Student CAD/CFD build recommendations

[Hamzah_TM]

Hey, 

This is my first post so please forgive any mistakes. 

I'm part of a student run organisation based at the Uni of Glasgow (Scotland) and basically we're designing and 3D printing a working jet engine model (the website offers a far better explanation - check out https://www.jet-x.org/ ) 

The work dictates that we have to do A LOT of CAD and CFD, and now that we've been given licenses for ANSYS, it seems our current individual computing abilities are no longer optimum. Therefore, we are toying around with the idea of building a system purely dedicated to high level design and simulation. The design is done is Solidworks (there are some very large assemblies, full engine is 800+ components) and the CFD in ANSYS Fluent. 

However, with regards to hardware, I have no idea where to start in terms of picking the correct/optimum parts.I'm not sure how much RAM is required, or even what to look for in the GPU.  I've heard that Solidworks works on a single core, so favours higher clock speeds (not sure if this is true), but then wouldn't simulations work best on processors with lots of cores (seeing as it's lots of iterative calculations)? If this is the case, then I'm wondering if there is a way to get the best of both via a compromise. Our budget is around £2,000, but with some reasoning and good justification, we might be able to go slightly over if it would benefit the project. 

 

Any help regarding CPU choice, GPU, amount of RAM etc would be very much appreciated. 

 

Many thanks, 

 

H

Edited February 21, 2018 by Hamzah_TM
Spelling error

[Jurrunio]

 

This says it all

[Hamzah_TM]

Thanks Jurrunio! That was incredibly well explained and will definitely help us draft up a mock system (which I'll probably post here for a quick proof read)