Maximize SolidWorks Performance White Paper

Adrian Fanjoy and myself began doing performance testing for SolidWorks four years ago. We have presented those results at SolidWorks World each year as we have continued to refine our tests. This past year we partnered up with BOXX Technologies who lent us one of their top of the line CAD Workstations which allowed us to put together a large range of different test variables and produce our best set of results to date.

After all our testing and presentations were done this year, BOXX and Intel asked us if we would work together with the team at Desktop Engineering to turn our Allowing SolidWorks to Perform presentation into a white paper.

The white paper that we developed takes you through our entire process starting with the computer setup to the large SolidWorks assembly we used for testing. The paper then talks about the macro we built that takes our model and runs it through a battery of standard operations that a user of SolidWorks would do in a "typical" work day. Next it takes you through tests that we performed which included everything from changes to the SolidWorks System and Document Options to changes in the amount of RAM and type of hard drive that were installed in our computer. Our testing started with an initial baseline run of just over five hours with a setup that we see on most users' computers. For each of our tests we isolated one item in our SolidWorks or System environment then reran our macro to see how much of a performance difference that one change made. The paper concluded with our optimal system setup which shows the combination of changes that can increase your performance by as much as 5.5 times.

The link below will take you to the CATI site where you can download the Maximize SolidWorks' Performance White Paper.

http://www.cati.com/maximize-solidworks-performance

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Please check back to the CATI blog as we have started posting a series of articles beginning on 7/9/12 that goes further into the details of each of our tests. All of these articles are stored in the category of Maximizing SolidWorks Performance, and links to each with their future release date are listed below.

Thanks,

Josh Altergott, CATI Support Manager

Adrian Fanjoy, CATI Technical Services Director

Josh Altergott
Josh Altergott is Support Manager at Computer Aided Technology, a SolidWorks Value Added Reseller with locations in Kentucky, Missouri, Kansas, Indiana, Wisconsin and Illinois. He is a regular contributor to the CATI Tech Notes blog. http://blog.cati.com/