How often do you upgrade your hardware?

[Alin]

The upgrade cycle at my company is every 2 year. What is yours?
I will explain why I ask.


Based on my experience, working with thousands of SOLIDWORKS users, to maximize productivity, a company needs to consider three things:

1. Have the optimal hardware for its CAD solution

2. Have the optimal software to do the job they require (design, engineering, simulation, QA, CAM, marketing, documentation and more)

3. Have the users professionally trained to use the first two items proficiently.


Let’s leave items 2 and 3 for a future conversation, and let’s focus only on how hardware impacts your performance as a SOLIDWORKS user. Wouldn’t be nice to experience an increase of speed of 20 or 30% just by getting a new computer, independent of training or software upgrades?

This is what I noticed this year, when I got my new laptop. Naturally, I asked myself why do my assemblies open so much faster on a laptop that is only 2 years newer than my old one?
I could not find a good answer, so I will ask this question next Tuesday, August the 2nd at 1pm ET to the leading experts from DELL and NVIDIA.

If you want to ask your own questions, please join me. You can reserve your seat in the conversation here:

https://solution.trimech.com/the-effect ... SOLIDWORKS

[ellundo]

We upgrade every three years.

[jcapriotti]

This is what I noticed this year, when I got my new laptop. Naturally, I asked myself why do my assemblies open so much faster on a laptop that is only 2 years newer than my old one?
I could not find a good answer, so I will ask this question next Tuesday, August the 2nd at 1pm ET to the leading experts from DELL and NVIDIA.

If you want to ask your own questions, please join me. You can reserve your seat in the conversation here:

https://solution.trimech.com/the-effect ... SOLIDWORKS

Thanks Alin, I'll bite and join the call. We upgrade every 3 years on lease. When we were purchasing the hardware, we would upgrade a 1/3 of the engineering groups every year to spread the cost around and I could get the budget set for engineering in a consistent manner.

I suspect some performance gains are just from Windows getting bloated after 3 years. An interesting experiment would be to wipe the old machine and reinstall Windows and SolidWorks and compare. I would only expect a 10% gain in performance unless there is a major component change, like HDDs to SSDs.

[Alin]

Thanks Alin, I'll bite and join the call. We upgrade every 3 years on lease. When we were purchasing the hardware, we would upgrade a 1/3 of the engineering groups every year to spread the cost around and I could get the budget set for engineering in a consistent manner.

I suspect some performance gains are just from Windows getting bloated after 3 years. An interesting experiment would be to wipe the old machine and reinstall Windows and SolidWorks and compare. I would only expect a 10% gain in performance unless there is a major component change, like HDDs to SSDs.

Glad to hear you will join us tomorrow. I did my best to ensure the software settings and specs were similar on both machines. Usually you are right, the increase in performance I usually record is about 5-7 percent over 2 generations (we get a new workstation every 2 years). This year it was closed to 25% and I could not explain why.

So… I asked they guys who are building these workstation and video cards what has changed this year to make such a huge difference. Hope that the answers they will give us tomorrow would be satisfactory.

[zxys001]

3-6 years range for me (sole proprietor).
Since SolidWorks or Windows has NOT improved or changed much at all ~ 10yrs,...and since the pandemic (some waited +1-2 years) most have not change their hardware (or trained much),.. yes, (since you sell services) buying, upgrading with new components or hardware .. it's probably a very good idea.

My latest rig, Core i9 12th Gen, 40gigs DDR5, 3070ti, 1gb-1gb w/Win11

[bnemec]

We try to stay on a three-year rotation. Trying to evaluate or predict the true cost/benefit ratio for the various new technologies (storage, CPU, GPU, RAM/bus) seems to be a different research project each time. There's no lack of information about this topic so filtering through it all takes a bit of time.

Looking forward to the show!

I've wondered this point often.

... I suspect some performance gains are just from Windows getting bloated after 3 years. An interesting experiment would be to wipe the old machine and reinstall Windows and SolidWorks and compare. I would only expect a 10% gain in performance unless there is a major component change, like HDDs to SSDs.

[jcapriotti]

Glad to hear you will join us tomorrow. I did my best to ensure the software settings and specs were similar on both machines. Usually you are right, the increase in performance I usually record is about 5-7 percent over 2 generations (we get a new workstation every 2 years). This year it was closed to 25% and I could not explain why.

Which version of SolidWorks did you test? I assume you are using the same version to eliminate the possibility that SolidWorks increased performance. Also, I'd learn toward testing on an a slightly older version as it's possible that the latest version of SolidWorks might take advantage of of some new hardware feature. Or at least test the last 3 Swx versions on both latest hardware and 3 year old hardware.

