Hi,

I'm in the process of upgrading my gaming pc to a solidworks pc, please help me decide what graphics card to choose. I'm also interested to know if it is possible to render using a workstation graphics card?

My main activities include modelling in viewport and rendering using photoview. I've decided on upgrading amount of ram since my models use more than 12gb. If you have any other suggestions on what I should do to improve performance it would also be much appreciated. The problem I have with my current setup is slow performance, especially in the viewport.

My current specs are:

intel 980x

12gb ram (will upgrade to 48 at the same time)

samsung 840 pro

amd 290x

Since the 290x card is a great gaming card I would also like to know that performance in fact will increase, I'm not very keen in spending a lot of money on a workstation card if there is nothing to gain.

I have thought about the following cards: K2200, K4200, W5100, W7100 and W8100. I have also tried to find different benchmarks to compare them, but they all seem very unreliable and seldom include gaming cards in the comparison. I think the real question is; will a w5100 or K2200 have better performance than a 290x even though they are much slower in hardware?

Also, I'm quite confused about the bench marking test in solidworks and particularly the comparison on solidworks website. The results are depending on resolution of the viewport and using the latest settings for rendering with photoview, and since these settings are not visible in the tables the comparison is quite useless. (if I had set 4000x4000 I get about 80s and if I set 1000x1000 I get about 5s on rendering.)

All answers are greatly appreciated

Thanks in advance,

/Johan