core2 Duo (or Xeon 51xx) CPUs are MUCH faster, even at slower
clock speeds.

A Dell Precision 390 with Core2Duo E6700 2.66 GHz CPU would be about
twice as fast as what you have now - the 2.93GHz X6800 even faster.
Should be able to get a nice config for around $2-2.5k. (These are
dual core CPUs, so there's no need to go to the more expensive Xeon
platform unless you need more than 4GB RAM)

 

What exactly makes you feel like they aren't up to snuff? If you can tell us
where the slow down appears to be, we have a lot better chance of figuring
out what would help.

Graphics cards are a religious issue. My own opinion is that midrange
SolidWorks approved cards are just fine and that you pay a lot of money for
not much improvement when you go to the higher end cards. Other people feel
that you can't spend too much on a graphics card. Using a gamer card is not
a good idea if you want to have multiple windows open.

Why do you say that? Are you quite sure you aren't getting into swap space?
Does the task manager show that you aren't using your 2 GB of RAM when you
see your slowdown? People who know more about PCs than I do say that the
task manager doesn't always give you the correct numbers, but I don't
remember now what they suggested to use. If your parts and assemblies are
pretty simple, perhaps you don't need more RAM, but I personally wouldn't
buy a machine with less than 4 GB. You might also find that you need to set
the 3GB switch (which involves adding a line to your boot.ini file).

SolidWorks usually doesn't gain much from having two CPUs or two cores. The
task manager will typically peg at 50% on a dual processor machines, meaning
that one of the processors is running full bore. If that is what you are
seeing, then you are CPU bound.

This is another religious issue. Some people, and I assume they are people
who work with a lot of different parts, assemblies or drawings in a day,
will go for the fastest possible disk drives. Other folks, who I assume work
with just a few parts, assemblies or drawings in a day, are inclined to buy
more mainstream drives, where you get a lot more GB for your buck. I have
usually been in the latter camp, but I spend a lot of time waiting for large
assemblies to load and am beginning to gravitate towards faster drives for
my next machine.

Yes, each release of SolidWorks expands its requirements to the maximum
available.

It depends on what kind of work you do.

Helps a lot if you are hitting swap space but doesn't help much if you
aren't. We haven't noticed that faster memory makes much difference, but
maybe we have other problems that are limiting us.

Better CPUs always help, but it isn't always clear which is better. Faster
clock cycles don't necessarily translate into faster SolidWorks, as jimsym
notes in his post. A second CPU or core helps when SolidWorks is pegging
one, so that you can use the other to do something else. It sometimes helps
inside SolidWorks too, and will help when rendering in PhotoWorks, but isn't
a big hitter otherwise.

As noted above, this may help quite a bit. On the other hand, you may be
throwing away a lot of money for not much improvement.

Do you mean on the drive(s)? I guess it would depend on the size of your
typical files.

From your comments above, it doesn't seem like this is much of a problem.

As I said above, it all depends on the work you do and where you see
SolidWorks being too slow.


Jerry Steiger
Tripod Data Systems
"take the garbage out, dear"

 

In my other long-winded reply, I forgot the most important point I wanted to
make. One of the other guys got a Dell 690 a couple of months ago. He was
really bummed to find that it was typically slower than his old machine, and
by quite a lot. He called in our IT guys, who spent some time working with
Dell and playing with the machine. They eventually brought it back in much
better running condition and he is pretty happy with it now. They never
really understood what the root cause was, but the improvement came when
they wiped the disk and rebuilt it with just the minimum required software
to make it run.

Jerry Steiger
Tripod Data Systems
"take the garbage out, dear"