Hi Guys,
I need some help here as I am not so up to speed on computer specs for SW as I used to be.
I want to spec up some machines for my engineering team as ours are in need of replacement. We currently have Dell T3400 machines, Core2 Quad Q9300 2.5GHz, 8GB RAM, Nvidia Quadro FX 570. Two machines are XP 64bit, the other two are XP 32bit. The company I work for manufactures tipper trailers, so we are talking models with 1000 components, potentially more. Most of the modelling will be sheet metal and weldments, we dont do any surfacing.
At the moment it is really only myself using SolidWorks as we currently use Inventor for production, but this is being phased out as we move over to Solidworks. We are owned by another company who owns a few other trailer brands, and all the engineering sites are being set up to work the same. At the other sites they are using HP Z400 workstations, which IT have selected. I think from memory they work fairly well but I want to customise one of these to suit what we do, and hopefully IT will standardise the computers across the board to the specs chosen by the users (ie myself). IT want to standardise their equipment across the board so I dont think they will be moving away from HP as they have just changed a lot of Dell gear out for HP. So I need to spec up a HP machine.
The current problems I have from my machine including it choking up on large assemlies, though it probably doesnt help that we are working over a network. As part of the SW rollout we are moving to EPDM so this wont be a problem for us soon. I do set my Solidworks to perform as best it can with large assemblies (dont use Realview, less detail set in settings etc.).
We will also be using DriveWorks, but models are going to be generated on our server not from our workstations. We do the occasional Simulation, generally only done by myself. We would rarely do any photoview work although I would like to be able to do this on occassions for promotional material.
What I would really like is stable workstations, that can handle the bigger assemblies and still run other applications at the same time (Inventor or Autocad, Outlook, Excel - we run dual monitors and because we are moving from Inventor to SW, we need to redraw in SW while looking at Inventor models). Because we are owned by a big company controlled by one IT department, there are all the other normal IT applicaitons it needs to run as well.
My biggest question I guess, does SW still like fast processor speeds to run best? What is the best bang-for-buck Quadro graphics card now? I would prefer a mid-range graphics card to the more entry level cards we run now. The link below is the HP machines I have been looking at, seems the higher priced machines have slower processor speeds? Bit confused here.
Any advice is greatly appreciated
Thanks,
Dana
SolidworksAdministration