- [Instructor] When using SOLIDWORKS
as your main design tool,
it's important to understand the CPU and RAM requirements
that SOLIDWORKS has.
By creating a machine that ideally
exceeds these requirements,
you have a better chance of increased productivity
and less failures while working in SOLIDWORKS.
Let's take a look at the SOLIDWORKS CPU
and RAM requirements.
Going to SOLIDWORKS.com,
clicking on support,
and then clicking on hardware and system requirements,
we now find our SOLIDWORKS system requirements.
Here you see SOLIDWORKS list the requirements
for all their software packages
as well as when they stop supporting Windows software.
We're only concerned with this top section right now.
As you can see, they list Windows 10, Windows 8,
and Windows 7.
All of these are still supported.
They also list SOLIDWORKS 2016, 2017, and 2018
because these are all also supported.
It's good rule of thumb to work
inside of the software packages
that still have support available.
Going down below we first see our RAM requirement,
which is eight gigabytes or more recommended.
I would suggest going to 16 gigabytes as a minimum.
And if you can, upgrade to 32
or even higher up to 64.
This will depend on the system that you choose
and the funding that's available to build your system.
But these are just the base minimums
and eight gigabytes isn't going to get you very far.
Moving on, we see our processor down here, our CPU.
Here they list Intel or AMD with SSE2 support,
64-bit operating system required.
This doesn't really give us a lot of information.
We know that it's an Intel or an AMD processor.
That could be a lot of processors.
So what I suggest is shopping around online,
Amazon, Newegg.com,
whatever resource you use to source your CPUs,
and then do a comparison at the one's you're looking at
at PassMark.
PassMark is a
software benchmark website.
So they do CPU benchmarks, video card benchmarks,
hard drive benchmarks, RAM benchmarks,
and complete PC system benchmarks.
They also have a portion for phones as well.
But what we want to focus on is the CPU benchmarks.
So now if you already have an existing system
and you don't know what you're using,
the way to find that is to go down to the Windows Explorer,
right-click on this PC, and go to properties.
Here you're going to see the process that you're using.
So I went ahead and did a comparison
of the CPU that I'm using.
The dual CPU Intel Xeon E5 2643
version four at 3.4 gigahertz,
looking at their guide down below
when compared to the top 10 CPUs on the market right now,
it scores very well,
almost twice in value.
But when looking at the price,
you can see here that it scores very poorly
because an expensive CPU.
The pricing history below shows
how the price has changed over time as well.
Also it shows us how the baselines have changed
for the CPU over time.
So this gives us some good information
about this specific CPU,
but you'll have to see what's available to you
and do comparisons.
Looking back on our requirements for SOLIDWORKS,
you can see that they're not extreme considering
the technology that's out there right now.
But you'll definitely want to go above and beyond
these requirements
to get your productivity and performance up.