Hi I had notebook which has Intel T9400 4gb DDR3 1066MHz ram. 1gb 9600MGT Graphic card. I can use Solidworks 2010 clearly. I can open big assembly files in 10seconds. I bought laptop. i7 2630QM 4GB DDR3 1333MHZ 1GB DDR5 HD6770M Graphic card. New notebook is much better than old one. But I can not open big assembly files on Solidworks 2011. It does not open. I wait 10-15 minutes but still loading. I look at Task manager. CPU and Ram is about %50 usage. I dont know what the problem is. Can anyone help me? Solidworks 2011 SP0
It sounds like you have one of two problems. The first one is whether you have a fast Hard disk - it sounds from the spec of the machine as if you should have but do you have the correct drivers or is it running in "legacy" mode or some thing? In my opinion, the most likely problem is the graphics card. If Solidworks doesnt see a graphics card that it can support with hardware acceleration, it defaults to using the main processor to handle graphics (software acceleration). Since the main program is only single threaded, I assume that you have one processor core running at maximum during file loading while the other is doing very little (approx 50% usage reported). I dont remember exactly what graphics features Solidworks have added for the 2011 release but my CAD workstation also takes longer to load files than it did with SW2010. Without a supported graphics card, the main processsor is having to load the file as well as calculate colours, finishes, shadows, reverse faces and a whole host of other graphics detail. There are very few graphics cards for laptops that are supported by Solidworks, the only ones I have come across are the nVidia mobile cards. Some mobile graphics cards also "share" system memory, if you have one of these you will really have a long wait! Hope this helps a little, but it doesnt sound as if your laptop will be good for Solidworks use..... Steve
I agree with the first poster. It is most likely the graphics card driver and the amount of ram. Most of these i7 notebooks use a Geforce card, a little weak but excellent when the drivers work right adn nvidia supports the driver development well. Yours is an AMD and I have no idea how good it is, but I guarantee that the drivers that came with the machine are probably out of date and the update feature for some reason may not always see the newest driver. Go to the card mfg website and look for the latest beta driver that will work with your card. If it is a dell written driver good luck. There are settings in your OS and in your video card software that will allow you to change the way the graphics card works, turning on and off various operational features that will make your card work better or not at all with SolidWorks. Unless there is a SolidWorks setup pre-built, you will have to play with the settings. I like the photoview preview window to kind of test how well the drivers are working. The ram for large assemblies needs to be at least 8 gigs, better with 16. I am building a large 400 part assembly with 8 gigs and it is just squeaking by. Finally the amount of ram on your processor (same as mine) is not always published. This is a lower end i7 chip, probably 6 mb of cache. http://ark.intel.com/products/52219. The same chip sold in desktops is running at 3.4 ghz instead of 2 ghz in notebooks. The ram in your graphics card (1gig) is low for large assemblies. I have 2gigs and it is still slow. Yoy can assign system ram to your graphics card with the i7 and windows 7. Good luck and let us know how you come out on this.
