Can My Computer Run SOLIDWORKS?

SOLIDWORKS is the world’s best CAD ecosystem, enabling you to create complex assemblies, run simulations, and collaborate efficiently across your team. With all this functionality under the hood, there is a robust set of system requirements to ensure you can run SOLIDWORKS efficiently.

Experiencing lag spikes, long open times, or generally degraded performance may leave you wondering if your computer can run SOLIDWORKS. Aside from breaking down the core SOLIDWORKS system requirements, we provide fundamental examples of machine specs based on use cases and how you can check your own laptop to see if it can run SOLIDWORKS.

Understanding SOLIDWORKS System Requirements

Each year, SOLIDWORKS releases the minimum system requirements to successfully install and run the software. When purchasing a laptop or desktop computer, it is important to at least meet the minimum requirements, but there are also additional considerations depending on your use case and if you plan to use more resource-intensive packages like SOLIDWORKS Simulation or SOLIDWORKS Visualize.

Essential SOLIDWORKS Hardware

If you find yourself creating moderately complex parts and assemblies to produce detailed drawings, then you could be served by a more budget-conscious system. This would be best suited for a fairly average SOLIDWORKS user who may only be using SOLIDWORKS SimulationXpress for validation and making quick renders of their products.

• Processor: Intel Core Ultra 7 or 13th/14th Generation i7
• RAM: 32 GB
• Hard Drive: At least 512 GB Solid State Drive (SSD)
• Graphics Card: 16GB NVIDIA RTX 2000 Ada or better

Advanced SOLIDWORKS Hardware

If you find yourself creating moderately complex parts and assemblies to produce detailed, multi-page drawings, then you could be served by a mid-range system. This would be best suited for a more advanced SOLIDWORKS user who regularly runs stress and motion analysis using SOLIDWORKS Simulation.

• Processor: Intel Core Ultra 9 or 13th/14th Generation i7/i9
• RAM: 64 GB
• Hard Drive: At least 1 TB Solid State Drive (SSD)
• Graphics Card: 20GB NVIDIA RTX 4000 Ada or better

Ultimate SOLIDWORKS Hardware

If you find yourself creating moderately complex parts and assemblies to produce extremely detailed, multi-page drawings, then you could be served by a higher-end system. This would be best suited for a fairly average SOLIDWORKS user who creates extremely high-quality renders and is consistently running complex simulation studies.

• Processor: 13th/14th Generation i7/i9
• RAM: 64-128GB
• Hard Drive: At least 1 TB Solid State Drive (SSD) or a RAID storage solution
• Graphics Card: 24GB NVIDIA RTX 4500 Ada Generation or better

Critical Hardware Components for SOLIDWORKS

As easy as it is on paper to have a computer that perfectly meets your needs, it’s often reality where you’ll have to pick and choose between off-the-shelf laptop models that may not perfectly line up with our hardware lists above. In those cases, it’s important to know what each component does to help you make an informed decision.

Processor (CPU)

The processor is the most influential hardware component that can affect your SOLIDWORKS performance. For the majority of SOLIDWORKS day-to-day tasks and operations, we want to focus on the best single-core performance with a clock speed that meets or exceeds the minimum requirements. Products like SOLIDWORKS Simulation, SOLIDWORKS Flow, and some SIMULIA apps do leverage multi-core processing that can make a slower processor less noticeable.

However, we recommend getting the latest generation processor with the highest base clock speed to maximize your SOLIDWORKS performance.

RAM (System Memory)

RAM is the second most influential hardware component that affects your SOLIDWORKS performance, along with your overall system performance. Fortunately, RAM is one of the cheapest upgrades that you can make to a system. If you are seeing degraded SOLIDWORKS performance with RAM overhead, adding more will not solve the problem.

The minimum requirement is only 16GB, but we generally like to see at least 32GB, in some cases going to 64GB or more with complex datasets.

Hard Drives

Other than acting as a storage space for applications and files, the hard drive can play a vital role in your system’s overall performance. The read and write speed of your drives has a large influence on SOLIDWORKS’ performance with save and open times. You also want to be sure that you have sufficient room on the drive to allow for virtual memory, temporary drive space, and extra overhead for best performance.

We recommend going with high-speed, solid-state drives for the best performance.

Graphics Card

You want to utilize a workstation-grade graphics card in your machine. While consumer or gaming-grade cards can anecdotally work, it is not a supported configuration with SOLIDWORKS and lacks some of the reliability features of workstation cards.

You want to be sure to use the best, latest-generation card that has a supported driver for running SOLIDWORKS.

Checking your Laptop Specifications

To see if your laptop meets the SOLIDWORKS specifications, you can launch the Windows System Information utility. This can be done by searching System Information in the Windows search bar or by navigating to Settings>System>About.

Viewing available drive space on your computer

In System Information, you can see information about your processor, installed memory, graphics card, and hard drive space. You may need to navigate to the different subdirectories to investigate the different system specifications.

Tips for Lower-Performance Machines

If you are using a computer that meets the minimum specifications and is still struggling to work effectively or are creating complex assemblies that slow down SOLIDWORKS, there are techniques that you can use to increase performance.

Lightweight Mode

SOLIDWORKS Lightweight mode was introduced back in 2013 and receives enhancements each year to make it a more powerful addition to the software. With lightweight mode, SOLIDWORKS only loads a small amount of data into system memory to free up resources, and any data that is needed later is loaded on demand. Loading an assembly with lightweight components is faster than loading the same assembly with fully resolved components.

Lowering Image Quality

A common cause of performance concerns is the Image Quality slider in the Document Properties window. Oftentimes, we see that the quality slider is at its max value in existing SOLIDWORKS templates or from downloaded files from a vendor website.

Adjusting the SOLIDWORKS Image Quality

While the increased image quality makes things look nicer in the graphics window, it greatly increases the number of triangles to create a shape, the file size, and the overall performance impact. Reducing this slider to a more reasonable level can greatly improve SOLIDWORKS performance on underpowered machines.

Reducing Model Complexity

Everyone loves to have a perfectly modeled 1:1 representation of their physical parts and assemblies, but what they might not know is how computationally intensive it ends up being. Having bolts with highly detailed threads adds a lot of complexity to the model and reduces performance while not adding much to the overall model.

File sizes of bolts created in different ways

You can still get the same amount of information from an extruded cylinder with a thread callout as you do with a fully modeled thread. Reduce the model complexity any chance you can, without sacrificing design intent.

When is it Time to Upgrade?

You typically know it’s time to upgrade your computer for two major reasons: it’s starting to be sluggish when working on your designs, or when moving to a new SOLIDWORKS release to keep up with the minimum requirements. If that is the case, you have options.

Depending on the computer configuration, you may just be able to swap out components to easily upgrade your RAM or processor to get a few more years out of it. However, if that’s not possible, then it is time to invest in a new computer altogether.

Where Can I Buy a Computer to Run SOLIDWORKS?

When you decide to upgrade the entire computer, you want to make sure that you future-proof yourself for growth and future SOLIDWORKS enhancements, and not just where we are today. One of the toughest decisions is which workstation can keep you going, no matter the complexity of assemblies or simulations you may face in the future.

Fortunately, TriMech has partnered with Dell to make that decision easier with the help of our certified workstations assembled to tackle your most unique SOLIDWORKS challenges.

Want help from our technical experts on choosing a certified computer? Contact us here.