[JerryFlyGuy]

Any good sites on the how-to side of soft moding cards?

[giz]

It's possible to softmod some of the "Gaming" graphic cards into workstation cards. This can be done with a lot of the Geforce and ATI cards. I had a geforce 7900GT card which I softmodded into a quadrro fx card. Worked great, the only difference in the cards really is the drivers, and maybe a different clock speed. If you go all business and plan on using solidworks a lot than go for the real thing, but since you're using the educational version. maybe it's an option.

Any good sites on the how-to side of soft moding cards?

I realize this - I have my 7950GT soft-modded at home. It gets me Realview, but the performance is still significantly lower then an actual Quadro FX card. I can see doing this at home, but for a company workstation it is just asking for trouble.

Also, I don't believe you can soft-mod anything above the Geforce 8000 series.

Jerry, this is the guide I used: Tech ARP - NVIDIA GeForce To Quadro Soft-Mod Guide Rev. 4.1

[MBX5]

Running a Dell Precision 690 workstation....running 2x Xeon 3.0 dual-core processors = 4 core....fast fsb (forget what it is)....64 bit Windows 7 ultimate, 12gb ram, dual 10k SAS/ SATA drives Raid0 for OS, plus a 2TB storage drive. Nvidia Quadro 4500 FX video card... dual 21" dell monitors. Runs smooth and cool. It is not overclocked... I run HSMworks CAM package that takes advantage of the 64bit system.... I have about $1,200 in the PC hardware...used system from eBay, plus some additional ram and the monitors, and the drives for RAID.

Pretty good bang for the buck...

[swingwing205]

I've had my system for a little while now, but here are some of the specs...

Core i7 950 Processor
nVidia FX 580 Quadro GPU
6 GB DDR3 RAM
500 GB HD
2x Acer 24" Monitors

This thing runs Solidworks very well, no hickups yet, even in large detailed assemblies. I made up my mind to try to use the most money on the best processor I could, and the i7 950 was as much as I could reasonably afford, and it handles SW just fine, plus the system is expandable to 24 GB RAM, and that will happen sometime in the future. I might also run SLI with another nVidia GPU, esp if I freelance, we'll see.

I'm not a computer techie at all, but I did my homework before I bought anything, and it paid off. Even a buddy of mine who does nothing but work on computers says I did really well, so that's a compliment coming from him.

[lcifers]

Swingwing, that's a great machine.

For anyone looking for a professional SolidWorks box, I would look at XI computer. Even if you decide to build your own, you can get some good specs using their configuration utility. They build excellent SolidWorks machines.

Video is extremely important - get the best you can afford.

Ram - for small assemblies 2GB is probably enough, but cutting it close. If you do large assemblies (200 or more pieces) you probably want at least 4. If you do simulation, you want as much as you can afford. In that case, 64bit OS and 12GB RAM would cover most situations.

The i7 chip performs VERY well with SolidWorks. It was a huge improvement over previous chips. After minimum video and RAM requirements are met, processor is king for performance. This is particularly true for complex parts. Get an i7 and let your budget decide which one.

For loading large assemblies and making saves quicker, dual 10K Raptor HDs at Raid 0 work great. That's probably not the best performance gain for the buck, but if you want that extra edge you might want to get them.

With all of that said, for casual users designing simple parts, you can get away with much less. I run SW on my Dell Vostro laptop. It's not a mobile workstation, it's a business class machine. It has an nVidia video card and 2GB Ram, but other than that is pretty low end. I do simple stuff on it without major problems.

Hope this helps.

[giz]

To be honest, 6GB would cover most situations. This is also the minimum recommended memory for SW2011 installed a Windows 7 64-bit machine.

Large assemblies are not the only memory hogs - a single part could be just as taxing on your system. It's all about the complexity of the geometry. Curved features patterned a thousand times over 100 configurations will be difficult for any computer to handle.

RAM doesn't speed up your computer. It makes it more capable to handle complex parts, assemblies, simulations, etc, but it won't increase speed.

[lcifers]

Complex parts are also extremely processor intensive as well as RAM intensive. To make large patters "lighter" check the "Gemotry Pattern" checkbox.

RAM doesn't speed up your computer unless you don't have enough. If you have too little RAM it you computer has to use hard disk space for memory which is much, much slower and unstable.

If you use SW on a machine that has barely enough RAM, frequent restarts of the software will help reduce crashes. SW has a lot of memory leaks and the longer you run it between restarts (I mean restarting of SW not the computer), the more memory it uses.

I had 6GB and it worked great until I started using the Simulation package. It was not enough memory to solve moderately complex structures so I went to 12GB. No problems since.

