Fantastic for Solidworks, Revit, AutoCAD, and CATIA design & modeling — 3D Studio Max and Maya design and Animation workflows.
 
 

A great Engineering and Product Design Workstation for the most demanding 3D scenes and engineering assemblies – A fantastic CAD, Solidworks, and Revit Workstation and a 3D Studio Max and Maya Workstation for semi-frequent Rendering and Modeling.

Fantastic for Design, Modeling, Rendering, and Simulation for Solidworks, Revit, AutoCAD, and CATI —- Amazing Modeling, Animation and Rendering for 3D Studio Max and Maya.

Premium max multi-core Xeon workstation for Design, Simulations & Rendering — the Ultimate Beast for Solidworks and CATiA, Video Editing and Film Post Production.

VOLTA PRO WORKSTATIONS
Creating the perfect performance Volta Pro Workstations that will do what you need it to do can be very difficult. To do this, you have to understand how the different hardware parts affect workstation performance for your specific work tasks. The key hardware choices you have to make are the CPU, graphics processing unit (GPU), RAM, and hard drive. You can call or email CDO for expert advice or you can browse the configurator on our website and make those decisions by yourself. See the recommended system configurations above.

PROCESSOR
The processor choice is simply a decision between CPU frequency (speed) and number of cores. CDO’s performance workstations range from four to 20 CPU Core and up to 40 CPU threads. Generally, there are twice as many threads as cores and threads are ordered sequences of instructions that specify what the CPU should do. Speed is measured in GHz and typically fewer core count processors run at a faster frequency while higher core processors typically run at lower frequencies.

The creating and manipulating 3D object portion of applications like SolidWorks, 3D Max, and Maya need higher frequency CPUs more than increased core count, whereas rendering and simulation applications want more cores for peak performance. CDO’s safely overclocked workstations (Volta Pro VP1 & Volta Pro VP2 workstations) provide up to 25% more performance for modeling and design applications. Our rendering and simulation workstations (Volta Pro X & Volta Pro X2 workstations) include the Intel Xeon processor(s) with up to 20 cores and 40 threads: remember that these workstations can use all the cores for rendering and simulations.

GPU
The GPU is responsible for creating the image you see on your LCD. The GPUs are responsible for setting up polygons and applying lighting, texture and color to a 3D image. Nvidia and AMD produce the professional grade graphics cards we use in our workstations. They are designed to run 24/7 at peak workload without failure through their strict quality control and use of better manufacturing parts. They also have tested and certified intermediary software (drivers) that tell the graphics card to how to run flawlessly with the operating system and the application software that professionals use for the work.

Design & Modeling
The interactive portions of applications like SolidWorks, Revit, Maya, and 3ds Max don’t gain advantage from multiple GPUs and run fine with basic to mid-range NVIDIA Quadro or AMD FirePro graphics cards. The GPU holds frame rates up for smooth panning, zooming and rotating when creating and working 3D objects.

Rendering & Simulation
GPU rendering engines like V-Ray RT, Octane, and Iray and simulation applications like CATIA and ANSYS can use the GPU to work in the background rendering and simulating – working exponentially faster than the CPU in these applications. Buying higher end GPUs and in many cases running multiple GPUs will increase performance and be well worth the money.

Large & High Resolution Display Screens
High resolution displays require high GPU memory that is only available on top end cards. Especially when running many monitor resolutions and 4K displays, multi-graphics cards are a good idea. Note that adding a second graphics card does not double performance; typically you will see a 25-50% increase.

RAM
It is much better to have more memory than not enough but it is hard to tell how much is enough. More RAM allows you to multitask without getting bogged down. We recommend at least 16GB of RAM to start with and much more for such jobs as: simulating large data sets, textures in 3D graphics, complex video editing, large scenes with lots of polygons, and complex part product design. A rule of thumb is having a 25% buffer of RAM usage while doing very intensive jobs.

HARD DRIVES
Properly configuring the OS and data drives in each workstation and then using SSDs to increase data reading times and decrease seek times is very important. Sustained read time can be more than four to five times higher on an SSD. Seek times are also much faster; consequently the faster SSDs are rated nanoseconds instead of milliseconds like SATA drives. This increased speed can have noticeable impact on your daily project completion times. A 180GB to 250GB SSD is recommended for the operating system and program installation and a SATA drive for storing data and work.

CUSTOMER REVIEWS

Read what CDO’s customers have to say: