Solidworks Performance Question

Justin726 · September 24, 2018

Hi,

Let me first say I'm new here, but have been watching LTT for a while now. Linus has sometimes mentioned this in some tests, but I never felt there was enough information to come to any real conclusions. I have brought this up in Solidworks forums as well as to the company I purchased Solidworks through, and I still do not have a straight answer. I have also done a significant amount of research on this topic and have found two things: this may be an issue more relevant to cpu rather than gpu and my own experiences do not seem to line up with some results I have seen online (although this may be related to my first discovery). So, the crux of the issue is I am trying to figure out how I can maximize the performance of Solidworks. I have been using Solidworks for 6 years now, across various different machines, but at the moment I have it installed on two computers. For work, I have a workstation laptop with an i7-7700HQ cpu @ 2.8 GHz, and an nvidia Quardo P3000, and my personal desktop, which has an i7-7800x OC at 4.5 GHz, and a 1080ti.

Across the two machines I found various issues. My work laptop couldn't handle massive assemblies. When dealing with large assemblies, over 800 parts, my system begins to slow a lot. Especially when dealing with large pipe routes. One thing I did find out was that larger pipe routes slow Solidworks significantly more than multiple small routes. It still slows down however with too many parts, even when I hide parts and routes I am not currently working on. I have also received assemblies from clients of models of large scale facilities in the form of E-Drawings. When these are too large, I cannot open them on my workstation laptop, however I have been able to open them on my personal desktop. That being said, they are usually still slow on the desktop. I believe it is primarily due to the scale of the models, however it may also be my personal gpu.

When working on my personal computer, I do not expect to get the best performance out of Solidworks, as I know it works better on a workstation gpu. I have seen this when Solidworks crashes sometimes while I am doing something routine in it and it crashes for a graphics related issue. Still, when it is not crashing I have noticeably better performance on my personal computer. Now I am not sure if this has to do with my personal computer's cpu or gpu, or a combo of both.

Now that I have finished explaining the situation, here is where this becomes an issue. I am planning on building a desktop for work, however I want to make sure the pc will run Solidworks significantly better then it works now. I also want to get a workstation gpu for my personal desktop, but am not sure which model to get. So I want to ask here if anyone has any insight as to what will impact the performance the most of Solidworks. From what I gathered through my research, the gpu model does not really matter. As seen here and here, Solidworks seems to perform the same across the different quadro models. From what I understand, the main difference between a quadro p2000 and p5000 is just graphics memory. Given that even large assemblies do not use much gpu memory, (I see this when I look in the task manager and I'll be using about 10% of my gpu on my workstation laptop), this seems to make sense, and would indicate that I could get away with a much less expensive gpu. But, are there any disadvantages to this? For instance, if I were to create motion studies, or flow/heat transfer analyses, would a lower model gpu cause problems? I'm assuming gpus aren't too important for the analyses, but I really do not know. Also, how should I be spec'ing my cpu? Is this the most important part to make Solidworks run well? Any advice on this would be much appreciated!