Optimizing SOLIDWORKS Performance and Building Efficient Models on Your Existing Hardware Setup

Hello, in this lesson we're going to talk a bit about the system requirements needed to operate SOLIDWORKS efficiently. We're going to build a bench, we're going to change the bench to see parametric modeling in action, and then we're going to look into the measure tool and evaluate tool. Now before we get started with that bench, I'm going to show you something.

Here I have a lot of the files associated with my power drill that was featured in the previous lesson. If I go down here to the SOLIDWORKS part file, I can see it says SOLIDWORKS part document. Over here to the size, it's over 40,000 kilobytes.

That's a fairly big part file. Now you can remember that that particular file had a lot going on. I mean this is a very complex part that we can see here, right, and all the complexity of that part is right here in the feature tree.

And all of these features have subsequent sketches, so there is a lot going on. I mention this because SOLIDWORKS is a program that can take a bit of its full on your machine if your machine isn't quite built for it. Now chances are you're already operating this on a machine that you have, which is perfectly fine.

We're going to move through this course using SOLIDWORKS in an efficient way to use as little power and processing power and data as possible. But just so you're aware, I'd like to show you a bit of some of the system requirements needed to make SOLIDWORKS operate efficiently. The first thing to know is you want a strong processor.

An Intel processor is great. NVIDIA graphics cards are recommended. Strong graphics cards are recommended.

You'd like to be able to have a lot of RAM. 16 gigs of RAM is great. 32 is even better.

SOLIDWORKS still can, I believe, operate at 8 gigs, but there is one way to find out for sure. I went ahead and searched for SOLIDWORKS system requirements, and you can find that yourself by navigating to this webpage here. You can see here, and it will show you based on SOLIDWORKS 2025 the required Windows installation, the requirements of your server,  the requirements of your hardware, and the different drives that you're going to use.

You can look into certified cars and drives to see what the SOLIDWORKS team actually recommends for peak performance, and we have a list of that here. If you're still modifying your machine,  this is a great reference to use. If you're not modifying your machine, we'll continue with what we have, and we'll make sure to operate SOLIDWORKS in a very efficient way so it's nice and clean and doesn't put too much of a burden on your machine.

But it's important to know that these requirements are out there. Now, we'll go back to our PowerDrill. You can see here.

Let's go ahead and start a new file together. I'm going to close this out by hitting this check mark here. Go ahead and open SOLIDWORKS on your own machine, and once you've come to this page, let's start a new file.

Go to File, New, Part File, click OK. Now, as before, it automatically brings us into a sketch command. We don't want to be in a sketch right now.

We're not quite ready for that, so let's go to the right-hand side and click this red check, this red X, to close out the sketch without saving. Great. Now, to build this bench, we're going to start a new sketch, and if you remember from a past lesson, to have a sketch, we just first establish a plane on which to place that sketch.

And right now, our three choices for planes are here to the left-hand side, front plane, top plane, or right plane. Let's go ahead and select the top plane because we're going to build the top of our bench first. We'll go over here to the Create New Sketch button, and now we're facing our top plane directly.

The top of our bench is going to be a rectangle,  so let's grab the Rectangle tool. If we can make sure that we're in the Sketch tab in our Graphics Manager, we'll select the Rectangle tool, and let's select the center rectangle again. And as you can remember, the first click of the mouse of the center rectangle establishes the center of that rectangle, and then as we bring the mouse out,  we can arbitrarily affect the height and width.

A second click sets the height and width. We can further manipulate the rectangle here if we so choose, or we can close it out by hitting this green check mark. Let's close it out, and as you can see, all the lines are blue.

That's because it is currently undefined, so we'll need to define it either with references or Smart Dimension. Let's go to Smart Dimension, click it, and you can see that our icon has changed to feature this measurement. You can see that our cursor has changed to feature this measurement icon.

We'll grab the top line. Now, you can see it's giving us millimeters, and that's because we haven't established inches as our main system preference in this particular part file. That's okay for right now.

Let's go ahead and just type in, say, 48, and in this case, we'll have to type IN for inches so it doesn't mistake it for 48 millimeters. Once we've done that, we can either hit the Enter key or select this green check. Great.

It's converted those 48 inches to millimeters shown here. That's okay for right now. Let's use our Smart Dimension to grab this right-hand line,  and again, it's showing us millimeters.

We're going to correct that and call that 12 IN,  12 inches, and I'll hit the Enter key on my keyboard to close it out. Great. Now, it is fully defined.

It's nice and black, too, which tells us that it's fully defined. Before we close down and save this sketch, you'll notice that there is a purple shaded area in the middle of this. That tells us that this sketch is a closed sketch, which is another way to say that every line and arc and spline and everything that makes that sketch connects to something else,  and a closed sketch allows us to create a shape or rather a 3D volume in space.

If this sketch were not closed, say if I were to go to Sketch, Trim Entities, and drag my mouse over one of these lines, thereby cutting it away, we've opened up the sketch and therefore that purple haze has gone away. If I click Escape, I can get out of Trim Entities, and also some of the aspects that defined our sketch are no longer black, they're no longer fully defined such as the center of these lines connecting with the center of our origin. That's okay.

I'm going to CTRL Z to undo the commands that I recently did. You can follow along or just don't cut your sketch in the first place,  but what we want is a completely closed sketch that is black and fully defined. Once we have that,  we can hit this blue button here to close and save our sketch.

Now that we've done that,  let's go down to our custom system measurements and make sure that we have inches selected,  so we don't have to mess around with millimeters again. Great.