EAGLE lagging: how to turn off live DRC in EAGLE? Which is the best/recommended PC hardware for complex designs?

[ivan_octo]

Hello,

I am designing PCBs with geometrically complex lines (both for the dimension and signal layers) which is causing EAGLE to lag with huge delays, also for very small design changes (such as copy/pasting a component). 

I think one of the main reasons for this lagging is the live DRC, because for every small change I do the software is checking all the rules across all the designs. I found a post in this forum describing how to turn it off in FUSION360, but I am currently using EAGLE as standalone software (v9.5.2), and here I can't find an option to disable the live DRC. Anyone can help me?

Another reason might be limitations on the hardware side, even if I am also using a very powerful laptop with Graphic Card Nvidia RTX 400 and CPU AMD Ryzen 9 5950X, 128GB Memory. Apart from my setup, I would be very interested to know if hardware with better performance would solve the continuous lagging I am experiencing and if this might depend mostly on the CPU or on the Graphic Card performance. As I will need to buy a new PC in any case, I would be glad to know if there is any approved/tested CPU/GPU that fits the EAGLE requirement for best performance. Any suggestion?

Thank you very much
Best regards,

Ivan

[jorge_garcia · Accepted solution]

Hi @ivan_octo,

Turning it off in EAGLE is straight forward. Go to Options > Set > DRC uncheck the live DRC option.

If the design is large and has a convoluted board shape that might also be part of the issue. You can try turning off the the Detect board shape feature. You'll find this under Options > User Interface.

EAGLE is a single threaded application so the hardware doesn't play that big a role in it's performance. The machine you have should be more than sufficient.

Best Regards,

[ivan_octo]

Thank you @jorge.garcia,

the DRC off solved the lagging issue indeed, even if at the expense of not having real-time control over the design rules, but I am happy with such a solution for now.