Working on a decent Cad Workstation Computer will be more productive and business owners will get a far quicker return on investment in expensive cad software. An IT professional that may be very skilled in there own area of expertise, but may have little experience to run a Cad workstation Computer or mobile Cad workstation.
Getting it wrong is not really an option because lack of performance, system crashes and lost data can literally cost a business thousands more than the price of a properly configured Cad workstation computer in a single month in some cases.
CPU for CAD Workstation Computer
The general rule of thumb when it comes to a CAD workstation Computer is that, the CPU is king. No matter what software you are using, a fast processor is critical. The better the processor, the faster your rebuild and rendering times will be. The majority of CAD Workstation Computer operations are CPU based so it is a good idea to get the best one you can afford. The speed of a processor is referred to as its clock speed and is measured in GHz. The core count refers to how many cores per CPU. For instance, a 3.2GHz hex-core processor has 6 cores, each running at 3.2GHz.
When rendering, you want as many cores as possible to get faster render times. A common misconception is that rendering is performed by the graphics card, when it is primarily CPU based. A even though rendering is primarily CPU based, some modern rendering programs can utilize higher end graphics cards for rendering. The graphics cards are essentially turned into an additional processor cores to aid the CPU in rendering.
Now, rendering is a multi-threaded operation, meaning it can utilize more than one processor core at a time. A quad core processor will render much faster than a dual core processor with a higher clock speed. The more cores you have, the faster you can render. There are motherboards that support multiple CPUs on a single board. For example, you could have two hex-core processors giving you a total of 12 processing cores.
On the other hand, modeling with 3D CAD Workstation software is primarily a single threaded operation. This means it will only use one CPU core at a time. So when speaking about CPU‚ is in regard to 3D modeling, the higher the clock speed, the better the performance. It may seem odd, but a dual core processor running at 3.5GHz will rebuild a complex part faster than a quad core running at 2.5GHz.
Many processor are also capable of running at much higher speeds than advertised by the manufacture. The process of manually increasing your CPU clock speed is called Overclocking. With overclocking you can increase your processors performance by changing timing and voltages of the processor to achieve a higher clock speed.
Overclocking often requires improved cooling for the processor such as a larger heat sink or liquid cooling, but can yield significantly improved performance. Keep in mind, If not done properly overclocking can damage your hardware.
Graphics Card for CAD Workstation Computer
After the processor, the graphics card (GPU) is considered the second most important piece of Cad Workstation Computer hardware. The graphics card handles the visual display of the model when you roll, pan or zoom. For 3D CAD applications you will need a professional, OpenGL graphics card.
There are are two main brands of 3D CADworkstation cards, the NVIDIA Quadro and ATI FirePro series. These OpenGL cards are considerably more expensive than their DirectX based on Gaming counterparts, but are necessary for most 3D CAD applications.
The easiest way to think about the difference between OpenGL and DirectX is an OpenGL card calculates higher detail models at relatively low frame rates, while a DirectX card calculates lower detail models at high, sustained frame rates.
When choosing a graphics card for CAD workstation Computer, keep in mind the type of work you will be doing. If you work on very large assemblies with lots of models you will want a graphics card with more memory. If the graphics card does not have enough memory, the frame rate will lag or stutter when moving the model.
It is possible to use DirectX cards for 3D CAD, however some features may not function properly (such as SolidWorks RealView) and you may experience slow frame rates as well as graphical glitches.
Hard Drives for CAD Workstation Computer
Although not as important as a CPU or graphics card for CAD work, the hard drive can have a significant impact on overall performance. Hard drive technology has come a long way in the past few years. With the rise of the Solid State Drive (SSD) transfer speeds have increased dramatically.
The fastest traditional disk drives have a transfer speed of around 100MB/s, while modern SSDs range from 120MB/s to 750MB/s (and getting faster!) The faster transfer rate of the SSD will let you save and open models faster, make programs start faster, and decrease your computers boot time.
The downside of the SSD is its cost. The massive performance increase over disk drives is very noticeable. Because of the cost, it is a good idea to use a small SSD as the main drive for the operating system and programs, and a high capacity disk drive as a media/storage/backup drive drive.
RAM for CAD Workstation Computer.
In a Cad workstation 64 bit technology is all about addressing vast amounts of physical memory (RAM) and computing information far quicker. 64-bit operating systems will allow 32-bit programs to use the full 4GB of RAM where required and will allow some programs to be recompiled/compiled into 64-bit applications thereby allowing them to use much more RAM giving much faster more stable applications (subject to hardware configurations of course).
This of course makes the software applications far more powerful and gives a business an even better return on investment in their CAD technology making this an all round win-win scenario.
The main disadvantage of 64-bit architectures is that relative to 32-bit architectures, the same data occupies more space in memory (due to swollen pointers and possibly other types and alignment padding). This increases the memory requirements of a given process and can have implications for efficient processor cache utilization.
So now, when it’s time for an upgrade, you’ll know what you need to design your own custom
