cad Beefy Solidworks CAD machine for a YouTuber

[DrSkunk]

A certain marble loving YouTuber, who likes to use magnets to complicate things and weld everything together, has asked me to help him choose a new modeling PC.

 

Budget (including currency): No real budget, but I prefer to keep my kidney(s)

Country: France

Games, programs or workloads that it will be used for: Fusion360, Solidworks (rendering and modeling), maybe editing videos.

Other details (existing parts lists, whether any peripherals are needed, what you're upgrading from, when you're going to buy, what resolution and refresh rate you want to play at, etc): 

- You can view the complete list of current parts here, the prices are a rough estimate and can be ignored mostly.

- No previous parts to use

- Must be Windows since Solidworks is Windows-only

- Later two monitors will be added, probably 1440p 60hz

- As silent as possible, within the abilities. Watercooling is not an options since this PC wil not be maintained by me or the person who it's for.

 

The build listed below started from following the Puget Systems recommended systems for Solidworks. There I found that AMD Threadripper would be best for rendering because of the massive amount of cores, even though most pre-builds I found online are built with Intel.

For RAM I read somewhere that it's best to use as many of the slots as possible, hence the 8GB sticks.

 

For the case I went with a big boi Corsair Crystal 680X to maximize airflow, but I'm looking into a smaller mid-tower or rack solution if it's needed, this is something I'll have to check. Sound and airflow would still be most important.

 

The biggest help I would need is with choosing a decent GPU for this kind of work. Currently a Nvidia Quadro RTX 6000 is chosen, but not for a particular reason.

 

Let me know if you need verification that this is indeed for Winter-, oops, I mean, marble loving YouTuber©.

Thank you so much in advance!

With love from Belgium,

Sebastiaan Jansen

[Aragorn-]

I mean, people at my work use Solidworks and Siemens NX for "real work" modelling actual production parts, and none of the mech engs have threadrippers

 

Most are using Laptops with 6 core H series Intel CPU's and an RTX 3000 or similar.

 

The heavy work is in simulations, FEA and fluid dynamics etc, which are generally offloaded to compute machines with 16cores+ but you dont mention doing any of that...

 

Personally, i'd probably go 5900x. It has plenty of grunt but none of the cost associated with threadripper.

 

GPU its hard to tell, but i would note for instance that an RTX A4000 is just about as quick as the RTX6000 and significantly cheaper (about 4x cheaper!).

 

But then is it about bang for buck, or just overkill++++ for the youtube cred?

[Aragorn-]

Infact, reading the puget site, they recommend the intel 11700k for modelling and 5900x for simulation, so i guess that also mirrors in effect what i said.

 

Personally i'd stick with AMD, you could drop to a 5800x if you wanted to, but why not go with the 5900x for a bit more flexibility. Its still massively cheaper than the threadripper build.

[DrSkunk]

18 minutes ago, Aragorn- said:

...

The heavy work is in simulations, FEA and fluid dynamics etc, which are generally offloaded to compute machines with 16cores+ but you dont mention doing any of that...

...

Indeed, I forgot to mention that ideally that would also be possible. Getting that to be silent would be hard though

 

If the better solution is to have a dedicated server-like PC for rendering, that's also possible.

[Tegneren]

13 minutes ago, Aragorn- said:

they recommend the intel 11700k for modelling and 5900x for simulation,

Yes for purely modeling work I would agree, but he said they said they needed it for rendering an maybe video editing as well, an for that more cores=more better.

If they need the 64 core version is another matter, I would consider going for the32 core 3970X for half the price. The difference in rendering times aren't that big.

19 minutes ago, Aragorn- said:

people at my work use Solidworks and Siemens NX for "real work" modelling actual production parts

You clearly haven't seen what Martin... I mean marble loving YouTuber© are working at

[Aragorn-]

the point is for rendering or editing the odd video, a 5900x is fine. Its only when your getting to banging out multiple videos a day and the 10minutes saved rendering a video starts to actually add up in a meaningful way, that going up to the threadripper starts to make sense, IMO anyway.

 

Its very hard to judge without a starting point. IE whats he using just now, and whats wrong with it.

 

The puget bench is also a little fragmented, i'd really like to see say the 5900x against the 39xx threadrippers. I imagine we'll see that the IPC gains on Zen3 means the gap between them is closed up more than the core count advantage would suggest, and the 5900 will also be faster in all the stuff that cannot harness the massive parallelism the big chips offer.

[DrSkunk]

Just now, Aragorn- said:

Its very hard to judge without a starting point. IE whats he using just now, and whats wrong with it.

He currently works on an older iMac, I don't have a specific model, but SolidWorks is Windows only. This was also not used for rendering.