Pricey? Sure.
Flawless? I don't know, maybe someone should find out.
http://www.solidsmack.com/solidworks-professional-engineer-workstation-computer-solidbox/2009-12-17/
SolidBox claims to make computers "By SolidWorks users, for SolidWorks users".
Pricey? Sure.
Flawless? I don't know, maybe someone should find out.
http://www.solidsmack.com/solidworks-professional-engineer-workstation-computer-solidbox/2009-12-17/
SolidBox claims to make computers "By SolidWorks users, for SolidWorks users".
Very interesting, but how many people out there can really afford a computer for only running SolidWorks!?
If you work for a company IT will hijack your workstation and put all these "who knows what" processes, apps, scripts, firewalls, drivers etc.,
If you work for yourself you'll likely need to run more than just SW on it.
It's still a great "ideal scenario" concept.
Yeah, I also looked over their specs...
I actually disagree a bit. Anna's (www.solidmuse.com) benchmarks show that those wimpy 2.4 GHz chips should be replaced with 3.2GHz Corei7/Nehalem Xeon chips, and the video cards should be toned down a notch.Spending upwards of $7k on a computer that doesn't have above 3GHz just seems silly, even if there are two quad-cores.
FX4800's are not nessisary for Solidworks, we aren't designing "immersive environments". Regardless of how complex your part is, an FX1800 is plenty for midrange, and an FX3800 is overkill for anything in SW. As I have mentioned before I suggest an FX580 for 80% of Solidworks users out there.
Agreed!
My IT Dept. spec my workstation here at the office, it has Dual Quad Cores @ 2.27 , 6GB RAM and a FX3800 GPU! used to cry about it, now I just laugh!
My 2 year old Gateway at home is Faster (simple work) with a 2.8Gz dual core processor!
Their price point for aSolidBoxx "immobile" workstation is way too much for what you get. You can build a tow Nehalem Xeon processor desktop workstation for about $3,000 and buy a Lenovo Thinkpad W500 for about $1,300 for portability and be way ahead of the game. But I do llike their idea of stripping out all of the BS in the OS and installing SolidWorks on a clean OS platform.
This is a bit of a regression. When SW came out in '95, one of the big deals was that it ran on ordinary machines, not expensive workstations (Easily over 5 figures at the time). SW99 on NT4 sp2a was absolutely bullet-proof. I remember coming from Mechanical Desktop, and being so impressed with the stability that I deliberately put off saving until the end of the day, because I could. Now stability has become such a problem that there is a market for people looking to pay for more expensive, purpose-built (assembled, anyway) workstations, and I've had to return to saving my work after every significant milepost of the day, with restarts and reboots to clear strange behavior.
I haven't heard a good technical reason for why SW should be so sensitive to hardware and system configuration, when games arguably tax the hardware much more and don't have these problems. Yes, CAD software is more complex than games, but not where it interfaces the OS and hardware. As a market, CAD users tolerate a lot more crap from our software. Probably because gamers don't have an enormous investment in legacy data, processes, training, etc. They certainly wouldn't tolerate things like waiting 3 releases for integration with desktop search to work reliably.
Unfortunately, that's the situation. It's unfortunate that we're on the verge of requiring special system configurations for CAD again.
I will start a thread doing just so..
I agree. Every year SolidWorks state the software is faster but every year we have to buy a new and faster workstation. Now our VAR told use that 64 bit will be the key to speed. If I go with SW, I should be using my old 286 and designing cities without problems but yes, SolidWorks 2009 is nicer then SW 97 I started with.
Its like car insurance, if I keep switching, my car insurance should be free as I save $600 every time I switch?
We are now purchasing 64 bit XP, HP SB Z600 x5550 320 GB XPP DVR with two NVIDIA quad FX1800’s, and with two quad Xeon processors
Charles,
My money would be with you in a Core i5 at 3 GHz vs. two quad core chips runing at 2.4 GHz. You win this race mathematicaly because SolidWorks base application is not multi-threaded, or at least not very much. But solving an FEA or CFD problem, or on rendering, it would be 6-8 times faster. And I suspect if the FEA or Flow problem were written in FORTRAN for a specific application, it would be 100 times faster.
