A Performance Comparison of Solidworks on Windows Vista with Solidworks on Vindows 7

Hello!

Please write your observations of the performance of Solidworks for various operating systems.

If you already have such tests, give the link.

My test results below:

Testing the performance of SolidWorks 2012 in a variety of operating systems.

Computer hardware:

CPU: Intel Core i5 680 @ 3.60GHz

Motheboard: Gigabyte H55M-S2

Video Adapter: NVIDIA Quadro 2000 1024 MByte

Memory: 8118 MB

Disk: ST3160815AS

This test was carried out with the installation of the latest, at the time of this test, video card drivers.

Tested operating systems:

• Windows Vista x64 SP2;

• Windows 7 x64 SP1.

To test the three-dimensional modeling was used SolidWorks 2012 with built-in software SolidWorks Rx.

Notes:

 

• The test has three areas; CPU, I/O, and Graphics. Each step of the test (described below) is meant to exercise a specific area of the computer using SolidWorks.
  
• Out of the box, standard settings are used to insure consistent settings are used to run the tests.
  
• The general tasks for the all datasets are as follows. The areas test are listed in [] after the test step:
  

 

- Open the file [i/O]

- Force a rebuild [CPU]

- Rotate and zoom [Graphics]

- Open drawing [i/O w/Multi-Threading]

- Rotate and zoom [Graphics]

- Add sheet [CPU] & [Graphics]

- Add view [CPU] & [Graphics]

- Render (parts only) [CPU w/Multi-Threading]

 

https://forum.solidworks.com/community/administration/blog/2011/01/04/solidworks-performance-test

Test results below:

Test results for Windows Vista x64 SP2

Test results for Windows 7 x64 SP1

Diagram comparing the performance of Solidworks 2012 in the operating systems.

Summary table of results:

I've had pretty good luck so far using Win7. Vista is dead. If Im not mistaken, MS no longer supports Vista. Much like XP. Win7 would be the ideal environment. When I get a chance at home I'll see if I can dump some details for you.

I think the difference is more about how Win7 uses the system memory. There are so many setup factors that would influence these tests as well. I ran SW10 on vista on a fairly slow system with no issues. They for most things is going to be your processor speed. Several features in SW can make use of multiple cores. Things like Hyperthreading can have an adverse affect on performance in SW as well. Also note that the performance test runs different if you run it first when you start your computer.

Did you mess with anything in Win7 as far as performance settings? What about Vista? Do you have a paging file? Hyperthreading on or off?

Just as a comparison on my machine I ran the SW benchmark with and without hyperthreading to see the difference. The bottleneck on my system is the memechanical drive. Im running a core i7 x980 overclocked to 4.15ghz. 12gb ram and a quadro 5000 graphics card.

I also did some post benchmark testing for motion studies and renders. With HT on i rendered a car in 4.5mins. With it off i rendered the same scene in 5.25mins. During my motion study the 6 virtual cores were parked so there was no noticeable difference in speed.