Hardware and system requirements.

To handle the most demanding tasks for injection molding mold design and mold flow simulation software
it is important that your hardware has the best optimal performance possible
as you should be able to rely on it when you really need it.

Your workstation should have an ISV (Independent Software Vendor) certification.
This means it has been tested with specific software to run optimally.
Autodesk moldflow insight from Autodesk and SolidWorks from Dassault Systemes are examples of this.

In the video tutorial a Dell Precision Tower 5810 Workstation has been used.
It is equipped with an Intel (R) Xeon (R) E5-1650 v3 3.5GHz CPU, a Nvidia Quadro K4200 graphics card and 32GB RAM.
During the recording SolidWorks mold assembly has been fully resolved with more than 10,000 configurations in the associated parts.
The recording has been made with the resolution 1920x1200 @ 30 fps and there have been no problems.

Our experience is that SolidWorks works best with a single processor and high clock frequency.
You do not need more than 6 or 8 cores. Avoid dual processors because they simply do not work well with SolidWorks.

Here you will find information about doing a SolidWorks performance test.
It is a set of tests that compares your system against others.
To ensure you are always working with a SolidWorks supported and optimized system,
check out SolidWorks recommended hardware and recommended system requirements.

Hardware for mold flow simulation and mold flow analysis.

When it comes to mold flow simulation it is interesting to know how long some tasks might take.
You cannot know in advance how many tetras you will get before you mesh your 3D model.
You only know when the meshing is done.
For the actual mold flow simulation the same applies.
You do not know in advance how long it will take.

Does your workstation have too little RAM to cope with the simulation you are planning to perform?
It is very ineffective having to interrupt after 15-20 hours of simulation due to such a thing.
Estimating the time required to prepare your 3D model with a 3D mesh and simulation is not easy.
Some guideline values based on recent simulations will be shown below.
The above Dell workstation and Autodesk Moldflow Insight 2018 R2 have been used.

3D meshing with 3 million tetras takes just over 8 minutes and used 5 GB of RAM.
Mold flow simulation with 3 million tetras took almost 13 hours and used up to 11 GB of RAM.

3D meshing with 13.5 million tetras took 42 minutes and used 11 GB of RAM.
Mold flow simulation with 13.5 million tetras took 40 hours and used up to 31 GB of RAM.

Large file size should not be a problem.
The analysis of 13.5 million tetras gave a 25 GB file size.

If you want an even faster simulation a solution can be dual processors.
It is a few years since we tried it last but our experience is positive and it worked very well.
Do you know the absolute cheapest way to increase the performance of your workstation?
Disable virus scanning can make a big difference.
Of course, the antivirus software should not be completely disabled.
Only the process of moldflow simulation should be excluded.
For Autodesk Moldflow Insight, it is mhb3d.exe.
The time taken for the moldflow simulation can decrease by up to 40%.