What is the ideal amount of RAM for a SW2021 system?

[Mike Gera]

What is the ideal amount of RAM for a SW2021 system?

This will be for a new workstation build. OS will be Windows 11.

Thanks for any replies.

[jcapriotti]

These days I'd say 32gb minimum but it depends on what your are doing. How large of assemblies will you be working on? Any advance simulations on large complex models?

[zxys001]

16 min for most work...32 for lrg asm's, sims or lrg imports.

[HDS]

We started with 16GB but would run out of ram because of the enterprise IT overhead with Windows 10. MS Teams can use .5 to 1GB alone. All together 8GB can be used on a fresh boot without opening anything. 32gb seems to be enough for our small assemblies. I haven't run out of RAM since the upgrade. 16GB might be enough for parts and drawings without the overhead.

Windows 11 might change this but I expect more business will be slow to leave 10.

Sometimes I wish Solidworks was more like MS. They are not afraid to take all the resources in your computer. SW should would work harder to max out the hardware instead of running for 15 minutes at 10% load on one CPU.

[Mike Gera]

I ended up ordering 64 gigs of PC3200. Now where it IS (sitting on a dock in China somewhere, I think) is another thing altogether...

[HerrTick]

The ideal is as much as you can possibly cram into your RAM slots. Every KB that puts distance between you and pagefile.sys swapping is worth it.

[Jim Steinmeyer]

The ideal is as much as you can possibly cram into your RAM slots. Every KB that puts distance between you and pagefile.sys swapping is worth it.

This is absolutely the correct answer.