If you’re just beginning your career as an engineer, simulation or visualizer designer, or if you’re looking to upgrade your equipment, it is important to think about the following factors prior to buying a CAD workstation to Autodesk Inventor.
Autodesk Inventor provides professional-grade 3D mechanical design, documentation, and product simulation tools. It lets you work efficiently through an effective blend of direct, parametric freeform, and rules-based design features.
It comes with tools to help navigate through assemblies using fast graphic rendering as well as high-quality graphics. So it is essential that you buy an CAD workstation that is able to meet the minimum requirements for your system. How do you decide what equipment to select with so many options available?
Here are a few points to keep in mind when selecting an Inventor CAD workstation:
1. Understand your workloads
The first step to selecting the best computer for Inventor is to take into consideration the purposes you plan to use it for. For example, if you’ll use Inventor for design of products or modelling, you’ll not require a CAD system that is as precise as one who is using Inventor to simulate or for visualisation.
It is also crucial to think about the amount of parts you typically have to manage. For instance, Complex Models, Complex Mold Assemblies and large Assemblies (typically greater than 1000 pieces) need more memory, graphics , and CPU power than assemblies of 500 parts.
2. Think about other programs and software that you may require
In the event that Inventor is the program you utilize on a regular basis for mechanical and product design and manufacturing, but you’ll also use 3ds Max as an instance, you should find a CAD-compatible workstation which can run the program equally effectively.
3. Make sure you invest in a specialist graphics card
While consumer-grade graphics cards can be used in conjunction with Autodesk Inventor, they are not ISV certified for workstations that use CAD. Autodesk is a testing lab that conducts extensive tests to validate the professional range of graphics cards to aid in developing highly optimized drivers that can boost speed of performance for the program. It is not necessary for them to be costly, however the cost will depend on the workload you’re working with.
If you are working on smaller assemblies, then a less specific graphics card will be adequate. Larger projects require an intermediate-level graphics card and more intensive projects require a more expensive graphics card. Particularly if you’re using more than one monitor, or an ultra-high definition monitor, and carrying the visualisation task.
4. Select the correct CPU and specifications for RAM
When it comes to choosing RAM and CPU specs, you have plenty of factors to take into consideration based on the program you’re employing as well as requirements of the work. Both are equally crucial. Each is superior to the other with respect to overall performance. The number of tasks the CPU is able to handle is mostly dependent on the quantity of RAM accessible to it, as this will store the data the CPU is processing which allows more applications to be running at the same time.
Autodesk tends to design the products they offer around Xeon CPU’s rather than i7’s or i9’s due to the bigger caches and larger calculations. Autodesk Inventor is predominately a single-threaded software, therefore we recommend Xeons to increase durability and reliability since it’s a professional processor.
