Cad workstation motherboard

[Robbie_G_83]

Hello,

I'm looking at building a Cad workstation to run solidworks, and in particular render the products i design.

They designs i produce will mainly be Solidworks assemblies with low-medium number of parts.

Any suggestions for a mid range motherboard, memory, processor (potentially graphics card - though i already have a good one) would be much appreciated. I have a large tower, powerful psu, suitable hard drive (sata) etc

what operating system would you recommend

Rob

 

[Proximon]

What kind of budget did you have in mind?
How valuable is your time and how much time do you spend waiting right now?

From what I see about Solidworks you do not need server grade hardware. Probably a very strong quad core would be fine, because the program is not so well multithreaded that it will make use of many cores.

Is your good GPU a professional grade one?

Unless you have a very high budget, the sweet spot will be an i7 2600K on a P67 or Z68 board. The RAM though could be trickier. If saving a few days of time over the course of a year is legitimate, laying out a bit more for high performance RAM may make sense.