more RAM or Dual Processor

More ram will definately speed things up for You ....a dual processor ..no

Krister L

Yeah I figured that would help, but would dual processors help me do other stuff while SWX is loading/updating? I've heard mixed reviews.

Thanks

Krister L wrote:

Yepp....it sure does...I'm on a dual processor machine, and I can do whatever while SW is thinking (or what it's doing)....with two screens it's almost like two different machines. But I can't see any differance in calculating or rebuilding speed inside SW

Krister

whit skrev i diskussionsgruppsmeddelandet: snipped-for-privacy@mywayREMOVE.com...

Cool, right now my machine at work becomes almost useless when SW is 'thinking'. This machine, Dell Precision 340, is only about a year old, but they didn't bother to ask us if we had any particular requirements when they bought these.

Gather>

more ram will help with solidworks. dual processor will help if you would like to use other applications while solidworks is thinking. solidworks itself does not make use of dual processors. which makes sence why they can not make use of dual processors. the feature manager rebuilds from top to bottom. but if they checked child/parent relationsion mabey they could address dual processors.

Another nice thing - you can even assign your SW process to one or another cpu (instead running synced):

- start your task manager (assuming XP/2000);

- go to Processes tab;

- right-click Solidworks process;

- in the pop-up click "Set affinity";

- choose on which cpu (1 or 2 for duallies) you want this job executed.

BBM

If you can afford, it both, ha ha

Even if you have dual processors, it wont help much if you dont have much RAM.

But I cna say, from first hand experience, I will aways push for duals from now on. The computer no longer"freezes up" while Sw is thinking real hard...

Todd

Hi There Whit.

Excuse the tired old "What about the disk access" question, but what about the disk access?

In my presennt life I have "downgraded" from a one of those fast 1.3 ghz pentiums to a 1 ghz with scsi (yes laughable for cad, but it works). The "new" machine ripped the old one to shreads. I know there is more to it, but I think disk access is probably one of the most neglected features when we consider speed.

There are cheaply avaialble RAID striping controllers. Hard drive cards that have 128 meg memory capability. 1500 Rpm scsi drives and the like.

I can't understand why we all get preoccupied with Video/Processor/RAM and almost never consider the slowest component (after the human of course) - the disk drive.

If you could double your disk throughput, this could help. I know that in a former life I had a cached controller card that gave me an easy 300 percent improvement (OK it was "tossing" mail on a vesa local bus machine, but I did take a 70 second operation down to about 20 seconds that's a real improvement - I'm a believer).

Next time I have a spare 500 bucks for cad stuff, striped disks here I come . . .

Thanks for listening to the madman.

SMA

ya cuz you are not stuck in a process. on a big rebuild if you open outlook at the same time. you can cause a unhandled error. what the hell are they doing in memmory. microsoft or solidworks.

good point. we have 2 identical machines. opening 600mb assembly on both. fully resolved all references. machine with scsi opened in

Remember when quad processors were announced ? Did you see any ? The problem is access to memory from multiple processors is hard to manage, and if you look at the front side bus (FSB) frequency of dual boards, they're always slower than single CPU machines. The idea is now to move parallelism on the chip. "Hyper threading" processors such as the latest Pentium IV are now pretty equivalent to dual processors (see

Another question is : how can a CAD use this ? IMHO, the best way would be to parallelize the rebuild process by evaluating each feature in a different thread, while synchronizing them according to their parent/child relationship. Some features (such as the dreaded "shell") could even be threaded internally, by computing disjoint faces separately...

Philippe,

Actually, some processes are already multi-threaded (like the shell command). This is done in the kernel.

I tend to watch my processes when really bogged down, and certain commands do indeed use both processors. Other than "shell", I also think "knit-surface" and "Filled surface" are both multi-threaded. I dont know this as fact, but when watching the Task Manager and also watching the rebuild, I have come to those conclusions.

As far as benchmarks, no, I havent done any. Just going by TM and what I have been told and have seen.

--Todd

separately...

In your case, the SCSI drive was about 15% faster. Since it cost WAY more bucks per GB, it doesn't seem worth it to me. If you open and close a lot of files each day, maybe it would pay, but it certainly wouldn't for me, when I only open a few, maybe a dozen.

With a simple 2 disk RAID setup you will get faster disk access, but you double the chances of disk failures. Since disks have been the highest failure rate items on our PCs, I worry about that. Four disks will protect you from that, but now your cost is getting out of hand.

Jerry Steiger Tripod Data Systems