Has anyone found benefit in using a Dual CPU? 1

[t2design]

Thinking of doing an upgrade and just wondering if anyone has found it beneficial, using Solidworks 2004 SP1 on a Dual CPU workstation?

Currently I have a 2.4Ghz, 1 Gb, but the CPU is just bogged down with some of my very large rebuild/redraws for 10 minutes (and yes I invoke light weights).

 

[DanielGraham]

You guys are correct. Cosmos made the claim that the sparse solver does take advantage of 2 processors.

DG

 

[linqur]

MadMango, you say there is a offical response somewhere?

 

[SBaugh]

Go to the KBA (Knowledge Base Article) in the support side of SW website and type in "Dual Processors" in the KBA Search engine.

Regards,

Scott Baugh, CSWP

http://www.3dvisiontech.com

http://www.scottjbaugh.com

faq731-376

 

[linqur]

Thanks! There it was.

 

[oharag]

Cosmosworks is SMP aware:

"Improved FFEPlus Solver for Static Studies. The speed of FFEPlus has been improved substantially in solving most problems. Testing on benchmark problems showed a 30% average speed improvement.

Improved Direct Sparse Solver for Static Studies. The performance of the Direct Sparse has been improved substantially in terms of speed and memory management. Benchmark testing on solid mesh studies showed the following results in comparison to COSMOSWorks 2004:

For problems solved in core in earlier releases, the speed is about 3 times faster on average.

For problems solved out of core in earlier releases, the speed ratio becomes higher as the problem becomes larger. For a large benchmark problem, the speed is about 20 times faster.

The solver now supports multi-processors. The solution time goes down substantially with added processors. A machine with dual processor showed an average speed improvement of 60%.
"

oharag

 

[JNR]

Going all the way to the original post (bit late, I know) you could run SW on one processor and something else time/compute intensive (like FEA) on the other.

John Richards Sr. Mech. Engr.
Rockwell Collins Flight Dynamics

There are only 10 types of people in the world - those who understand binary and those who don't.

 

[David93]

I use SolidWorks 2004 SP3 and CosmosWorks 2004 SP3 on both single and dual processor machines and I have not seen any noticable difference in the graphics update or FEA processing time related to the 2 processors. The dual machine is a Dell 450 with 2x2.8 Ghz processors. Certainly, the system becomes less bogged down when running additional apps, and this is a slight benefit. If you have a large model then bringing your RAM up to 2 Gb could be warranted. I have seen that working on very big models in both SolidWorks and CosmosWorks is possible with 2Gb and can be nearly impossible with 1Gb. The latest update to CosmosWorks is supposed to solve using both processors, but 75% of my time is spent in the meshing process for my casting models where the dual processor usage does not seem to be utilized.

Regards
Dave