More motherboard RAM is better for large assemblies

nick_papageorge073

I upgraded my work laptop from 16GB motherboard ram to 64GB (the max for my computer). No other changes. It made a noticeable difference for my large assemblies, of about 500 components, many of them pcb's. For small assemblies it made zero difference. The difference was not in the load time, or the spinning/panning movements. It was actually in the user interface. For example, with 16GB, when I edited a mate, it would take several seconds for the edit dialog to open. When I typed in a number in the mate offsets, the keystrokes would lag noticeably. With the 64GB, this went away.

The other scenario it made a noticeable difference was when I had 2 or 3 browser windows open of a larger assembly, for example to look at an old version and a new version side by side. With one window only open, the 16GB was ok. But with 2 or 3 windows open, the 16GB would run out of memory, and the whole ux would slow down to a crawl (along with my whole computer). With 64GB, this all went away.

I did not do any studio work to see if there is a noticeable difference there.

For $220 on Amazon, this was a definite improvement to my daily use of OS, and I'd recommend maxing out the motherboard RAM to any professional user.

The laptop is a CAD specific Dell Precision laptop, with a Quadro CAD card.

S1mon

I have to assume that the browser needs to cache a bunch of data locally to do what Onshape does. If you don't have tons of RAM, your operating system is going to use virtual RAM ("hard drive") which is much slower (even if it's a SSD). With both Windows and MacOS, 8GB or 16GB is a joke these days. They both really want 32GB or more to be happy. 

NeilCooke

WebGL is handled by the graphics card, but the browser also needs plenty of RAM to process the graphics and UI (JavaScript), especially if you’re working on large assemblies. Chrome can use up to 4GB per browser tab (FireFox 8GB) so the more browser tabs you have open, the more RAM it uses.