The one area I would expect minimal gains is CPU rebuilding on a large part's feature tree. It's often single threaded and the only expected gains would be a slight increase in performance due to a new CPUs architecture. Assemblies are trickier with each version as they implement new loading tricks to increase performance.

[Glenn Schroeder]

Every three years here.

[HDS]

I have seen both extremes.

Best was when the engineering manager was also the IT manager. Every computer purchased for the entire company was a top of the line engineering workstation. The oldest engineering computer was replaced and the other person got an old workstation. It worked well for everyone. The 2nd hand workstation was better than they would have gotten for themselves. The oldest computer in engineering was only 1 year old. This was nice because we did reverse engineering and CAM programing was well as CAD. Some of those tasks could take an hour to run.

Worst was a director of engineering that was a programmer and a ME manager that was a cheapskate. The director said with a straight face that every 5 years was being generous. The ME manger couldn't justify a new computer even when the lead engineering on the highest profile project at the company was bluescreening every day. Even the idea that when it took us 15 minutes to save a file I was wasting an hour a day if I only saved 4 times didn't phase him. With that mentality we had get the bleeding edge and spend over $5000 per a machine that would be less obsolete in 5 years. The sad thing was that we sold a dell PC with each product. So we got a %40 discount from Dell.

I would say every 3 years is the limit for desktops and pushing it for laptops that get beat up more.

[Alin]

Which version of SolidWorks did you test? I assume you are using the same version to eliminate the possibility that SolidWorks increased performance.

SW2022

[jcapriotti]

I have seen both extremes.

Best was when the engineering manager was also the IT manager.

Worst was a director of engineering that was a programmer and a ME manager that was a cheapskate.

I would say every 3 years is the limit for desktops and pushing it for laptops that get beat up more.

I'd like to think that I fall into that first category . But basically as CAD Manager, I could only recommend to the VP of engineering what we should do, luckily he was open to it.

We build big assemblies that can go over 10k components with daily assembly work in the lower thousands. No computer was fast "enough". Besides lost time sitting around waiting for operations to finish, there is another factor which I call "User fatigue" although that is probably not the best term. Basically it means if I'm working in the software and its lagging and can't respond as fast as I can, then I lose my "zone" and lose even more productivity.

This also affects employee morale when management gives the impression that they aren't willing to provide you with the necessary tools. Cost is always a concern and I do my best to create computer builds for various roles, basically a low, medium, high engineering build. And then there are one off builds for high end FEA and other simulation engineers.

[TTevolve]

We do every 3 years for CAD workstations, then hand them down to other departments in the organization, like HDS above, the 2nd hand engineering workstations was better than the low end machines that would have been purchased for them, even after 3 years of use.

I created a spreadsheet where you can input the estimated percentage of the improvement in hardware (I usually used 5%) and using an average salary for a designer, with the time to take common tasks (Regen a assembly, load/save parts), you could get the estimated savings over the course of a year. I originally used it to prove that spending 5K on a high end workstation would actually pay for itself of the 3 years, which it does easily.

[Glenn Schroeder]

We do every 3 years for CAD workstations, then hand them down to other departments in the organization, like HDS above, the 2nd hand engineering workstations was better than the low end machines that would have been purchased for them, even after 3 years of use.

I created a spreadsheet where you can input the estimated percentage of the improvement in hardware (I usually used 5%) and using an average salary for a designer, with the time to take common tasks (Regen a assembly, load/save parts), you could get the estimated savings over the course of a year. I originally used it to prove that spending 5K on a high end workstation would actually pay for itself of the 3 years, which it does easily.

We hand ours down too, but with changing computers every three years and NIS not allowing computers over five years old to connect to the network they other folks still need to buy new ones.

[Frederick_Law]

Would like to see the answer also.
CPU haven't changed much in pass 10 years. Top speed is below 5GHz and not all core run at that speed.
Software security patch had made them slower. So it could be hardware patch on new CPU.
Memory speed haven't increased much too.
Video card does keep improving each year but OpenGL haven't keep up and SW not using latest version.
SSD speed has increased 10x in pass 10 years.

I do notice huge different in Windows 10 when switching from HDD to SSD.
See if you can test old 500MB/s SSD and 5000MB/s SSD in same system.
And different Video card.

[jcapriotti]

CPU haven't changed much in pass 10 years. Top speed is below 5GHz and not all core run at that speed.

