Stay up to date with the latest desktop PC hardware—CPUs, RAM, storage solutions, and GPUs—all broken down in one comprehensive resource.

Stay up to date with the latest desktop PC hardware—CPUs, RAM, storage solutions, and GPUs—all broken down in one comprehensive resource.
On February 15th 2023, Intel announced the launch of two new families of Xeon processors: the W-2400 and W-3400 series. Read about new and potentially exciting features they bring to Intel’s workstation lineup and what differences there are between these two CPU families.
Intel has released their latest mainstream desktop CPU family, the 11th Gen Intel Core processors. We compare the top three models in this new lineup to the previous 10th Gen Core models and AMD’s competing Ryzen 5000 Series in Agisoft Metashape.
AMD’s Ryzen 5000 Series processors have shown stellar performance across a wide range of applications so far, and now we have the opportunity to test them head-to-head against Intel’s Core series in Autodesk Revit 2021.
AMD’s Ryzen 5000 Series processors have shown stellar performance across a wide range of applications so far, and now we have the opportunity to test them head-to-head against Intel’s Core series in SOLIDWORKS 2020.
PCI-Express has been the standard for connecting video cards and other expansion devices inside of computers for many years now, and several generations of the technology have now passed. With each of those generations, the amount of data that can be transferred over the PCIe connection has increased. How much impact does that have on modern video cards? Is there any benefit to running a PCIe 3.0 card in a 4.0 slot, or loss if using a 4.0 card in a 3.0 slot?
Here at Puget Systems, we have tried to be careful about sticking to CPU manufacturer memory specifications – to ensure the best reliability, and to avoid overclocking memory controllers (which could, technically, violate CPU warranties). But increasingly complicated memory speed support schemes on many newer processors, combined with a lack of supply of certain speed modules, has forced us to adopt a new approach to what we offer in our workstations.
Intel recently updated their mainstream Core processor series, and since we had tested SOLIDWORKS 2020 SP1 pretty recently we thought it would be good to run these new CPUs through the same testing to see how they compare with other Intel and AMD models.
In our past testing of Metashape, we have found that it only effectively uses around 8-16 cores. More than that doesn’t help, and so the focus for best performance is on high clock speeds within that range. What if you were running multiple photogrammetry jobs at the same time, though? Would that end up better utilizing a high core count processor?
With the recent release of SOLIDWORKS 2020’s first service pack, as well as multiple new CPU launches from Intel and AMD in the past few months, we thought it would be a good time to do a roundup of processor performance in modeling, rendering, and simulations within SOLIDWORKS.