Go Engineer : support : SOLIDWORKS HARDWARE REQUIREMENTS

Sizing Hardware

In order to effectively determine what kind of hardware best fits your solid modeling needs, you must ask yourself a few questions. First, what kind of modeling are you doing most? For example, how many parts are in your large assemblies, ie: 10-20, 100-500, 1000+? How complex are the parts you model - in number of faces approximately, ie: 10-20, 100-500, 1000+? Do your parts contain numerous advanced, intensive features such as lofts, sweeps, or complex or numerous fillets? What operating system are you going to use? Each of these items will help you determine what the best hardware will be for your modeling tasks.

In general, you can put yourself into one of three basic categories depending on your answers to the above questions.

Light user - Assemblies contain only a few parts (2-20) without many complex features.

Moderate user - Assemblies contain many parts (100-500) without many complex features.

Heavy user - Assemblies contain thousands of parts or contain many parts with complex features.

***With any of the above categories, we recommend you buy as fast a processor as your budget allows. This will benefit any user – regardless of his design requirements.

Light user:

RAM: 256MB min, 512MB or more recommended

Graphics Card: 32MB or more, OpenGL support (Nvidia Quadro4 700 XGL, Quadro FX500)

OS: Win XP Professional

Hard drive speed is not critical

Moderate user:

RAM: 512MB min, 1GB or more recommended

Graphics Card: 64MB or more, OpenGL support (Nvidia Quadro4 750 XGL, Quadro FX500)

OS: Win XP Professional

Hard drive speed is important

Heavy user:

RAM: 2GB or more

Graphics Card: 64MB or more, OpenGL support (Nvidia Quadro FX1000, FX2000 or FX3000)

OS: Win XP Professional or Win XP x64 (only for high memory requirements)

Hard drive speed is crucial

Graphics Cards:

The following graphics cards are recommended and support RealView Graphics display for SolidWorks...

* Information for notebook computers available here

3Dlabs:

Wildcat VP series

Wildcat Realizm series

ATI:

Fire GL T, V and X series

Mobility Fire GL T2 (in HP and IBM’s laptops)

PNY/NVIDIA:

Quadro FX series

Quadro4 XGL series

Summary:

Put money towards a single faster processor first. Use of COSMOS analysis tools will benefit from multiple processors while best performance/price ratio is acheived with a single processor for SolidWorks alone. Dual core processors are an excellent choice if you need to run multiple applications.
Next, put money towards memory (RAM). An easy way to determine how much you need is by watching the task manager. If you use more than you have, buy more (make sure your motherboard is expandable)! Windows XP Professional x64 Edition is the solution for users who need more than 3GB of memory for SolidWorks.
Finally, put money towards a stable, OpenGL, professional level graphics card, avoiding the cards with current limitations/issues. You can view testing results and a list of certified cards for a variety of vendors at: http://www.solidworks.com/pages/services/VideoCardTesting.html

These are the three hardware items that will directly affect your SolidWorks performance. Faster hard drive speeds can improve the performance of your machine while opening and saving files, but do not affect general performance.

You can view benchmarks of hardware configurations and results and also download the test to run on your machine at: http://www.spec.org/gpc/apc.static/sw2007.html