64bit experiences?

Use for very large assembly work. It is generally slower by a few percent than 32 bit SW.

I've been running 2006 in both 32 and 64 bit. I've seen no benefit to one over the other. Neither are what I'd call stable, both have the same bugs, and I haven't seen any performance difference. Of course, with 64 bit the same file uses twice the ram (not actually 2x, but something approaching this...seems to vary). I work on fairly complex parts, but not big assemblies.

The only drawback that bob z. has run into is the availability of printer drivers. yes, yes, bob z. knows this is a swx specific question, but we all need to be aware of the printing issues.

bob z. likes running swx-64 and xp-64 just so he can say, "hey, look at me. mine's bigger and badder than yours." :~)>

bob z. p.s. those summer nights are callin. can't help myself from fallin...

So does anyone have an experience of better performance or stability with

64bit, or is the one and only benefit the ability to use more RAM for use with large assemblies?

John H

Hello. I use now Windows Xp x64, with GForce 7600GT and 1giga Ram. i can see that now SW works faster and more stable. i am very satisfied with that version of SW

I use now Win 8XP x64 1 giga Ram GT7600. My SW2007x64 works very fine. firstly i was using x86 version of SW, but now i can see in this version it worsk more stable and faster. maybe i will chcnage my memory because it can be truble tu use in big assemblies, but now i diddn't test on it.

Our experience so far has been very favorable. We have 3 HP xw8400's each with 16gigs of ram, single 5160 xeon dual core processors (didn't go with quad cores since there is no real advantage to multiprocessor since we don't do renderings) and Quadro FX 4500's (thanks to discounted prices on the video cards from Solidworks World) for working on our top level assemblies. When working with our top level assemblies under windows xp and 3-4 gigs of ram, we always had to dumb down our assemblies (mulitple configurations with various items suppressed or simplified versions). Now we can open our entire top level assembly in the default configuration and not utilize lightweight or large assembly mode.

The stability seems on par with the 32 bit except we no longer have crashes due to memory issues.

I can't give an accurate comparison regarding general performance since these machines are faster in general than our standard workstations. The feeling is that performance is a little quicker than with 32 bit, but I feel this is partly due to not having a bunch of other crap running in background since the machines have had clean installs and none of the operators realize that they can use 32 bit softare on them. They think they can only use 64 bit applications so they haven't installed all the junk that is cluttering up our other workstaions.

We are very happy that we made the switch. Using as much ram as we can afford to stuff into a system has made life a lot easier. Not having to invoke funky switches and work arounds has made configuring a whole lot easier also.

The only frustration I have so far is the fact that we had to do a lot of dancing around to convince the powers that be that spending $10,000 on a workstations would be worth the investment. I remember a few years ago we were spending $25,000 each on unix boxes that could be streched to hold a gig of ram (if you had the $2000 riser card to install more modules)