Effects of RAM speed on Inventor (opening large assemblies and FEA)

[Anonymous]

It seems every year our assemblies get bigger and bigger.  Most projects I work on have 5,000-15,000 occurances and load times can start to cut into productivity when I'm opening 30 different projects a day.

I am currently running 16GB of PC3-8500F (533 MHz) DDR3 Patriot 1600EL RAM. I am running windows 7 with an i7 2700k OC'ed to 4.0 Ghz.  Load times are sometimes around a minute with the normal being just under 30 seconds.  On top of simply opening assemblies, I've also noticed complex FEA simulations almost filling up my 16GB of RAM.  I don't where the bottle neck is in today's computers, so I'm wondering if anyone has done any testing to see if faster RAM would speed things up.  Any help is appriciated.
Thank,
Michael

[Jon.Dean · Accepted solution]

Every item in a computer contributes to the performance of your system. If you look to the "Windows Experience Index" under My Computer / Properties you will see an index for each major component of your computer, so , Processor, RAM, Graphics, Gaming Graphics and Primary Hard Disk.

You should be aiming to get a 7.5 to 7.9 for each component. You may find that your Hard Disk is the slowest, this is of course because it is not solid state unless you have a SSD drive.

Looking at the spec of your PC most of the components should be rated fairly high but you might find the Hard Disk is down at 5.9 and therefore it is important that you keep this component as efficient as possible with regular defragmentation and the use of the good old DOS command "CHKDSK C: /F", this will clean up the indexes, making the drive more efficient.

Jon