Clock speed doesn't tell the whole story. way back in the day they kept raising the clock speed to gain performance but ran out of headroom a long time ago. Today, the latest CPU at 2.8 ghz can be significantly faster than a CPU three generations ago running at 4ghz. I haven't tested the latest CPUs so maybe the internal architecture changes aren't as significant.

[RichGergely]

Total irrelevant putting a set year date on upgrading workstations. All it highlights is a total lack of competence in IT and the fools who let them have the money.

For more than a decade the days of massive jumps in a short time have somewhat gone. The clock speeds are critical but only to the specific generation of chip. Generally v2 and v3 of chips don't have a massive increase either.

The trick to purchasing a workstation is to jump in on the new processor architecture/chipset at the very beginning and get the fastest single core processing speed you can (this is relevant to Soildworks). Then keep that workstation while that architecture is current - which can last many years. Yes there will be updated processors and even the chipset to that architecture but what you won't see if you got the fastest single core processor at the start much of a performance boost until the totally new generation comes out.

That system has worked pretty well over the last 12 years (pre that big speed boosts were much quicker). Will it work in the future, who knows, which even more compounds the idea of a system of changing computers at a set time is garbage. It should be a fluid thing which adapts.

[Frederick_Law]

When clock rate got stuck, they add cores. Then add internal parallel processing and branch prediction.
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html
If you compare P4 to 12 Gen Core, you get 10x faster.
Compare 5th gen Core to 12th Gen you get 2x.
If someone upgrade from P4, that's huge gain.
Upgrade from a few years, not much.

Lots of programs moved from CPU to GPU, including games.
CAD had been moving very slowly.

Would be nice to see a break down on which one give most gain: CPU, GPU, memory, SSD.
On large assembly and sim.

[bnemec]

Some discussion in the webinar about increased GPU Memory. I have heard that system RAM is "mapped" to the GPU memory or something. So a system with an RTX A4000 that has 16GB of GDDR will dedicate 16GB of system RAM for working with the GPU. Am I misunderstanding what was being said? Maybe I should ask does the amount of GDDR on the GPU affect how much system memory should be installed and how much?

[Frederick_Law]

I only see that on laptop where CPU and GPU share same memory.
Desktop will have dedicated memory for GPU, usually faster then CPU memory.

[dave.laban]

Don't think I've ever worked anywhere with a set schedule. I've had a 7 year old desktop at one former employee. My current laptop is 3.5 years old and there's been no discussion about replacing it.

[Dwight]

Alin

Your post lead me to checking out my upgrade option. I now on a . . .
Dell 7530
Intel Xeon E-2176M (Six Core Xeon 2.70GHz, 4.40GHz Turbo, 12 MB 45W)
P2000 video card

My upgrade choice is a . . .
Dell 7560
Intel Xeon W-11855M (6 Core, 3.20 to 4.90Ghz)
RTX A2000 4GB GDDR6 Video Memory

Per the discussion here, there doesn't seem to be much difference. We are soon moving from SW2018 to SW2022, for which the P2000 is not tested, but usually that isn't a problem.

Dwight

[bnemec]

Not just @@Dwight, I hear it a lot; why the Xeons in CAD workstations? Clock speeds are typically lower, are there other mechanisms that increase performance and/or reliability?

We used to order Xeons as well, but the past ~8 years or so just using the regular i7 or i9 depending on which one appears to have better single threaded performance at the time.

Xeons support ECC is that of use in CAD?

[Frederick_Law]

Yes, Xeons are workstation CPU which support ECC RAM for less random memory error.
Might help if you need to run days long simulations.

[KSHansen]

We went a very long time without hardware upgrades. We were on Creo, and we also went a long time between software upgrades. We'd usually skip a version, so three or four years.

[HDS]

Upgrading more often lets you purchase a much less expensive system. You can get a CPU that is one or two steps down from the fastest thing that was just released. A workstation that will be fast enough for 2 years is half the cost of one that will be O.K. for 5.

You can also spend less on shorter warranties.

[SPerman]

Upgrading more often lets you purchase a much less expensive system. You can get a CPU that is one or two steps down from the fastest thing that was just released. A workstation that will be fast enough for 2 years is half the cost of one that will be O.K. for 5.

You can also spend less on shorter warranties.

So in five years you will have spent more on a slower machine.

[bnemec]

Upgrading more often lets you purchase a much less expensive system. You can get a CPU that is one or two steps down from the fastest thing that was just released. A workstation that will be fast enough for 2 years is half the cost of one that will be O.K. for 5.

You can also spend less on shorter warranties.

