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i5 or i7 will be fine, get plenty of RAM (at least 3 GB) and pay attention to the graphics card, that's where you'll see the biggest improvement. Embedded graphics will kill performance more than a slow processor.
Joe
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Looking for a mid - low price system for running SolidWorks 2010. Does anyone have any experience with the Intel I5 or I7 processor? Should I stick with Xeon processor? It seems that I get more bang for my buck with one of the I's.
i5 or i7 will be fine, get plenty of RAM (at least 3 GB) and pay attention to the graphics card, that's where you'll see the biggest improvement. Embedded graphics will kill performance more than a slow processor.
Joe
Golf - what Xeon do you have? Xeon covers a very broad range of chips, some of the newer Xeons, IIRC, are pretty much hopped up i7 chips with a few other things enabled *cough*dual processors*cough*
Seriously, though, the two places you need to put money into are the graphics card - Go Quadro FX1800 at least - and the hard drive. SW is fairly file intensive, with it's various temp files, backups, and whatnot, so anything you can do to improve the read/write bottleneck is a very good thing. An SSD dedicated to the OS and SW would be a good thing...and you could probably get away with 40GB there. Don't know what else you'll be using this system for, but that might be all you need, even. Just remember to back up the SSD frequently!
As for RAM...meh. I'm running a Core i7/Quadro FX 1800 setup with 12 GB of DDR3...I've never seen SW take more than 2 gigs of ram, and I don't think I've ever had the entire system using even half of what I got. 6 GB should be plenty for you.
How do you delete mis-posts?
The "best" one is the almighty most expensive one that came out 5 minutes ago, whatever that happens to be. That is NOT the "smartest" one to go with, though, and answering what is the "smartest" one will depend on MANY circumstances to do with the type of work you are doing, your budget, etc.
Depending on how many parts you want to work on in assemblies, you can run VERY low hardware quite successfully. I run 2008, 2009 and 2010 Premium on my laptop at work. It's a "mighty" 1.83 GHz Core2 laptop with embedded Intel graphics.
Believe it or not, working on single parts is NO problem with this setup. At home I have a 3 GHz Core2 Duo, and a QuadroFX 4500 - a smoother setup, but at this point in time pretty "behind the curve" of technology (I got the CPU 3 years ago, the video card last year for $80 on eBay).
Again, not much real power is needed unless you work with tons of parts in assemblies, or do a ton of photo rendering.
mcphill -
Interesting you mention photo rendering. I was doing some fairly heavy renderings in SW Premium 2010, and as I watched core usage in the i7 , it never used more than one core at a time...One core would go to 100% load, for a bit, then it would hand off to another, and go into idle itself...maybe this is a strategy to deal with heat?
Point is, 4 cores + 4 virtual cores never actually used more than one core at a time for the rendering task.
It would probably have been faster to use a Wolfdale (?) 3.X gHz chip, the only big benefit to the i7 in this situation is onboard memory control.
And you're right about smartest money. There are some MONSTER Core 2 duo and quad chips out there that can be had dirt cheap and probably perform 90% as well as the new batch of i7 chips.
http://www.solidmuse.com/
Check out this blog. She's compiled some great benchmarks of SW systems, you can see the various systems people are using, and how they stack up against others.
Might be useful to plan your computer build...
Newegg.com - MSI 880GM-E41 AM3 AMD 880G HDMI Micro ATX AMD Motherboard
Newegg.com - AMD Athlon II X4 640 Propus 3.0GHz 4 x 512KB L2 Cache Socket AM3 95W Quad-Core Desktop Processor ADX640WFGMBOX
Running on 4gb of RAM, thinking about jumping up to 8gb and I'm going to be using Win 7 64bit. How do you guys think this will work? I'm starting out and i have the 14month student version of SW.
Picked up a 2nd hand HP xw8600 system on ebay... 2x 3.16ghz X5460 quad cores... Paid $1k. Put in my existing Quadro FX4500 and 18gb ram, 2x 10k drives in Raid... You should be able to get something similar in the $2k range used...I would consider that mid range pricing...
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