How can I get SolidWorks to use more of my computing power?

David,

SolidWorks is only going to use one core.  Hence your 10% usage.  Rendering with PhotoView, or FEA stuff can use more cores.

For RAM usage, just make big complicated assemblies with lots of complicated components, you'll get there.  But unlikely to all 32GB.  The best I've done is about 15 and that was only by trying hard, not in "real life".

What processor do you have that has 12 cores? How are you coming up with 12 cores? check your bios settings as you may have hyperthreading enabled in your bios. this splits your physical cores in two which doubles what you really have. Its great for large calculation programs that use more than one core. Otherwise in your case it may be keeping you from using a full core.

Although Intel markets their multi-core processors as the way of the future, many programs are not written to use multiple cores effectively, and nothing can be done about this by the end-user. The programmers of the software need to completely rewrite their code for multi-core support, which is not trivial due to needing to keep separate but parallel tasks synchronized across the multiple cores (race conditions, file locking, atomic operations).

After the single core Pentium D series back in about 2007, Intel went with multiple cores in order to reduce problems with cooling. It is much easier for Intel to cool many separate slow cores spread across a large area than a single very fast core with all the heat focused in one tiny area.

If or when you upgrade in the future, you should look for Intel processors with the fewest number of cores but also the highest TDP (thermal design power). This will give you the fastest possible speed per individual core, and the most effective processor usage by single-threaded software (although still, typically only using 1 core out of several).

Of Intel's processors intended for workstations, this is likely the current top performer for single-threaded programs:

Xeon E5-1630 v3: 4 cores, 3.7 ghz base speed / 3.8ghz Turbo, 140W TDP

ARK | Intel® Xeon® Processor E5-1630 v3 (10M Cache, 3.70 GHz)

Here is one interesting study I've found:

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Solidworks-2016-Multi-Core-Performance-741/

Here is a good article to read (see attachment):

Hi David,

Sorry for the delay, but I have some useful information that can help. I wrote a blog a little while back explaining exactly what you need to know regarding hardware utilisation and SOLIDWORKS Simulation. There is a lot of scatterred information out there so I thought I would compile my own research and findings and after confirming this with SOLIDWORKS I published it.

Basically to summarise the document, only certain areas within Simulation use multi-core functionality i.e. curvature mesh not standard mesh, and particular solvers, etc. Hyper-threading is not supported whatsoever so if it is enabled, SW will only see 6 cores (if 12 with hyper-threading enabled). Always choose faster clock speed over multiple cores. (Unless you are rendering) You can always manually assign cores to carry out particular cores as well, have a read and if you have any questions just ask.

Phil.