CADspace was lucky to be sent an MSI WS72-6QJ. There were so many things we were thinking of doing to really push it to it’s limit, so we decided on a 2 part series. This is the first of 2 blog posts that compare performances between 3 different CAD Certified Workstations and for variety a custom built gaming machine. In this blog post we have compared the performance differences for SolidWorks Simulation, the reason for this is that SolidWorks Simulation makes heavy use of multi-core CPU, RAM and some disk usage.

To begin the testing, we first set up 6 different tests that get more and more complex.

  1. Mesh Creation
  2. Linear Static Study
  3. Flow Simulation
  4. Non Linear
  5. Linear Dynamic
  6. Non-Linear Dynamic

We needed to run each test 3 times and get an average result. To keep it consistent, we also restarted SolidWorks between each test to flush out the memory.

There is no surprise at the end of all the testing to see the MSI WS72-6QJ perform the best out of all machines. The powerful Xeon processor was able to crunch all those numbers faster due to it’s 2.8GHz clock speed and 3.7GHz boosted speed and 16GB of DDR4 RAM. It’s also running a super raid 4 hard drive setup, which actually means read speeds of 2900MB/s and write speeds of 1050MB/s – that’s right, 2.9GB/s read and 1GB/s write!

In comparison, the HP Elitebook runs at 2.7GHz and 16GB DDR3 RAM, this pair works really well, however you can see the massive difference when you spend the extra $ and go for a Xeon and DDR4 pair. Meanwhile, the Dell M3800 Precision is running at a much lower clock rate of 2.3GHz with 16GB DDR3 RAM. Comparing just these 2, it is sensible to assume that an extra 400MHz make quite a big difference in terms of simulation calculations times (sensible because simulation is very CPU intensive).

To add some variety to the testing, we had access to a gaming rig, with a 3.6GHz i7 Processor with 16GB DDR3 ram with dual NVIDIA GTX 960 graphics cards. Big thing to note in this case is that graphics power has nothing to do with final result, it all comes down to CPU, RAM and hard drive speeds. The only test that the gaming rig was the fastest was the meshing – the reason for this is that it is only CPU intensive, so with the fastest CPU speeds it was bound to be the fastest.

In conclusion, when it came down to complex FEA solvers and numerical solving with Navier Stokes equations in CFD, the robustness and speed of the Intel Xeon processor paired with the faster DDR4 RAM and super raid 4 setups there is no surprise the MSI WS72-6QJ reigned supreme in these tests.

Thanks to COM1 and MSI for providing us with the laptop to test and feel free to contact CADspace if you want anymore information.

Watch out for the next series of testing on Rendering Speeds in CAD Workstations.

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