Can anyone that has evaluated at both SolidWorks and Inventor specifically with regards to handling large assemblies please tell me what you discovered about hardware configuration and memory consumption. Our machines can exceed 10000+ parts. I have heard the arguements Inventor uses against lightweight parts, but wonder what limitations exist with Inventor's Adaptive Data Engine?
I have had bad luck using SW for large assemblies (7,500+ to 10,000+ parts) and had even worse luck with them when we were evaluating Inventor. Are you going to be creating cropped and section views with the large assembly? If so, I would look at a more advanced CAD program or at least get a 60-day evaluation of SolidWorks and really push it. If you do end up with SolidWorks feel free to contact me for my horror stories as well as positive experiences.
I had a customer using SW with a 15,000 part assembly and didn't have any problems running the file. He could get the file open lightweight in around a minute and fully resolve it, in 3 minutes. On top of that the file was in-contexted with Equations and Design Table.
So just because one person has problems running large assemblies doesn't mean everyone is. The machine he had was hoss (3 gig of memory) but the video card I didn't recognize as a preferred card by SW. To bad he's not at that job anymore I wish I could remember what it was.
Regards, Scott
I would take a look at Solid Edge. It has been known to work well with large assemblies, with some customers having assemblies of 100,000 parts or more.
It is very vague to suggest that a system can or can't run with a large number of parts. They key here is how many of these 10 or 100 thousand parts are unique parts. To me, you could almost count out most commonly used fasterners that used over and over in a large assembly. It's also based on how complex the feature tree is on some parts such as sweeps, lofts, feature patterns, etc... I bet there is a lot of people that have 20 part assemblies that can challege the most powerfull systems around.
Well, that being said, I would really like to see just how many of these 100,000 part assemblies are unique and complex parts.
Correct.And the mates and other constraints might play a dramatic role too.
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