1 Votes

System requirements

Last modified by Iwona Budny Bjergø on 2024/02/08 14:20

Check the minimal and recommended system configurations when using the latest version of FEM-Design.

 

Minimal configuration

Recommended configuration

SystemWindows 7 SP1 64bit (with updates) + Microsoft .NET 4 + 4.5  runtimeWindows 10 or 11 (with latest updates)
RAM4 GB32 GB
CPUIntel Core 4th gen. supporting AVX2Intel or Ryzen with 6 or 8 real cores. "threads" and "E-cores" don't help.
Free disk space40 GB500 GB
Monitor1280x800 resolution1920x1080 resolution
Video cardOpenGL 1.5 or DirectX 9.0 compatible video cardOpenGL 4.5 or DirectX 11.0 compatible video card
Other SSD (Solid-state drive)

Additional comments

The program generates several Gbytes of result files. Using HDD instead of SSD results in massive degradation of performance.

Some parts of the program use all the CPU cores, so having more of them improves overall performance. The parts that are not parallelized benefit from higher CPU and RAM clock (single-core benchmark score). The program mostly does floating point calculations that require fully functional core.  "Hyperthreading" adds to the OS-reported core count, but duplicates only a small part, not what the program requires, so their presence can even make the execution slower.

At this point we have limited experience with the new Intel hybrid model. If you have such CPU, we recommend using Windows 11 that at least has chance for better load balancing. But even with that, the E-cores may actually decrease performance instead of increasing it.