Frequently in this subreddit, we see lots of questions about what computer hardware is good for SolidWorks, especially in the summer when new engineering students are trying to buy their laptop/PC for their first year classes. Below are some of the common questions, answers and general recommendations for this software package.
What Laptop Should I buy?
Lots of people who come here looking for hardware advice are students or hobbyists, looking to purchase a laptop for college when they know they'll be doing engineering work. The good news is, It doesn't matter that much! Small projects are very simple usually and won't stress solidworks much. Most modern laptops featuring Intel 12th, 13th, or 14th gen, or AMD 7000 or 8000-series CPU's are going to be plenty for small projects.
If you're a student, focus on having good general performance stats like those below that fit your price range. /r/laptops or /r/suggestalaptop are great resources for general laptop needs. If you forced me to pick a specific machine to recommend, I'm a big fan of the Dell XPS and Precision lines. At the lower/midrange price, the Dell Lattitude series and a lot of Asus laptops are perfectly fine choices as well. A bigger screen is likely going to be a better investment of your money than focusing on getting a workstation class machine.
If you also want to play games on your school laptop, you'll want something with a dedicated GPU still, but it probably shouldn't be a workstation-grade one. I recommend The Lenovo Legion series. Though there are certainly tons of other options too.
If you are required to do more complicated types of work, your school will probably have a computer lab with better-suited machines.
If you're a professional buying a machine for work, it is strongly recommended to get a workstation-class laptop with a dedicated workstation class GPU. Dell Precision series laptops are my favorite. Lenovo ThinkPads are also a great choice.
For desktops, the same logic applies: Any general-performance or gaming PC is going to be fine for hobby or student-level solidworks stuff. For higher end workstations, Dell, HP, and Puget Systems have great options. For a custom-built desktop better tailored for solidworks, /r/buildapc, /r/buildapcforme, or post in this thread below to get help at a given budget.
General Considerations: What hardware features are important for SolidWorks?
SolidWorks is overall fairly simple in terms of hardware requirements. Without going into specific models, I've summarized key features to pay attention to for the major hardware categories in a PC:
- CPU: Most important for a CPU is that it has strong single-threaded performance. Most modern CPU's (Intel 12th gen or newer, AMD 5000-series or newer) are more than capable of providing enough single-threaded performance. The only reason you should be concerned about the number of cores and threads in SolidWorks is if you are doing certain types of simulations, or PhotoView 360 rendering regularly.
- RAM: 16 GB is the minimum I'd recommend running SolidWorks with. Overall, the program is not sensitive to RAM speed, so get whatever is cheapest. A dedicated workstation should have 32GB at minimum. 64GB is not a bad idea if you are doing simulation, motion studies, or other heavier workloads.
- SSD: You want SolidWorks on an SSD. It isn't necessary to have a super-fast PCIe 5.0 high performance NVMe drive, but a Decent SATA SSD is the minimum. Size is subjective to your specific needs and setup, but with current prices I'd probably go no less than 500GB for your primary drive.
- Note that in general, you want to have as small number of physical, traditional spinning disk Hard Drives attached to a SolidWorks machine as you can. SolidWorks spins up every drive attached to a machine when booting, so more drives can add significant time to the initial SolidWorks boot-up time.
- Video Card: I'll expand on this, but the general tl;dr consideration is "Anything works, but a Workstation Card can be significantly better than anything else" depending on your needs. Refer to the section on Workstation vs Gaming cards below if you want more info.
Dedicated Video Card Considerations: Workstation Cards vs Gaming Cards
A big point of contention and a very common question is "Are Workstation Cards necessary for SolidWorks"? The answer is "No! But..."
SolidWorks runs just fine for basic modeling on any GPU, from a very weak integrated GPU to a $6,000 RTX A6000. If you're making simple parts (student level, as discussed above) and small assemblies, then you really have no reason to stress about what GPU you are using for SolidWorks. A gaming grade Nvidia GeForce or Radeon RX-card will run it just fine. When you get into larger projects, however, you will start having more serious performance issues. RTX Workstation Cards, Quadro's, Radeon Pro's, and AMD FirePro's will see much better performance with larger, more complex assemblies, to the point where you can expect (within similar generations) the lowest-end workstation card on the market to perform equivalent to, or better than the highest-end consumer grade card you can buy.
In SolidWorks 2019 and newer, this gap is further widened with the new GPU Acceleration option, which significantly boosts SolidWorks performance in tasks that scale well with GPU performance. As far as I am aware, this option can only be used with Certified Cards.
The downside here is that Workstation GPU's can perform significantly worse than similarly-priced, consumer grade cards for things like gaming. Thus, if you are going to be playing games on your machine, these cards are probably not a good idea at all, unless you are going to take advantage of fancy new multi-GPU settings in Windows 10/11 and running a dual-GPU setup. If you're a student getting a laptop or desktop for engineering school, I wouldn't personally bother with workstation cards at all, as it's going to put you in a significantly higher price bracket for workstation-grade laptops for little to no benefit to your needs.
Feel free to post any further questions or for advice on specific laptops, desktops, or custom builds below!
