Which PC component to upgrade first for GD

[majce]

I often receive larger CAD files, about 100 to 500MB, in various formats (recently step, Catia and Solidworks native formats).
The CAD files do not necessarily have a lot of parts but they have a lot of sections created by surface modeling,
for example molded plastics cover of a car door. The process of importing these files into GD and saving as part or assembly
can easily take more than 1h. When working with them later GD also pauses for a minute from time to time.

Which component of my PC would be best to upgrade to have a better performance here ?
My PC configuration:
Win 7 Ultimate 64Bit, Intel i5-4570 3.2Ghz 4 Cores, 16GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce GTX 760 (4GB), SSD for OS/Programs and HDD for data.

 

[bigseb]

I have same issue i.e. getting clients files in usually stp or Catia format (sometimes x_t and Solidworks) that are very large, up to and sometimes over 500Mb. They don't take an hour to load but quite long. I think twenty minutes was the longest.

We work from a server and this is a huge bottleneck in my opinion. If I work on the files locally then its much quicker but most of the time all read/writes are done to the server. Beyond that my PC is similarly specced to yours: Win 7 Pro 64Bit, Intel i7-2600 3.4Ghz 4 Cores, 32GB RAM, NVIDIA Quadro 600, SSD for OS/Programs and HDD server for data.

 

[majce]

We also work from a server and typically I read/write CAD data to the server.
But I also worked with large files locally, though I did not directly compare
the load time. If the process takes longer than 10-15min I start to do something else
and check later, I'll test that on next occasion.

 

[HaroldL]

FYI - For comparison, here are the recommended system requirements from the 3DS Support web page. Note that for Design they are recommending a Quadro video card vs. your GeForce.

 

[DavidJ]

Don't get hung up on the Quadro bit - the recommendations are generic across all Geomagic softwares.

In the old days Alibre used to actively recommend AGAINST Quadro cards. A GeForce should manage fine.

 

[HaroldL]

Don't get hung up on the Quadro bit - the recommendations are generic across all Geomagic softwares.

You're right for most of the requirements, why then would they have a GPU recommendation specific for Design? :?
I think, in the end, if your card supports DirectX 9.0 and OpenGL 3.0 and has adequate memory you'll probably be just fine.

In the old days Alibre used to actively recommend AGAINST Quadro cards. A GeForce should manage fine.

I never understood that, I used to run Alibre on a desktop (along side a Home Use License of SolidWorks) and a laptop, both with Quadro cards and it ran just fine. I now have a HP laptop that uses an HP on-board graphics card, and it runs fine on it too, aside from the Windows10 issues.

 

[bigseb]

GD isn't exactly graphics hungry. And regardless of what card you use it has little to do with the PC's number crunching abilities. GD just isn't the quickest at processing massive non-native files. I had similar issues using Catia and Creo and now more recently with Powershape.

Bottom line: working with large non-native files slow thing down. Doing it from a data server slows it down even more.