Dear SolidWorks Community,
We are currently encountering significant performance bottlenecks with SolidWorks 2023 / 2017 in a high-demand design environment. Our projects typically involve full-scale plant models, often exceeding 89,000 components per assembly. These assemblies require extensive compute resources, and we're experiencing considerable delays (e.g., ~5 minutes just to open files) and system instability—particularly during simulation runs and rendering tasks.
Our workflows demand sustained performance across the following key areas:
- Advanced part and assembly modeling, frequently involving >2,000 components per assembly, with complex mate structures.
- Finite Element Analysis (FEA) involving intricate geometry and multibody setups.
- Rendering and animation using SolidWorks Visualize, including ray-traced outputs and real-time previews.
- Detailed drafting, including large drawing sheets with many referenced views.
- Weldment design workflows, including conversion to solid bodies with part counts often exceeding 1,000+ solid entities per file.
Additional context:
- We are not currently utilizing SolidWorks PDM.
- The systems in use frequently crash during compute-intensive operations, especially in Simulation and Visualize.
- Stability, GPU acceleration, memory bandwidth, and disk I/O are now limiting our productivity.
We are seeking expert guidance on the optimal high-end workstation configuration to support our usage. Specifically, we need recommendations on:
- Processor architecture (e.g., high-frequency vs. high-core-count balance)
- Certified GPU for CAD + GPU compute (Visualize + Simulation Solver)
- Memory capacity and speed (with ECC or non-ECC consideration)
- Primary and secondary storage recommendations (NVMe vs SATA, RAID configurations, etc.)
- Any proven OEM solutions or mobile workstations with validated performance for similar SolidWorks workloads
We aim to future-proof our investment for at least the next 3–5 years and would appreciate real-world feedback from users working on similar scales of complexity.
Thank you in advance for your technical insights.
