We wanted to see if adding a second processor to a HP workstation would substantially improve performance. We are using AnnaWood's model as a performance measure.

Here are the system specifics:

SW2007 sp 5.0
HP xw6400 workstation
Nvidia Quadro FX1500 graphics card
XPP 32 SP2
Intel Xeon 5130 2.0 GHz Wood crest
3GB RAM DDR2 667
5000x chipset
150 GB SATA 7200 rpm HDD
1333 fsb

We used Anna Woods model as the bench mark. We did the ctrl-Q torebuild the model. With one processor it took 152.44 seconds.

We increased the memory from 2GB to 4Gb (yes 1 GB isn't beingused), added a 2nd processor (same as the 1st) and rebuilt the samemodel. With a 2nd processor and more memory, the computer took149.47 seconds. A mere 3 second improvement.

Checked the solidworks process to ensure the process took advantageof the 4 cores. It does.

During the rebuild the processors hit a peak usage of approximately70%.

Why didn't we see a better improvement in performance?

A majority of the features took longer to rebuild, after the 2ndprocessor was added. Especially the #8-32 tapped hole. ONeprocessor= 25.77 seconds. Two processors = 29.36 seconds. Why?
SolidworksAdministration