Solidworks on Gateway FX with ATI Radeon 4800 series card

Hi,

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?

Any idea on cost of standard and professional SW?

Any maintainence fees?

It’ll work fine.
SW Professional is something like $2800/ seat and around $1200 maintentance/year.

I think… I don’t pay the invoices here, but I remember it being close to that.

Any difference with the Student Edition? What’s the educational edition lacking?

Don’t think the educational version lacks anything - but it’s licensed for non commercial use.

Does it do anything weird like watermarks or anything that would keep a file from being used for hand off to manufacture?

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.

-Josh