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coma13

coma13

Turbo Monkey
Feb 14, 2006
1,082
0
what kind of system specs do i need to be running on a PC to somewhat efficiently run solidworks for fairly simple parts?

I'm a long time Mac user and I'm thinking of picking up a PC laptop for my girl and possibly commandeering it for CAD purposes if I can get one that will perform good enough without breaking the bank.
 
GumbaFish

GumbaFish

Turbo Monkey
Oct 5, 2004
1,747
0
Rochester N.Y.
I used inventor 5 for a while just to mess around in my spare time making bike frames and parts. But that is just because I was already familiar with the series.
 
C

ChrisKring

Turbo Monkey
Jan 30, 2002
2,399
6
Grand Haven, MI
coma13 said:
what kind of system specs do i need to be running on a PC to somewhat efficiently run solidworks for fairly simple parts?

I'm a long time Mac user and I'm thinking of picking up a PC laptop for my girl and possibly commandeering it for CAD purposes if I can get one that will perform good enough without breaking the bank.
Click to expand...
Rule one of buying a system to run solid based cad: buy the most expensive system you can afford. Our designers are running 2 gig of ram with 1 gig on the video card. They are dual processors with the latest intel processor. We turn the machines over every 2 years to keep the speed reasonable. In the GM business group I work in, we run UG since that's what GM uses. All other business groups run Catia.

I have run Autocad Mechanical Desktop on my home computer with 2.4gHz and a half gig of ram. I would recommend more than that even for simple solid modeling.
 
beaverbiker

beaverbiker

Monkey
Feb 5, 2003
586
0
Santa Clara
you work for PTC?
Pro/E Wildfire 3.0 FOR LIFE

I've used every version of Pro/E since i2, have also used AutoCAD for lame, boring 2D stuff, and have used SolidWorks a bunch during school. Solidworks is allright, but it's intent manager sucks, especially during sketches. I'd much rather use Pro/E any day. But we have super computers here. I build assemblies with over 3,000 parts in them and my computer never slows down a bit. We also use PTC's intraLink. such a nice database organization system.

-I'm a mechanical design engineer in the US
 
Gunner

Gunner

Monkey
May 6, 2003
533
0
Framingham, MA
beaverbiker said:
you work for PTC?
Pro/E Wildfire 3.0 FOR LIFE

I've used every version of Pro/E since i2, have also used AutoCAD for lame, boring 2D stuff, and have used SolidWorks a bunch during school. Solidworks is allright, but it's intent manager sucks, especially during sketches. I'd much rather use Pro/E any day. But we have super computers here. I build assemblies with over 3,000 parts in them and my computer never slows down a bit. We also use PTC's intraLink. such a nice database organization system.

-I'm a mechanical design engineer in the US
Click to expand...
oh yes I work for PTC! I started back in the day on 2000i (scary huh?) when I was doing my first Mech. Eng co-op.
 
W

Whoops

Turbo Monkey
Jul 9, 2006
1,011
0
New Zealand
ProE, Space.

Some bits suck major arse, but once your used to it (used it for 10+ years in one form or another) it does everything.

(still, some bits REALLY do suck)


Whoops
 
buildyourown

buildyourown

Turbo Monkey
Feb 9, 2004
4,832
0
South Seattle
coma13 said:
what kind of system specs do i need to be running on a PC to somewhat efficiently run solidworks for fairly simple parts?
Click to expand...

You used to have to get a cutting edge system to run SW well. Now you can just get a well built machine.
Mine is a P4 2.8 with a gig of ram w/ a GeForce 5900XT card recommended to me by some other monkeys. It works great and is under $200. The most important thing is the video card. Find one that works and stick with it.

I use SW and Mastercam a lot. I'm still on Mastercam 9.1 cause I can't stand X.
 
zedro

zedro

Turbo Monkey
Sep 14, 2001
4,144
1
at the end of the longest line
mrbigisbudgood said:
Honestly, I'd rather use 4. Consider yourself lucky.
Click to expand...
except what takes V4 users a week will take me 4 hours on V5. I used to curse Catia but R16 has been quite stable (i started on R7...what a turd), and going 64bit has really souped it up. Catia is quite unforgiving if you don't work around it's quirks and pitfalls (i.e. newbie sloppyness), which depending on the companies design standards may be inevitable, but I was involved with developing our own specific methodologies which have been working really well. Solidworks I find works really well with complicated detailed parts, but not so great with managing large assemblies, especially when you need to navigate quickly (which is why big outfits with PLM needs use it).

