I have an eight-year-old laptop that needs replacing and I’m paralyzed. What are the most reliable ones now? Do I need a desktop for CAD? Pros and cons of operating systems (and where do I find them?) Browsers ditto? Where do I find answers that aren’t just product marketing?

  • ilovecheese
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    810 months ago

    I’m on a 7 year old laptop, i7-7500U CPU, 32gb RAM and run Solidworks in a VM as I’m also running Linux.

    It handles parts fine, but struggles a bit with very large assemblies and rendering on surfaces. This I assume is the lack of dedicated GPU.

    • @GreenAppleTree
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      410 months ago

      There’s many aspects of Solidworks that are CPU-bound. Worse, they’re only utilising a single core. It’s ridiculous for 2024.

      • ilovecheese
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        410 months ago

        I’m on a rather old version of Solidworks, for various reasons, but had hoped for some improvement by now.

        Although, I’m not surprised. Many, if not all of the ‘premium’ CAD and CAM software I have used have no multi-threading either.