OK, I have been tasked with building a Solidworks station at work and there is one thing thta I cannot seem to gleam from their website, would it be better bang for the buck to sink a shit ton into the GPU or CPU... is the actual rendering GPU or CPU bound?
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OK, I have been tasked with building a Solidworks station at work and there is one thing thta I cannot seem to gleam from their website, would it be better bang for the buck to sink a shit ton into the GPU or CPU... is the actual rendering GPU or CPU bound?
You probably won't be doing all that much rendering in Solidworks.
The most important thing is to have a lot of RAM. As much as you can fit.
CPUs are all really fast these days. Unless you're doing massive simulations on massive objects, go for the price/performance sweet spot. Having the max isn't going to be worth it. You can get a fancy Quadro or similar graphics card if you want to have the best realtime OpenGL renders, although consumer cards these days can certainly do justice to it. Otherwise, the GPU means very little.
A mid range Mac Pro is a fine benchmark. Windows can't utilize very much RAM, so I guess 2GB or whatever is all you need.
It does really basic low quality previews, so even a mid-range 4 year old card will do wonders. And it's not particularly complex on the CPU front either.
the engeneer tells me that the thing takes over a half-hour to render and even longer when he makes the thing do small units ofr pin-point accuracy when the design is sent to mill...he wants it faster....the box he is on now has a quadroFX and 2 gig ram...
Sounds like he has a large model. The more vertices that can be stored in RAM, the better. Put more RAM in it, and if need be have him save his render outputs to a RAM-disk. If XP supports more RAM than 2GB, get that done. Having more GPU is clearly not going to help since he already has a good one, and more CPU is probably not going to buy you that much either.
the engeneer tells me that the thing takes over a half-hour to render and even longer when he makes the thing do small units ofr pin-point accuracy when the design is sent to mill...he wants it faster....the box he is on now has a quadroFX and 2 gig ram...
Then ignore my advice. My experience is clearly lightyears short of what he does with it. Sorry!