Sluggish Solidworks

Oct 16, 2006 22 Replies

There is a lot of overhead as far as windows is concerned managing a single threaded process into a dual core/processor situation. It often outweighs the benefits of the additional processing power. Try opening task manager, selecting the processes tab, right click the solidworks process, choose "set affinity" and de-select one of your two cores (does not matter which) . This is a session only setting, so next time solidworks is started it will revert back to using both cores. I'm willing to bet that your benchmark times improve.

I usually leave mine set up to use both cores. But when I am doing something that I know is going to be processor intensive, I'll switch it over to single for speed. There are utilities available that will automatically run a selected processor in single core mode, should you prefer it that way all the time.

Anna Wood wrote: You say it is

Anna is correct (as usual). The new 5100 series Xeons don't even support Hyperthreading. HT was a NetBurst architecture feature.

A 2.33 GHz Xeon 5140 would be about the same as or slightly faster than your old FX53 - and yield the benefits of dual core processing (minor for SolidWorks, major for PhotoWorks and COSMOSWorks.) A 2.66 GHz 5160 or 3.0 GHz 5160 would be significantly faster.

Pricing (from Dell) for the 5140, 5150 & 5160 is currently $609, $869 and $1279 respectively. The 5110 cost $349 and the 5060 cost $479, maybe Dell will credit you on the old chips.

(This goes to show that you may not always get what you pay for, but you ALWAYS pay for what you get.)

Don't worry about the memory. 553MHz DDR2 is just fine. Uprading to

667Mhz would only improve performance by 3-4%. It would have been a better choice on the initial order, but it's not worth replacing it

One of my colleagues had similar problems with a new Dell 690. When he first set it up, it was slower than his old computer. He eventually gave up on it and gave it to one of our IT guys to see if he could get it working better. After a long time working with Dell, it eventually came back and is about twice as fast as the old one, an Athlon XP2800+ (2.08 GHz). No one is quite sure what the original problem was or what fixed it.

He has a Xeon 5160 3.0 GHz processor.

Jerry Steiger Tripod Data Systems "take the garbage out, dear"

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