Ah the epic battle of where to be on the cost/technology curve. For some I'd bet buying the bleeding edge and highest end tech is well worth investment. For our usage we've found through the years that most of the time we're better off buying at the "knee" in the curve between cost and performance. Sometimes we go for the higher end GPU but just don't see that the gain justifies the large cost increase. BUT, when the m2 SSDs first came out, for example, that was well worth it!

[AlexLachance]

The upgrade cycle at my company is every 2 year. What is yours?
I will explain why I ask.


Based on my experience, working with thousands of SOLIDWORKS users, to maximize productivity, a company needs to consider three things:

1. Have the optimal hardware for its CAD solution

2. Have the optimal software to do the job they require (design, engineering, simulation, QA, CAM, marketing, documentation and more)

3. Have the users professionally trained to use the first two items proficiently.


Let’s leave items 2 and 3 for a future conversation, and let’s focus only on how hardware impacts your performance as a SOLIDWORKS user. Wouldn’t be nice to experience an increase of speed of 20 or 30% just by getting a new computer, independent of training or software upgrades?

This is what I noticed this year, when I got my new laptop. Naturally, I asked myself why do my assemblies open so much faster on a laptop that is only 2 years newer than my old one?
I could not find a good answer, so I will ask this question next Tuesday, August the 2nd at 1pm ET to the leading experts from DELL and NVIDIA.

If you want to ask your own questions, please join me. You can reserve your seat in the conversation here:

https://solution.trimech.com/the-effect ... SOLIDWORKS

We have a bi-cycle if we could say. We upgrade the workstations of the engineers every 3 year. Everytime we update their workstation, we take their old one, transfer it to someone else in the technical department. Everytime we do the cycle twice, all computers have been updated for all the department. This way, we ensure that engineers always have optimal hardware and ensure that the rest of department also has hardware that is certified/used to be certified. The workstations are mostly a necessity for engineers, when doing stress analysises and things of such nature.

If the workstations are still decent after the cycle, we convert them into computers that can be used anywhere inside the company.

So, every 3 years for engineers, every 6 years for everyone else that requires workstations. It used to be 2/4 to keep up with SolidWorks, but we switched to 3/6 because of the current economical circumstances and also because SolidWorks has a hard time keeping up with itself.

Everyone else in the company is in a per-need basis, so when their computer breaks down, we switch it.

[Cadmonkeychris]

Freelancer. I have mostly run Dell Precision laptops for the last 16 years, normally upgrading every 3.5 or so. Currently waiting for a visit from a Dell tech and that average may take a small hit...

[Jim Steinmeyer]

This also affects employee morale when management gives the impression that they aren't willing to provide you with the necessary tools. Cost is always a concern and I do my best to create computer builds for various roles, basically a low, medium, high engineering build. And then there are one off builds for high end FEA and other simulation engineers.
[/quote]

I can personally attest to this. We outsource out IT work and the Company who does our IT work also builds and sells computers. He tends to build based on minimum specs because the company wants to keep the cost down. I would say we change out our machines every 10 years weather they need it or not, but it isn't quite that bad. My machine is notoriously slow enough that even the company president jokes about having someone else open files while we wait for mine to open something during a zoom meeting. Last November the IT guy looked at my machine and determined that he thought one of my RAM sticks was bad. Since he is 50 miles away he was going to mail me one to replace it. After waiting a month I mentioned it to my supervisor and he said not to worry, there was something better in the works. I am still waiting.
Do you suppose this has any effect on my morale? Do you think I try hard to hurry when they don't seem to care about my slow computer? The larger models I routinely work with can take 10 to open. I frequently have to wait for a selected edge or surface to highlight when I pick it. I frequently crash, because my machine can't handle the load.

[AlexB]

I've worked at places with both extremes.

- One had a policy to replace every 3 years regardless of department due to a leasing program with Dell. I liked this company and really felt supported in my role there by my manager and the IT department.

- Another had a tightwad of a finance guy that would not replace a computer... ever. My workstation there was 14 years old or something ridiculous and he wouldn't even approve a graphics card / RAM upgrade because "the last engineer didn't have any problems". I did not feel supported or even liked at this company and the turnover rate for engineers was HIGH. 6 months at the company and you'd be the most senior engineer.

I feel like there's a good middle ground for these things at 3-5 years depending on the grade of hardware purchased initially. However, if the hardware is causing delays and issues with your ability to do your job then it needs addressed ASAP. The important thing is that users feel supported by the company when concerns are brought forward.

[Frederick_Law]

I frequently have to wait for a selected edge or surface to highlight when I pick it. I frequently crash, because my machine can't handle the load.

Lots of coffee breaks