3D Modeling/CAD Computer Components

[Jared]

Originally Posted by artdutra04

Make sure you get a professional graphics card - either an AMD FirePro or nVidia Quadro. The hardware and drivers are tailored for CAD/modeling performance instead of gaming performance, and are thus the only officially supported graphics cards for most CAD software.

Agreed. See this (https://forum.solidworks.com/thread/64436) for some details.

If you want to save money and are willing to take a chance, you can pick up some used workstations (typically dell or hp) off of ebay for cheap ($200) with a quadro card.

I would stay away from gaming cards if possible just because of driver issues. You'll get great performance with way more stability on a cheaper workstation gfx card.

As others have said 8 Gb of RAM is enough, though I wouldn't go much less, especially if you like to have an internet browser, excel, an email client, and a music player running at the same time. It doesn't use 8 Gb of RAM to open the robonauts 2013 or 2014 assemblies in SolidWorks or Inventor.

As for CPU, higher clock speed is better. This is why laptops aren't always the greatest for CAD. Getting a CPU with a million cores doesn't help that much with SolidWorks. Most tasks, like importing, or general modeling don't take much advantage of having a bunch of cores. Importing the robonauts 2014 model only maxed out 1 core on my computer. I would prefer a higher clock speed over a just released quad core CPU, but that's me.

Don't get an SSD unless you like spending money.