'Puter upgrade recommendations

I've been using F360 for about 3 years now and I'm reasonably satisfied with the performance on my elderly Win10 Home system using a Core i5-4460 processor, NVIDIA GeForce GT 705, 12GB RAM, and an SSD. But when I watch videos by people like Brad Tallis etc, their systems seem rather smoother than mine, especially when demonstrating things like moving sketch items etc. I'm considering an upgrade to my system, but have limited funds. Any recommendations please?

Add more RAM.

Gary

I believe you need to consider which parts of your present system will benefit viewing performance by upgrading, it may only be 1 area or could be all, I'm sure the boffins will advise.

Just seen post about adding more RAM, I have 16 gB and it is seldom when more than 5 gB is used when running Fusion 360.

Emgee

Edited By Emgee on 28/07/2021 11:39:07

3D CAD is pretty taxing on the graphics adapter. It may be that an upgrade there would be helpful. Display size can make a big difference, more pixels to manage means more work for the graphics adapter.

Before any hardware upgrade, you might be able to get a useful performance boost by -> ensure Win10 is fully updated, ensure you have latest driver for the graphics adapter, then check to see if Win10 offers 'Hardware accelerated graphics scheduling' - it's only available in fairly recent Win10 builds, and IF your graphics adapter and driver has the capability.  Enable it if it is available.

Check the settings for the Nvidia card - make sure it's set for 'performance' rather then power saving.

RAM - that all depends on how large/complex your designs are, and if you are running other software at the same time. 12GB may be plenty, or you may need more

Edited By David Jupp on 28/07/2021 11:53:25

How old is elderly? SSD's will slow down over time and more when getting full. It may be worth clearing out old junk to free up space, defragment and run the usual utilities to clear any lurking viruses, cookies etc and tidy up the registry before enhancing hardware.

pgk

I always used a graphics card rated for 3D Cad, the more ram on the card the better, as 3D uses the graphics processors. Mostly I used Nvidia.

Your overall system spec. doesn't look too bad IMO, athough the CPU is fairly modest by current standards.

Before spending money, a tune-up might be helpful. An easy, though fairly time consuming approach could be to download Win10 for a clean install, then reinstall your software.

I assume that you currently have 64 bit Win10. If it happens to be 32 bit then that would explain your slow running, but it can be replaced FOC.

Don't try to defrag your SSD, it's not necessary and shortens its life

As has been mentioned your setup doesn't look too bad!

I'm running F360 on a Win 7 machine with 8GB ram, dual monitors and Intel built in graphics.

Even though Autodesk says Win 7 is unsupported, it runs perfectly well, occasionally slow if it has to do something complicated to do.

I would be looking elswhere for a bottleneck before buying a new machine.

I thought defragging SSD is usually not necessary or desirable.

Fusion 360 is cloud based I believe. How fast is your internet connection?

I am using Solidedge 2021 on a very simple laptop with an SSD but no internet connection and it is so fast! Solidedge loads in about 4 seconds. Designspark loads in about the same time. I hate to think how much slower it would be if it was connected to the WWW.

Yes and No...
Link
http://www.hanselman.com/blog/the-real-and-complete-story-does-windows-defragment-your-ssd

pgk

Gary's system doesn't sound too bad too me, so I wonder if something is adrift.

As mentioned, the SSD is a possibility. This website lists SSD health check software. I've never used one: my SSDs are all fine, so far!

Gary's mention of 12Gb raises another possibility if his RAM was upgraded in steps rather than all at once. Mixing different RAM modules can cause marked performance problems. The whole 12Gb should be of the same type and from the same manufacturer.

Malware and/or a corrupt Registry is always a strong possibility on Windows, so worth doing a full scan and clean if there's any suspicion. I'm out-of-date, but malwarebytes and ccleaner did a good job for me last time my daughter had trouble. (She's now a confirmed Apple user...)

These days almost any new workstation costing over £500 will run CAD easily, and more ordinary kit will do the job too. Unless the model is huge Fusion 360 is lightweight.compared with the average video game. Getting the same performance out of a laptop is considerably more expensive.

Dave

Dont be in too much of a hurry to uograde the machine at the moment, as there may be issues with the upcoming Win 11, which is really only Win10 rebadged, but the issue will be that a significant number of CPU's and AMD graphics cards and chips will NOT be supported by the new version. AMD have just chopped support on WIn 10 for a significant niumber of graphics cards and chips, and those that have been recently chopped will for sure not be supported under Win 11.

The utility that's supposed to check for Win 11 upgrade has been withdrawn by Microsoft, so it's not possible to check for sure at the moment,