[crazyman]

I'm on a small budget.
What would be the slowest desktop computer i can use for Solidworks (designer) 2004 to 2006?

What processors are known to work?
ie what min Clock speed will work?
min RAM required?

Also, ideally i would consider a laptop for SW if possible.
Are there any labtops that are known to work?

[HuFlungDung]

Even old 1 ghz cpus are pretty cheap nowadays. Get something like that, with 512meg ram and a decent video card. I'd stay away from laptops, as the failure rate for laptops is fairly high.

[dmealer]

Huflung is right. A 1 Ghz with 512 ram should do the trick under most apps. But try to get at least a 128 meg nvidia or Ati card. Cheap knockoff cards that say they will do open GL won't do the trick in solidworks.

[JavaDog]

How small of a budget? Can you scavange Hard-Drives, Case, Power Supply, etc?

[DareBee]

I would also make sure you go with Win XP Pro.
SW will work on older OS but does not support anything but XP anymore (well maybe the support 2000 yet, but just go with XP anyway).
Just to let you know IMO anything under 2gig will be painfully slow.
Memory and Vid card are very important.
I have had a lot of diff machines running SW.

[crazyman]

I'm currently looking at purchasing piece parts to slap one together.
I was looking in the $3-400 range for one computer. Looks like I may have to get two as I need one to control my cnc via Mach3 in my basement and one to work with SW upstairs in a more hostile environment.
Sure wish they made a laptop that would satify both uses rather than peice together two separate computers.
maybe I can put together an Xterm type of setup with two monitors/keyboard/mouse and one central PC? Anyone ever do this?
Only thing I can think of that would be a downfall is:
1) Lenght of cables causing issues with signal integrity
2) Inconvience of not having the box right in front of you.

[crazyman]

PS.
I'm operating SW on a 550Mhz PIII with 256M of ram at the moment.
It seems to work "ok" for single part functions but when I open an assembly it slows it doen a fair bit.
Since I'm new to this, Are there any functions that someone can suggest I try to exercise this setup to its limits just to see if I can live with it or not?
So far I have designed a piston top using extrusions, cutaways, etc.

[JavaDog]

I'm currently looking at purchasing piece parts to slap one together.
I was looking in the $3-400 range for one computer.

Well, for $400 range you could go with a nice 64bit AMD cpu, 1GB of ram and a nice Geforce 6x00 series card (I would recommend a workstation card, but you will get better performance for your money with a consumer grade card) - all of which would work great for entry-level CAD/3D-Graphics work.

Again, if you have an ATX case, decent PSU (350w min) and some hard-drives already you can get a bit more bang for your buck...

[Kingz]

let me get this right you are running a 6k to 10k version of Solidworks, and wanted to run two version, 20k, and you want to spend 400 on a computer, lol. can we say boot leg, oh well, dont run any of the listed on SW2006-SP1.1 but if you are running 2005 or lower you could. i say you could bet a 2.8 intel chip, 1 gb ram fx500 card, for about 650. but thats no monitor, just a CD drive, no extra software of than OS, and by the way only xp is support by SW now.

[crazyman]

I have legal access to solidworks.
getting back to a cheap 'puter.
Hey, Money is money, lol.
I'm trying to keep costs down because I will probably need to have two computers, one in an office location for CAD and one to run MachIII in an industrial space.
It hurts me to have to purchase two units, especially since I really would like a laptop but that will not cut it.
Also hurts to purchase the latest and greatest to find out you can get it half the price month later.

[pinkerton5]

I've been running solidworks as well as COSMOSWorks on my Dell Latitude laptop w/ 1ghz and 1gig ram w/ no real problems to date.....once in a very great while, (by which i mean twice in the last 4-5 months) the program will crash, but that is likely due to my poor computer maintenance and the fact that i was running 10 programs at once....really I can't say that my laptop has had problems....and i use solidworks for 3-4 hours each day. Even before i upgraded the ram from 512 it worked pretty good for modeling, the problem came w/ the finite element analysis in cosmos.....all this on a computer i bought from the dell auction site for about $500

[cosmiccutting]

It all comes down to how much is your time worth?
At $50 an hour, it does not take very long to pay for a good machine that you are not waiting on. I just up graded from a PAINFULLY slow machine to a good machine (not the fastest processor available) but one or two steps back. Memory is the most important. Crucial.com has memory cheap.
The larger the models the more memory needed. Put as much memory in the machine as the mother board will handle.
Also, if you are comfortable building your own computer you can get the parts cheap. Tigerdirect.com is a good source i have used serveral times.