So I guess I should give some background. I am currently a high school student on a robotics team. I am learning CAD for robotics (We use autodesk inventor). I have a gaming rig with specs as follows and I am curious, what types of resources do CAD programs benifit from. GPU, CPU, RAM, disk speed. I truly dont know. I do not have problems with loading times or importing components, and am wondering what piece of hardware is to thank for that.
MB: MSI 970-G46 CPU: AMD fx-8350 GPU: GTX 760 RAM: 16 gbs (4x4) Cosiar vengance HDD: Some 1tb hitachi drive that was on sale
I imagine that CAD takes advantage of multiple cores and possibly gpu acceleration (maybe?) considering that it is basically rendering 3D. I would guess that it is the 16gb and the 8350 that is allowing it to run smoothly. I would also venture to guess that the current bottleneck is the hdd. Just from a theoretic perspective, it would make sense that a program like that would have to offload and import rather regularly (or at least when saving and starting up). But if it runs smoothly now, then great. You really don't have any problems with it at all? I always knew that CAD required a lot of cpu horsepower, but never really knew what cpus did well. Would be interesting to see some sort of benchmarks...... too bad that things like this aren't like video games. People don't tend to benchmark performance of random software like this. I would assume that it would run better on Intel hardware though. That is just an assumption.
Hey, welcome to CADing and robotics, out of curiosity what program are you part of? FIRST?
As for the resources needed for CAD, it depends on how large/complex your part or assembly will be. A basic GPU will generally be fine, but with a higher end GPU (a 760 will do just fine) you will benefit from buttery smooth animations as your spin the model around and have the option to bump up the working model. CPU power is extremely important for rendering and simulations (something that very few high school teams do) but other wise it doesn't really matter. RAM is useful to have, but again, not super important unless rendering or doing simulations. HDD speed is not really important, but having really fast load times for models is nice, and something I really like out of SSDs.
I did CAD for two years on a similar machine to yours, though mine had an SSD, a 650Ti Boost and an FX-8320, it worked very well and each of those years I have produced renders for the team either in video and/or still form. And for my first two years I did it on a Phenom II X6 1055T and 4GB of RAM with some old AMD GPU.
I personally use Solidworks (and dislike using Autodesk), and I have either used or tested it out on a variety of setups. I currently CAD on a laptop using a i7-4700MQ with no GPU, worked heavily on a model using a Core2Duo laptop with some form of a terrible GPU, worked some on an HP Stream 11(or 13?) netbook with utter cancer specs and also worked on a number of other setups with a bunch of different things with varying levels of cancer and awesomeness.
Ask me anything!
Oh, people do benchmark these things, they just usually aren't posted all over the place. Solidworks actually has a built in benchmark, pretty nifty.
It appears that my CPU has had high usage while I was working. FYI while I was doing stuff the usage was higher. The 8 core seem to be helping. I actually installed autodesk on a virtual machine in my linux laptop. Although it takes time to load things, save and perform actions, but its not bad. I do have an ssd, but it is empty until I get myself to transfer the windows install onto it. I am a part of first, ftc to be specific. Autodesk is the only CAD program I have used, so I dont know if others are better, Ill have to try them sometime. And I made a mistake on my CPU, its actually an 8320, but I wrote 8350 because my friend has one.
Ahh, I see, I was in FRC for four years, best four years I've had so far. Team 2643, Dark Matter.
Your assemblies probably won't be large enough for a HDD to actually annoy you, but an SSD will help. The FX-8320 will serve you well, mine went through hell with me (two years of rendering and encoding videos for robotics along with my personal projects) and it's still running.
If your team doesn't care which CAD program you use, and you just want something that works with Linux, I've heard good things about both Blender and FreeCAD. I am not skilled at using either program, but I can confirm they run okay on Linux and I've heard good things.
Yeah, our standard program is inventor (which doesnt have linux support). Its what we got so Ill make it work. I put my 8320 through hell all the time, virtual machines cad work, games, and other stuff. I think the reason for inventor being the standard program is because we have a 3d-printer (Makerbot replicator) which I heard uses proprietary software. The part files might only be comparable with inventor. Not sure though.
As for being confused in inventor, hell yeah. Everything is all over the place and the errors that come up dont tell you whats wrong at all. Let alone the fact that the online resoures are not very good. I once was trying to scale something so I went online to look up how to. The website said to use the scale command. I looked for hours and could not find a goddamn scale command. It annoys me most of the time. If that didnt happen I would get things done way faster.
