We have tools and equipment that just sit idle for most of the year. That’s fine for some types of equipment. A $200 benchtop drill press will last a couple of decades.
But, that’s a lousy model for things like a computer. A decent CAD capable computer can cost $2000 and may be mostly unusable in just 4 years.
So far, we have been relying on student laptops. But that means there’s a lot of variability year to year. This year, for example, I discovered that one of our design team’s laptops could not render a PDP in onshape.
How does your team deal with computers becoming rapidly obsolete without having to spend thousands of dollars every few years?
Use the powerful CAD computers to mine Bitcoin in the offseason? The money you’ll make can go to offsetting the cost of replacing the computer in a few years
Generally, programming and CAD are the same people so we save a bit there but, we have been using main Alienware from 2010 until this year where I’m fighting school IT to get us a new computer because our hard drives were corrupt and it’s time for a new computer. We had a donation of two acer laptops about 2-3 years ago that have been our main computers. We generally put some funds towards a computer every year and eventually have enough, I also acknowledge what @AriMB said and we will also start to do that.
I have not spent $2000 computer since I bought my AT&T 6300 with an Intel 8086 and 640K of memory. Even with a math co processor, it doesn’t do CAD very well.
If you are spending $2,000 on a computer for CAD, you are doing it very wrong. $500 will get you plenty far. Anything Sandybridge and beyond does fine. If you are using Inventor, I’d even argue you don’t necessarily need a dedicated graphics card.
In desktops, look for used HP Z230 or Z420. In the right config, very powerful and cheap.
If I were buying a laptop today, I’d probably go get the 14" HP from Costco for $300 and stick 16GB RAM in it. It’s got a 1080 screen and 10th gen i3.
And then of course there’s the option of using Onshape which will run in a browser on just about anything.
We use (cheap) school computers for CAD (Solidworks) and student laptops for code. Reasons:
Our code kids tend to have nice laptops that they like, so why not let them use them?
The CAD kids historically haven’t had fancy laptops, much more desktop/gaming PC people for some reason.
Having our code kids use their own laptops means that they have flexibility when it comes to installing git, etc.
The school computers we use come with Solidworks for one of the classes taught in that room, so we don’t have to worry about that. Plus, if they ever become unable to run Solidworks, the school will hopefully foot the bill for upgrades.
Yeah, Solidworks runs slow on the cheap computers. However, it runs well enough for us most of the time.
We use student computers… and they are school provided, so we have a stable and well-known base! Each student gets a brand new Macbook air as a freshman, and have it throughout their career at the school (Minus a few weeks each summer when they collect them for tech updates). It also means we can work with the school to get any apps we need deployed to the school’s app store, so installation is an easy click away for each of the students, with everything configured properly.
We do buy our own driver station laptops, but that’s ~$500 each every few years, so its not so bad.
Find a company that’s upgrading their computers and ask for a few of their old ones? (Even if you have to purchase the computers off of them for a price, it’s usually a pretty good deal.) We were lucky enough to have a few laptops donated to us in this way this year.
We use student computers… and they are school provided, so we have a stable and well-known base! Each student gets a brand new Macbook air as a freshman, and have it throughout their career at the school (Minus a few weeks each summer when they collect them for tech updates). It also means we can work with the school to get any apps we need deployed to the school’s app store, so installation is an easy click away for each of the students, with everything configured properly.
Do you run bootcamp on the MB Air’s to run the CAD software (since I assume you’re either using Inventor or Solidworks…correct me if I’m wrong)
Nope, we’re using OnShape specifically so we can have a solution that works on OSX. The added complexity and expense (Windows costs money!) of doing Bootcamp or running a VM just isn’t worth it.
The school provides us with Inventor workstations that are refreshed every 5 years (supposedly, we’ll find out this year). These computers are OK, but not great, so usually someone with a powerful desktop at home steps up and does the assembly (since that’s not a stable process on those machines)
My strategy has always been to go with the used Thinkpad market. Currently, 3468s 4 Programming laptops are second-hand/refurbished Thinkpad T440p’s that cost us less than 300 a piece IIRC, and should last us at least another few years without issue.(my own personal laptop, and the one I’m writing on now, is a second-hand Thinkpad W540 I’ve had now for almost 3 years and plan to keep for at least another 2-3 years) I know our plan was to also source some more T440p’s for the marketing team as well.
Thinkpad laptops are also some of the most serviceable laptops available, and if you find a model you like and can use across various needs, maintaining them is even simpler if you do ever need to replace a keyboard, screen, battery, ect.
Here’s an idea I haven’t seen done before, but could work. Reserve a beefy EC2 instance running Windows for the 2-3 months you’ll need it, and have students CAD via remote desktop. Sure the beefier instances are expensive, but you could support an entire design team on one or two servers. You also ensure that every student has a working environment out of the box provided they have remote desktop working.
Consider asking one of your sponsors if they have laptops they are scrapping . We have had the good fortune of having used Thinkpads and Dells donated to us from one of our sponsors. While they may not be the latest or greatest, a memory upgrade and or swapping out for an SSD drive instead of a spinning HDD boosts performance enough to run most CAD SW.
We have bought our drive stations online at either Amazon or Woot when they are on sale.
We get our computers donated to us from a variety of sources, I believe. Currently, we don’t have many computers newer than 2-3 years old, and all of them need SSD’s, they’re all slow as heck due to hard drives. Most of our programmers use their own laptops, but we have plenty of computers that are easily capable of running Solidworks: It’s just slow.
I highly recommend asking sponsors for computers: We have gotten quite a few computers from sponsors.
In terms of requirements for Solidworks, I’d suggest a i7 or Ryzen 7, with a dedicated GPU for sure if you’re using an Intel processor. AMD integrated graphics is quite a bit better AFAIK, so dedicated GPU isn’t as critical with an AMD processor. I’d also suggest 8-16 GB ram. This configuration is in the $500 range, especially if you look in the 15" screen size range with a small disk.
And Costco’s surprisingly cheap.
