Consumer Hardware for Solidworks?

You are already running it on consumer grade hardware, so you have a good start on getting a feel for how it will behave.

i5-7200u is about as fast as an i7-2700 when it comes to per-core performance. But the i7 does have hyperthreading so churns out almost double the raw performance.

Pretty much any desktop GPU will outperform a 940MX. Only has three shader modules. So about the same GPU size as a GT1030, anything higher than that would be better.

Some of the low-end Quadros are pretty easy to come by Quadro P600 is about the same as the GT1030 when it comes to cores, but the driver will be optimized for things like Solidworks. Still, if you can wrangle a Quadro P1000 or K1200, perhaps an M2000, you would be better off.

First, is this for FIRST FRC? If so, send me a PM. That competition drove me from near high-school dropout to now pursuing a doctorate in Engineering. I always love to help out as much as I can for any team that competes.

Second, Don't listen to when people say "OH mY GuD, YoU CanT RuN sOliDWOrks wIthOUt a QuaDRo!". They are unaware of the needs for a robotics team and home users. I personally run a homebuild desktop with an i5-3570, 8GB RAM, and a GTX 1070. It runs buttery smooth for any and all school projects, robotics projects, and personal projects. I would say that level is more than enough for a robotics team with a mid-size budget to spend. If you are really scrapping by for money, you can always go for less power. I have run Solidworks on Dell Optiplex 990s (with onboard intel GPUs!), without issues. Quadros really just get you better driver support, which, I have never heard of somebody that I know having an issue with. Unless you are doing work that is critical to human life (designing a car, or something else that could seriously injure someone) consumer grade hardware is fine, and better value.

Since your workload will probably not involve super crazy assemblies, you should be fine with a modern i5 and a midrange GPU (GTX 1060 or 1070). I have found that Solidworks is really CPU and Memory bound for the most part. I would put an i7 and 16gb of ram with a GTX 1050 over an i3 with 8gb of ram and Quadro. You will notice the upgraded graphics mainly when rendering and if you run really reflective appearances. (Note you can also turn down display settings)

Also, for your laptop, it should run OK with those specs, is the CPU thermal throttling? Or are you getting any VRM throttling? My Dell XPS 15 gets that running solidworks and goes from an amazingly fast Soldiworks machine to feeling like a thinkpad from 1999. Although a 940MX is on the lower side of GPU compute power. You still need some graphics capability. Either way, a desktop is the way to go for Soldiworks due mainly to heat and upgradability.

Those are my $0.02.

EDIT:

To actually answer you questions....
1) I'd upgrade to newer CPU than a Sandy Bridge... like a intel 7000 or 8000 series. (Kaby and Coffee Lake or whatever they call them these days). They are much more efficient and still great value.

2) I'd pair at least a desktop grade GTX 1060. Preferably a GTX 980ti or GTX 1070. They should be dropping in price right now with the new RTX gpus that were released.

While the Quadro can game, if you are planning on having a gaming on the same machine, AMD's cards offer better Solidworks performance than any of the GTX cards, but not quite as good as the Quadros. So something like an RX 580 or a Vega 56 would give you good gaming performance and good productivity performance.

The folks over at LinusTechTips did a big benchmark run on various hardware in relation to Solidworks. You might want to search up the video on the YouTubes.

GTX1060 is by far the larger GPU, but also very new compared to an i7-2700. I've seen some OEM computers be fine with it, but not all of them. Nvidia's latest and greatest tend to like UEFI bios, which older computers don't have.

I agree on a newer chip, but I wouldn't say you need to go as far as late model hardware.

You can often find fully loaded i7-4790 desktops and workstations with SSDs and 8GB+ memory for around $300. For around $200 you can drop back to third generation hardware.

Nice, I was a member of Blue Tide Robotics (Team 2840) for four years and took a year off to mentor the team before going to university. Totally understand, 1 laptop is just not viable for an FRC team. We had a programming laptop (with 2 wifi cards to connect to robot and internet at the same time), a Dell workstation laptop (for CAD), and a Desktop for CAD, when I was with the team.

I would recommend a desktop on a rolling cart. That way whoever is doing CAD can roll the desktop around the shop/practice field and work with the people they need to work with. We had the monitor, desktop, keyboard, mouse, printer, and more on a card that we could roll around and everything was plugged into a power strip so we only had to plug in a single extension cord to power up everything.

Having said that, we did use the workstation laptop as well and it was nice to have while traveling to the regional competition.

I'm a firm believer that using GeForce cards is the best solution for entry level CAD work. You can get much more powerful cards for the money since you don't have to pay for the extra optimization that ensures reliable simulations due to more heavily tested drivers. I would 100% go for the 1060 in your situation.

As for the AMD debate, I had issues back in high-school running an AMD graphics card with Solidworks. My friend had an equivalent Nvidia and with the same CPU and memory, his Solidworks ran noticeably better. Having said that, tech has come a long way in the past 6+ years, and AMD has solved a lot of the driver issues that used to plague their hardware. For now, I personally see no reason to switch back to AMD as my personal experience has been much better with Nvidia.

Also, this is important! Make sure to budget for a new power supply. If you are buying used hardware, you should never trust the PSU. If that fails horribly, all of your hardware could be blown. I'd budget for a 80+ gold-rated EVGA or Corsair PSU, personally. Also, regardless if you replace the PSU or not, make sure that whatever you use is powerful enough. If you start hitting the power limits, you might get some really weird crashes that are hard to diagnose.

Have to be careful with OEM machines. Many have non-standard power supplies, in both size and connections to the motherboard.

Only other reason to stick with lower power cards is avoid swapping out the supplies.

Depending on the model Moddiy.com carries the adapters for a lot of OEMs, also had pretty good luck with sellers on Amazon and Ebay. Usually just have to enter the brand, number of pins the connector has, and adapter to find them.