But some day when they figure out how to use all those available cores to program SolidWorks just like you do now............ Kind of like one of Mauricio's top down, design table driven assemblies on steroids. Then maybe we will at least have HAL Jr.
"By SolidWorks users, for SolidWorks users"
Does this mean they also market a ProEBoxx, a SolidEdgeBoxx, or maybe even a CatiaBoxx??
Somehow I don't think the Boxx is specifically designed for SolidWorks.
Just to be sure everyone realizes the difference.
The computer maker in question is not Boxx Technologies at http://www.boxxtech.com/
SolidBox is a totally different company, reselling Dell computers that are advertised to be optimized for SolidWorks. http://mysolidbox.com/
Two very different companies.
Cheers,
Anna
Thanks for the clarification, Anna. I was indeed unaware of SolidBox. But if all it is is a Dell laptop optimizied for SolidWorks, I would read that to mean that all of the bloatware you get on a Dell computer will not hinder the operation of SolidWorks. Do you have any punch holder results comapring a factory built computer as shipped with bloatware and then configured without the bloatware?? But maybe that is a good use for the multi-cores that exist on most computers now that SolidWorks can't figure how to use.
But I think a SolidBox may be best described as "Putting Lipstick on a Pig" for those of us who spent most of our careers in sales and marketing.
Is there any performance test similar to the punch test for a high part count SLDASM?
The solidbox website says their PC's will do >25,000 ct part assemblies.
Wondering if their setup would be better for assemblies?
Their top-of-the-line system has 24GB RAM. That is definitely better for 24k parts than the standard 4GB you will see from a lot of other computers being sold as "CAD machines" today.
24GB is probably overkill for most people though (and very expensive... now).
A little clarity here. Solidbox was started by Chris Castle, who was my VAR guru at MLC here in Austin for a number of years. Very sharp, one of the best VAR guys I've worked with in 25 years. He knows S/W inside out and sideways. His assessment of how to get the best out of S/W is to tailor your machine to its strengths. So fast processor, lots of memory, 64 bit and minimal software running. It's like having an RX-7 street racer instead of a Buick. He starts with a Dell, but fine tunes everything to get the best performance out of S/W.
He was in this morning setting up our software (wearing his VAR hat) and told us that people are really catching on and buying his setups. I wish him the very best at this. I think it's a great idea.
We don't have any of his systems, since we already have our own 6400s, but the next upgrade will be from Solidbox. Sure we could do it ourselves, but he's better at it.
bp
Brian,
I hope to hear more about what Chris is doing optimizing his systems for SolidWorks. It will be great to hear from some of his customers on how his systems work. Great idea and I hope he is successful with his endeavor.
Cheers,
Anna
Chris does it the way he does because he can. Lotus builds an elise with an inline 4. Why do they do that when all of the other performance car companies use V8? Again because they can.
I have to agree with Brian here. Chris Castle really knows this program inside and out. Having not actually bought or used a Solidbox I can't offer an opinion on them, but would I trust Chris to configure a Workstation for me? You can bet your 401k I would.
...and how much would that bet be for David? I typically only gamble as much as I am willing to lose and typically I am not interested in losing! My BOXX was $7K+
Is that your i5 at 87 seconds Charles?
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pz7wTpIkC7LA28ybEyxyTPw
Not to be too cocky. I replaced a $6K Dell that ran the punch holder at 111. Everything is out of date at some point and it is always sooner than I'd hoped!
This thread is over a year old. SolidBox.com is even older ... yet their Benchmark page is still "Under Construction". That doesn't leave me with a warm and fuzzy feeling.
I have a Solidbox for home usage. I love it. It's not the top of the line but it still screams. I think their gameplan for selling these higher end boxes is working fine. Smaller comapnies without large IT overhead will love to get a box with SW loaded. It just saves time and effort in the long run.
Steve
Steve ... have you posted benchmark scores to Anna's spreadsheet?