V5 is creating alot of havoc in the aerospace industry right now but thats mainly due to Enovia, bad training/low experienced users, bad design methodology/policies created by wide-eyed clueless managers and technocrats. Used properly with experience and forethought, it works pretty damn well.
 
zedro

zedro

Turbo Monkey
Sep 14, 2001
4,144
1
at the end of the longest line
ChrisKring said:
Rule one of buying a system to run solid based cad: buy the most expensive system you can afford. Our designers are running 2 gig of ram with 1 gig on the video card. They are dual processors with the latest intel processor.
Click to expand...
buildyourown said:
You used to have to get a cutting edge system to run SW well. Now you can just get a well built machine.
Click to expand...
agree, especially if you are not using it professionally with large assemblies, lots of parametrics, complicated surfacing or need some heavy analysis apps, a good gamer box is plenty. Really 2 gigs of ram and a good gamer card will take you pretty far; low/mid-end workstation gfx cards are basically the same as their gamer counterparts, exept for more tweaking on the OpenGL end, but video games are so demanding these days that they are surpasing most CAD users needs. Forget dual processors (x64 duo-core stuff is the norm now anyways) and large capacity video cards, just get a stable PC.
 
allsk8sno

allsk8sno

Turbo Monkey
Jun 6, 2002
1,153
33
Bellingham, WA
SW doesn't support dual processors or dual core as of yet anyways...i use SW as well, all the designers complain about how slow it is with the large assy's, i do too...but i don't have to open them as much since i am in the stress group.
i loved ProE/wildfire at school though it did crash alot. granted school computers arn't up to par usually either. but it is so much nicer than autoCAD and well i haven't touched V4 but V5 was pretty similar to SW, but with a better analysis prgram, though for stress stuff we are running Femap NX and Nastran(not CAD persay...)
 
B

BeaverBikersDad

Chimp
Nov 29, 2006
19
0
Try going back to 1984. One of the best autocad applications was from a company called Calma, named after Cal and his wife Martha Hefty, Los Gatos CA. It did 2D only. Top, front and side view stuff.

A bunch of guys, mostly brits, John Benbow, John "Potts" Pottier and Terry Clayton, to name a few, split and start Automation Technology Products with a product named Cimplex. It was designed to do 3D.

Stress analysis was mostly done through, I believe, Nastran. You had to construct you mesh by hand. Dave Arsenault at ATP is the first guy to figure out how to create an automatic mesh. We used triangles in those days. I'm not sure what you guys use today.

We did a bench mark performance test for Chrysler. We took a Dakota wheel and sliced out a fourth of it, seeing as it was so symetrical you don't really need the whole thing. On a nearly dedicated mainframe, costing about a million bucks, it only took about 100 hours to perform the simulation for the stress analysis. A typical hard drive was 2 foot by 2 foot by 3 foot tall can could hold 300 meg, at a cost of about 10 Gs. Chrysler was impressed with the high performance characteristics of the software.

We went broke anyway. It seems the young engineers in Japan thought in 3d. The old guys in Detroit only thought 2D. The car market is (was) the big one. There was no market in America for 3D solid modelling software.

For those of you that have never constructed a mesh by hand you can thank Dave A. as he is quite likely the grandfather of the algorithms.

I recall two of the toughest tests being to design two spheres that were tangent on a single point and then let the CNC cut one out of stock. It gives you a real appreciation for what "tangent on a single point" means.

Another test was to take a one inch cube and machine it into a one inch sphere.

The big question was can the software do anything useful with center of gravity. The classic example is to model a Boeing 747 jet, using sub assemblies, including washers, nuts, bolts. Remove one row of seats. Spread the extra leg room equally over the length of the jet. What happens to the center of gravity? How far does it move and in what direction. It was forcast in 1989 that the 747 problem would be solveable by the year 2000. I often have wondered if anyone has ever been successful in modelling a full and complete 747.

ahh, the good old days. Makes you wonder how anything ever got built.
 
