Dell Pro Max 18 Plus – Ultimate 2025

The majority of calculations in CAD parts and assemblies have to be performed one at a time, one feature needs to be calculated before the next can be built. This means the maximum “turbo boost” speed of the CPU rated in GHz is more important than number of cores for CAD modelling.

Recommended CPU’s

For CAD the highest performance CPU’s in professional workstations we recommend the latest Intel Core Ultra 200 series CPU’s. These have the best single threaded turbo boost speeds while offering up to 24 cores for more multi-threaded workflows and multi tasking.

Choosing more expensive CPU’s with more slower cores such as Intel Xeon range is not typically advised due to having lower maximum speeds which often results in lower performance. If you are primarily focused on simulation such as high end tools from Dassault Systèmes SIMULIA brand, please contact us for the best options for your workflow.

A professional graphics cards accelerates your interaction with the model as you rotate, zoom and pan, smooth interaction is key to productivity in CAD.

Onboard or gaming graphics such as NVIDIA GeForce are not supported for professional applications such as SOLIDWORKS & CATIA. These can lead to performance and instability which we cannot get support from the developers to resolve. We recommend NVIDIA RTX Professional Graphics from the Ada or Blackwell generations.

The best value Graphics cards for most engineering workflows are typically the 2000-4000 series.

• NVIDIA RTX 500 Blackwell: CAD use for assemblies with hundreds or low thousands of components.
• NVIDIA RTX 2000 Ada/ Blackwell Generation: CAD focused use, low thousands of components occasional visualisation.
• NVIDIA RTX 4000 Ada/Blackwell Generation or above: complex data sets, visualisation.

Higher end cards such as the desktop 5000 and 6000 series graphics cards cost significantly more, these are most beneficial for compute workloads such as rendering in SOLIDWORKS Visualize, Keyshot, CATIA Live Rendering, SIMULIA Xflow.

With ever increasing demands from other applications, we recommend 32GB for core most core CAD work and 64GB+ for complex designs and CAE workloads such as Simulation, Visualization. Error Code Correction (ECC) RAM is also recommended for

Desktop workstations running long running tasks such as simulations, data imports. Environmental factors which could otherwise lead to software or operating system instability can be corrected avoiding lost time and data.