SolidWorks crashes

Question

SolidWorks crashes

sirmick (Mechanical)

(OP)

21 Feb 01 10:20

I have Windows 2000 and am running Solidworks98 plus. My cpu is an Athlon 900 MHz with 654MB RAM. The video card is an ATI Rage Fury Pro AGP 4X with 32MB of RAM.

My problem is that SW will crash for no apparent reason. It will crash when I resize a window, rotate a part, or do any other operation/command. What makes this perplexing is that SW will run perfectly fine for several hours then just disappear. Other times I will have the program open for only a few minutes and it disappears. I haven't had this problem on my previous CPU which had basically the same specs.

I disabled all graphics acceleration but the program redrew so slowly in sketch mode that I couldn't use it. I think its the video card but I would like to know if anyone else has a problem with that type of video card before I get rid of it.

Thanks in advance for any feedback.

SJ (Mechanical) · Answer 1 · 2001-02-21 11:22:49

Sounds like the same problem that we were having. One of my Engineers has a ATI rage Pro also. Not the same model but the same manufacturer. I had our VAR come down and take a look at it. He went out to SolidWorks home page and under the subscription help they now have a list of what graphics cards will and will not work with solidWorks. Regrettably ATI cards almost always failed or worked very poorly. Something to do with the back buffer of the card. It seems that if you get enough windows up or try to do dynamic rotation it dumps on you, or you lose lines, etc... Our VAR downloaded the latest driver for our videocard and then he cleared out the temp folder and the SWtempbackup folder on the computer and this seemed to help for awhile. We have finally decided to go with another video card to get rid of all the problems we were having. Hope this helps.

swertel (Mechanical) · Answer 2 · 2001-02-21 15:27:03

Typically, although not always, your situation is based on the video card.  You can check for yourself at
http://www.solidworks.com/swdocs/support/html/videoissues/videotest.cfm
to see where your video card falls in the testing SolidWorks has done.  I would also view the SolidWorks newsgroup regularly at comp.cad.solidworks.
There is always several threads on video card issues within the newsgroup.  That's why I say that typically the video card is to blame.

Whatever you choose, get the most bang for your buck and try to find a card the has hardware support for full OpenGL.

ply (Civil/Environmental) · Answer 3 · 2001-02-23 05:17:04

Hi,

I had problems with solidworks. I think it is connected to the fact, I
use voodoo 3000 graphic card.
Any suggestions?

Thanks

sirmick (Mechanical) · Answer 4 · 2001-02-23 10:38:01

I took out the ATI Rage card and put in a Voodoo 3 and it has been working fine. Thanks for the respones.

SBaugh (Mechanical) · Answer 5 · 2001-03-09 08:37:24

Hello,

The rule of thumb is to not buy any video card which connotes violence like Rage, Fury, Voodoo. If you are going to do serious CAD, get a card designed for CAD. Get something like the Oxygen or Elsa cards, they rock.

(Quoted from comp.cad.solidworks)

Hope this helps,

Scott Baugh, CSWP
Senior Designer
George Koch Sons
Evansville, IN
812-465-9574
sjb@kochllc.com

**guest0821** (visitor) · Answer 6 · 2001-04-09 13:34:17

I have created a log of my crashes - sometimes 3-4x per day. Most are probably due to video drivers I assume.
I am using an Elsa Synergy II card and SW2001 SP2 ona Compaq AP400 600mhz PIII with 756mb ram.

ANy ideas??
Thanks...

**guest0821** (visitor) · Answer 7 · 2001-04-24 20:28:47

My company has over 50 seats of Solidworks 2K running on a variety of hardware all use WinNT. We are crashing constantly getting memory exception errors. I think it is the program itself, not the hardware.

SBaugh (Mechanical) · Answer 8 · 2001-04-25 09:38:55

<Snip>
>Weldaction (Visitor) Apr 9, 2001
>I have created a log of my crashes - sometimes 3-4x per >day. Most are probably due to video drivers I assume.
>I am using an Elsa Synergy II card and SW2001 SP2 ona >Compaq AP400 600mhz PIII with 756mb ram.

My suggestion to you is to move back to SP0, if you can. I found that SP2 is very unstable. Now that I'm back to SP0 I don't crash near as much. I still get Dr.Watson errors but they are few and far between.

<Snip>
>Acropora (Visitor) Apr 24, 2001
>My company has over 50 seats of Solidworks 2K running on a >variety of hardware all use WinNT. We are crashing >constantly getting memory exception errors. I think it is >the program itself, not the hardware.

What kind of video cards are you using? Don't list all of them, just a slight run down. Also the average amount of Ram used a a system there and so on.

As for both of you, I never turn my machine off. I don't know whether or not you do that, but I have seen an improvement in my machines performance. I don't even do a restart when I get in, in the morning. Sometimes I just keep Solidworks running with my large assemblies open. Another performance enhancement that I came across is to turn off the auto backup. This was posted at comp.cad.solidworks last week. But I did do this months ago because of a large assembly that I was working on. Now I just save more frequently. It seems to run a little faster and it doesn't stop to do a long backup anymore. This may have something to do with the crashes and maybe not.

I hope I have helped in some way,

Scott Baugh, CSWP
sjb@kochllc.com

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SolidWorks crashes