MrWolf

MrWolf

Chimp
Jun 10, 2003
30
0
Pro/E Wildfire 2.0

Aerospace


Solidworks sucks.

Pro/E sucks at making drawings... great at modelling

CATIA v5 is better at some things, worse at others
 
bballe336

bballe336

Turbo Monkey
Mar 3, 2005
1,757
0
MA
Solidworks, Cadkey, Prodesktop.
I use them to model bike parts that I'd like to have machined. I'm a high school kid from the US.
 
B

BeaverBikersDad

Chimp
Nov 29, 2006
19
0
azonicbruce:

The ray tracing in the mirrors of the motorhome looks pretty good, but the ray tracing in the windshield seems to be missing. I can see the reflections of the clouds in the mirrors, but not in the windshield.

This is one of the things that is a give away as to whether it is a photo of a real object or a computer generated image. With really good software and a power user it becomes almost impossible to tell the difference.
 
Yeti

Yeti

Monkey
May 17, 2005
877
0
yeti cave@the beach
beaversbikerdad: lots of respect man!...yeah i really wonder sometimes how things were ever built 20 years ago.:clapping:
by any chance do u have any pics of the mesh models u did by hand?...would interest me to check those out.
just for curiosity will try to ask a dude that does some materials development for airbus here in my uni, if they got a complete cad model of one of their big planes....maybe even get a file...who knows with a couple of beers.
 
H8R

H8R

Cranky Pants
Nov 10, 2004
13,959
35
I used Acad LT 2000 a bunch when I did stage and lighting production work. We had a bazillion blocks for lighting plots, truss rigging and staging setups. Fun stuff.

I've messed around w/ this a bit..

http://www.emachineshop.com/
 
B

BeaverBikersDad

Chimp
Nov 29, 2006
19
0
Somewhere, I have a color polaroid photo of a Dakota Pickup chrome wheel. In the wheel you can see the reflection of another object, but I no longer recall what the object was. The reflectied object is distorted by the shape of the wheel. At any rate, the wheel never existed. It was purely generated by the click of a button with software.

Ray tracing is some sort of vector analysis, beyond my knowlege.

The goal was to have the marketing dude sit next to the engineer and design a cute wheel that had market demand. Then at the click of a button the stress analysis would pop up and the engineer could explain to the marketing dude why they needed to make the spokes a little bigger to avoid premature failure under load.

I do not have any pictures of meshes. If I can find the polaroid Ill scan it in and post it.

I didn't write any of the code to implement the mathematics behind the algorithms, nor did I develope the algorithms. My contribution was packaging the software, you guys today cheat and use InatallShield, and to also improve performance characteristics. Any transaction that has less than 10,000 transactions per second is not an interesting problem for discussion. 8-)
 
azonicbruce

azonicbruce

Monkey
Apr 9, 2002
290
0
The flatlands of San Antonio. At least no more dus
BeaverBikersDad said:
azonicbruce:

The ray tracing in the mirrors of the motorhome looks pretty good, but the ray tracing in the windshield seems to be missing. I can see the reflections of the clouds in the mirrors, but not in the windshield.

This is one of the things that is a give away as to whether it is a photo of a real object or a computer generated image. With really good software and a power user it becomes almost impossible to tell the difference.
Click to expand...
Actually, it is there, but it's just very subtle. What I probably should have done instead is choose a better glass material. Also, I didn't activate Ray Tracing depth control (# of reflections & refractions)becuase the first render I did with it on took almost 24hrs to render. I didn't have that much time to spare, so without it on my renders took only about 4 hours.

You're right, though. It's amazing how realistic they can get CAD images to look these days.

Below are some other attempts:
 

Attachments

Kornphlake

Kornphlake

Turbo Monkey
Oct 8, 2002
2,632
1
Portland, OR
Hey Bruce, what model motor home is that, if you even know? If it's a Monaco signature 45' I may have had some contribution to the first prototype back in '94.
 
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