Blog | This is all about CAD Workstations

What is a CAD Workstation?

A CAD workstation is a professional-level computer system that provides significantly improved productivity and performance towards engineering and design data workloads. They have a substantial difference compared mainstream workstations, as they are equipped with powerful graphics processing and provide reliability options through error-correcting code (ECC) memory.

The difference between CAD Workstations and Mainstream Workstations

Dedicated, custom-built CAD workstation differ from a mainstream workstation

• Productivity performance - CAD workstations perform much faster than the mainstream workstation, and looks at paying for itself, through productivity, in just a few months. High performance in supporting 3D CAD software, stress testing, and high-resolution tasks.
• Reliability – CAD workstations are built with the best components possible with long-lasting warranty, in addition to the likelihood of system failure being very low. Mainstream workstations are built to be as affordable as possible. 
• Storage – Mainstream computers come with mechanical disks, which are much slower than digital disks and far more prone to failure. A CAD workstation is generally equipped with a solid state drive (SSDs) that is significantly faster, especially with the NVMe models. SSDs have a significantly lower failure rate compared to mechanical disks with the huge power supply.
• Motherboards - In a mainstream workstation are built for low-cost and the CPU is air-cooled. In a CAD workstation, the motherboard is more sophisticated with a water-cooled CPU. The higher quality CPU cores run at a lower temperature and increasing reliability of the workstation. If needed, utilises overclocking which is running the CPU at the speed higher than its nominal speed for additional performance due to the use of a water-cooled CPU.
• Graphic cards – Consumer workstations have very general and simple use cases that include emails, web browsing and watching videos. Therefore the graphic card is adequate for those tasks. In a CAD workstation, the graphics card is designed for large data processing and workstation PC. Furthermore, when running a rendering application, multiple graphics cards within the CAD workstation benefit the speed of rendering.

What Are The Main Components of a Modern CAD Workstation?

Most users that look to integrate or custom CAD Workstation into their operations can expect:

• A dual socket supported by 2^nd Gen Intel Xeon Scalable processors                                (Cascade Lake/Skylake)
• At least 16GB of physical RAM or more depending on your given workloads
• A professional graphics solution of hardware and drivers that significantly boosts performance of specific CAD applications.

A professional CAD workstation will incorporate a high-end GPU with the help of NVIDIA technology. This looks at optimising compute and visualisation performance capabilities such as 3D graphics rendering and processing.

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