I was thinking of getting a seat of SolidWorks. Will it run on a Gateway FX Core i7, 9GB RAM, with a 512MB ATI Radeon HD 4800 Series Graphics Card or do I need to upgrade the card to a workstaion grade video card?
I believe there are some strange watermarks somewhere…
Nevermind: here’s the scoop…
The SolidWorks® Student Edition is available to degree-seeking students or full-time faculty members using the software for personal learning or academic purposes.
A “degree-seeking student” is defined as a student who can confirm enrollment in a degree-granting program, or who can confirm full-time enrollment in a certificate-granting program. Do not purchase this software if you’re not a degree-seeking student or a full-time faculty member. Commercial and institutional use is prohibited.
Solidworks will run just fine on consumer graphics. You’ll miss out on Realview but for the most part that’s eye candy - though it makes selections real easy to see, they glow!
If you use a consumer level card and run into any issues, support will probably ignore you until you upgrade.
Quick note: For CAD work, ATI’s “Fire” series vastly outperforms their DirectX gaming cards. If you’re going to be using this rig mainly for CAD, you should switch over to a GPU designed for it.