I'm in the process of setting up a new portable workstation. For the moment I am offered the following configuration:
processor: i9-11-950H @2.6Ghz.
Memory: 32 GB RAM expandable to 64GB.
Hard Drive: 1TB SSD
Nvidia RTX A4000 graphics card (16GB DDR6)
I do overall design on Solidworks up to about 800 parts as well as simulation and rendering on Visualize.
My questions:
1- I have only used graphics cards from the QUADRO range. there is little feedback on the RTXA4000 on the Solidwork benchmark (probably because it is too recent since the scores are quite good) Do you have any feedback on this RTX range?
2- I'm currently running on an i7-4cores @2.9Ghz. Will switching to an i9-8cores @2.6Ghz be a real gain? knowing that only the simulation and the rendering exploit the number of cores... The drop in frequency puts me off a little.
Some cards in the RTX range are certified on SOLIDWORKS, but to date none of the RTX A range, which does not mean that it will not work, it simply means that Dassault does not guarantee its use on SOLIDWORKS and does not guarantee that it will not cause any problems. You may end up with graphical defects, display or crashes etc...
Regarding the second point, 4 cores can be enough, the clocking on a portable station is recommended at 2.7 or higher so for me the two processors are equal.
indeed the RTX 4000 is Solidworks certified but not the RTX A4000... I missed this important detail!
For the processor if I compare on the Solidworks benchmark, the response times are divided by 2 between the 2 references mentioned (whether for the design and simulation module) but there is only one result available for this i9 11950H so score can be reliable...
You know there are very few solidworks programs that use multicore (loading, +????) because the programs were not written for parallel computing So as you mention it's only interesting for rendering and simulation.
On the other hand, Solidworks does a lot of swapping with the hard drive, so there is probably a lot to gain on this side.
For your information, I have a tower with I7 7700 3.60 ghz (four cores, 8 threads) and a Quadro P2000 card, and even during the simulation it doesn't consume all the power of the machine, far from it.
For graphic design you use Visualize (phew) much faster than Photoview because they are not the same software (not the same technology)
I also have an HP Zbook Firefly 14 G7 Mobile Workstation - Windows 10 Pro 64, NVIDIA® Quadro® P520, FHD touch 14, i7, 16 GB, 512 GB SSD
What you need to know first of all is that no matter how powerful the processor is and how many cores it is, what matters is the frequency of the proc. You'll run better with a 4-core 4.1ghz Xeon than with an 8-core 2.7Ghz i9. It is important to understand that the 3d kernel of SolidWorks does not use multi-core. The reason for this goes back to the origins of the creation of the 3D kernel, which has changed very little. The usefulness of multi-core remains nevertheless in the use of visuale or photoview. So increase the frequency if you can without investing in a crazy processor. And for the graphics card, take a good look at the ones that are validated by SW in OpenGL. I agree with @Zozo_mp on this subject, he explained it well.
I suggest you before making your decision to watch the SW2021 presentation because there are very noticeable performance improvements between 2020 and 2021 that go more through the OpenGL 4.5 graphics card . Very, very big progress between 2019 and 2021. You'll see that the latencies in zooming or moving up, down or left, right have almost disappeared.
I stumbled upon the CLEVO laptop brand, which offers customizable configurations with hardware that I haven't found elsewhere in mobile stations. (example an i7 @3.8 Ghz - 5.1Ghz in boost)