We will be upgrading our PDM Server soon. Currently the server is on a 3.5 year old computer. Xeon 24 thread CPU, around 2.4 GHz cpu, 64 GB of ram (probably DDR3), and no GPU besides the integrated graphics.

The server runs the following tasks/services

• SQL
• PDM Server (archive / database / files)
• Web2 (PDM Web viewer host)
• Solidworks license manager
• Creo license manager
• PDM task host during workflow transitions
  • Create PDFs of Solidworks drawings
  • Create STEP models of Solidworks part and assembly files

My questions are. Should we add a GPU to the server to assist with the PDM tasks? For these tasks Solidworks is actually opening the file to handle the conversions.

Also would less threads (16 or so) and higher clock speed (3 GHz or higher) be better, than higher thread count, and lower clock speed on the CPU? My thinking is 16 threads would be plenty and it would be more advantageous to have higher clock speed.

Also, I don't know if it matters, but the server is a VM with basically all of the main hardware dedicated to the one VM. Probably some of these items should have been put on different VMs; however we didn't want to tie up multiple PDM licenses, as a few of the services require that a user be logged in to the vault at all times.