Building a PC for Fusion360. Some questions?

[gamblegarage]

my laptop does ok with fusion360 but I need some more processing power. From my research Fusion360 relies on the CPU only or is this old news? Hoping a good graphics card can take the load so the cpu can be free for all my other multitasking

Also anyone have any solid info if the intel i7 vs the new AMD Ryzen, which would work better for a combination of fusion360 and multitasking?

[Mike.Grau]

Hi @gamblegarage,

Thank you for asking about that.

Fusion 360 runs great with an old i3 for example. There is no need to go for a Xeon unless you want to use local Render and local solve quite often.

The computation of the features is pretty much driven by the CPU. Faster is better than more CPU´s in this case. I do recommend not save on the RAM.

If your motherboard supports up to 32Gb/64Gb, go for it.

The graphic should work fine with GeForce GTX 600series plus for example. If you plan to work with large assemblies and complex designs, you would look for CAD optimized cards.

like the K2000 and K4000 series.

I hope this helps.

Thanks,

[gamblegarage]

Interesting, I would have thought of going with more cores, but it looks like I'll be going for more clocking speed like a gaming rig

I am basically building this as my everyday pc that can handle anything I throw at it. My fusion 360 stuff is going to be very very basic at best. But looking for something that I can use for the next 5 years. 

Probably going to start with an AMD Ryzen 5 and 16gb of ram 2666mhz to get started and maybe upgrade to 32gb once the cost drops in a year or two. 

[Mike.Grau]

Hi @gamblegarage,

Thanks for the update.

Yes, go for 16Gb of memory. The best would be highest DDR4 in combination with SSD M.2 😉

Thanks,

[TrippyLighting]

I cannot comment on Intel vs. Ryzen, but if Intel I would recommend i7 if it's in the budget. It also, is depending on what you do.

Geometric modeling kernels such as the ones used in most major 3D CAD applications (Autodesk Shape Manager for Fusion 360) don't parallelize very well and Hyperthreading is  not used for CAD modeling or timeline re-computations in Fusion 360.

If you are thinking of rendering a good bit and possibly also local simulation then get as many cores as you can fit in the budget and hyper threading is used very efficiently..

Buy a gaming graphics card for Fusion 360 with at 2GB VRAM or more. It should be a gaming card as Fusion 360 uses the Direct-X API, and not the Open GL (well, at least on PC/Windows).

16GB is quite a bit. 

As @Mike.Grau has already mentioned, I'd also suggest to get a SSD.

[TrippyLighting]

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@Mike.Grau wrote:

If you plan to work with large assemblies and complex designs, you would look for CAD optimized cards.

like the K2000 and K4000 series.

---

@Mike.Grau That is entirely WRONG!!!

The Pro graphics cards such as the AMD Fire GL and Nvidia Quadro cards run Fusion 360 slower than an equivalent gaming card and there are several reasons for this.

1. They use the same graphics hardware as the gaming cards but some of them use ECC RAM which might be just a hair slower but is substantially more expensive.
2. They usually lag a generation or two behind the gaming cards, because it takes time to write the software drivers and get them "certified" and tested for the different CAS and DCC applications.
3. The Pro cards are optimized for Open GL and not for Direct-X and are often much slower than an equivalent gaming card with the same generation hardware. Fusion 360 as well as several other Autodesk products use the Direct-X graphics API on the Windows/PC platform.

This has been observed and reported by a good number of users here on the Forum.

[Mike.Grau]

Hi @TrippyLighting,

Thank you for pointing to that.

Unfortunately, I can not agree with you since I could benchmark only one design on multiple nvidia chips but I would be happy 

if you could share more of your and the user experience.

Please, keep me updated.

Thank you,

[HughesTooling]

@PhilProcarioJr has made a few post about this, here's one.

Mark

[HughesTooling]

The Ryzen chips seem to perform well for CAM and rendering, the CAD side of Fusion doesn't really benefit from more cores. Here a link to a thread on performance checked with autodesk's CAM benchmark.

Mark