[Drassk]

I was running a Radeon HD 4870 soft-modded to a FirePro and it really cooked in SW. While it didn't perform to the spec of the FirePro it was emulating, it was pretty close. It was doing better than any FirePro I could get for less than $1300 and the card cost $140.

Then that card died...don't buy anything from HIS...crappy fan actually died in less than 2 weeks and took the card with it! But, QA at video card companies aside...

I replaced it with a 6000 series Radeon HD. So far as I know, you can't mod these to run real FirePro drivers, but I did mod the device ID in the drivers so that I can use RealView. So far as I can tell, it's faster than the 4870 was (with FirePro drivers). It's a $200 card.

When I got this system, bang for buck was an AMD PhenomII 6-core at 2.8Ghz as they easily overclock to 4Ghz with any aftermarket heat sink. A similarly priced I5 was comparable, and better in some apps, but since I have apps that use all six cored the PII made more sense.

8G of RAM and a fast SSD as a working drive with two 1TB drives in mirrored RAID for redundant storage.

You can get a comparable system for $600-700 minus the SSD on NewEgg.

[Rich05]

Have you found that SSD is major improvement? what kind of SW01 scores are you getting in specviewperf with your unmodded 6XXX?

sounds like a great system.

Thanks~

[Drassk]

The SSD is a massive improvement. Not necessarily full time when you're running things, but app load speeds and file save/loads see a significant change. When your saves happen almost instantly, you're a lot more prone to hit CTRL-S more often

The SW score for the 6000 card comes in at like 50 seconds, though a modded 4870 will get you to very low 20s or even below. OTOH, the 6000 card with just the driver ID changed (so no real mod) can handle 3.2 million polys of reflective surfaces, in realview, with all detail and image quality options turned all the way up, and it only stutters a bit in zooming. With the image quality settings set at sane levels (not 'rendering must be within 0.001mm of model) the 3.2 million polys whip around through zooms and rotations with no noticeable lag whatsoever.

The pro drivers about triple the Spec score, but I really don't put extremely high confidence in the Spec scores for graphics. The six cores definitely help in rendering (it runs six concurrent threads). The six cores also help in MasterCAM, as the high speed toolpaths are multithreaded and they can use up 100% on all six cores.

If the crappy 4870 I bought hadn't died, I'd be able to do some sort of head to head, but I think you'll probably be slightly happier with a modded 4870 if Solidworks is your whole world and with a 6850 if you also run games or any non-workstation-optimized graphics apps on your computer.

[Rich05]

[
The SW score for the 6000 card comes in at like 50 seconds, though a modded 4870 will get you to very low 20s or even below. OTOH, the 6000 card with just the driver ID changed (so no real mod) can handle 3.2 million polys of reflective surfaces, in realview, with all detail and image quality options turned all the way up, and it only stutters a bit in zooming. With the image quality settings set at sane levels (not 'rendering must be within 0.001mm of model) the 3.2 million polys whip around through zooms and rotations with no noticeable lag whatsoever.

If the crappy 4870 I bought hadn't died, I'd be able to do some sort of head to head, but I think you'll probably be slightly happier with a modded 4870 if Solidworks is your whole world and with a 6850 if you also run games or any non-workstation-optimized graphics apps on your computer.[/QUOTE]\

i have modded a 4870 and get a 60 fps on an old dual core, and modded 2900 and get 60fps on a quad core that 20 frames per seccond sounds low is this specviewperf you are benchmarking on? my 5 year old core 2 duo laptop gets 20fps with an ati x1600.. modded. sw01 score.

[Drassk]

Those measures are in seconds, not frames per second. Lower is better.

[Rich05]

ok roger that sorry can you do a test with specviewperf 10? Would like to see a screen shot of that, its the standard for openGL benchmark, which you know just, just in case, I see 80 fps being good for a FireGL in your class of heavy workhorse!

[Rich05]

Any good sites on the how-to side of soft moding cards?

Jerry,

ATI FireGL/FireProSoftmod - Discussion Thread for new members - Guru3D.com Forums
HD48XX is last generation currently anyone has modded still a good card.

any progress on the SR-2 motherboard and dual socket xeon system????? would be lifechanging experience no doubt. i think you could do it for under 4k if you did not go huge on the SDD drives no?

[Drassk]

I'm pretty sure you can mod the 58XX series as well, but not the 6K cards. As I said above, the 4870 I had modded worked quite well and I'd still have it if it wasn't for HIS putting faulty fans on their cards...

Which benchmark exactly is it you want me to run? There are quite a few on the SPEC site. The SW2001 one?

[Rich05]

the sw01 test definitly thanks

[Drassk]

It won't run, says my resolution is wrong (but it isn't). Might not be compatible with 2011 or Windows 7.