SolidWorks System Requirements

Are you upgrading to a new computer, or need to know if SolidWorks products will run on a computer you already have? Here's where you can find out.

System hardware and operating system requirements for SolidWorks and SolidWorks Simulation products are listed below. For Product Data Management (PDM) requirements, click here.

Supported Microsoft Windows® Operating Systems⁽⁹⁾

	SolidWorks 2008	SolidWorks 2009	SolidWorks 2010	SolidWorks 2011
Windows 7 x86(2)(10)	No	No	Yes	Yes
Windows 7 x64(2)(10)	No	No	Yes	Yes
Vista x86(3)	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Vista x64(3)(4)	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
XP Professional x86(5)(1)	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
XP Professional x64(4)(1)	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes

Computer and Software Requirements:

RAM	Minimum: 1GB RAM Recommended: 6GB RAM (or more on Windows 7 x64 operating systems)
Video	A certified graphics card and driver (recommended) See Graphics Cards Drivers for details
CPU	Intel® or AMD® processors(7)(11) eDrawings® is supported on Apple Macintosh®-based machines(6)
Other	Mouse or other pointing device DVD drive Microsoft Internet Explorer version 6.x or higher Adobe Acrobat version 7.0.7 or higher Microsoft Office Excel 2002(12), 2003, or 2007
Network	SolidWorks is only tested with Microsoft's Windows Networking and Active Directory network environments(8)

SNL (SolidWorks Network License) Server Requirements:

USB or parallel port required (prior to SolidWorks 2010) Virtual servers are not supported for SNL Microsoft Windows XP Professional, Windows Server 2008® or Windows Server 2003® (recommended) DVD drive or Internet enabled network connection

 

(1) Support for Windows XP Professional is ending. For details see the Release Notes or Technical Alerts.

(2) Supports SolidWorks 2010 SP1 or higher (based on Windows 7 availability).

(3) Windows Vista Ultimate, Business and Enterprise editions only (SP1 or higher).

(4) Windows Vista x64 is supported for SolidWorks 2008 SP3.1 or higher. The Education Edition, Student 
     Edition, and Student Design Kit are supported after the 2008-2009 academic school year.

(5) Supported for Windows XP Professional (SP3 or higher).

(6) eDrawings and eDrawings Professional is supported on all operating systems listed above and Mac 
     OS X 10.4.x or higher. eDrawings 2010 will be the last version to support Mac OS X 10.4.x.

(7) SolidWorks is not supported on Apple Macintosh®-based machines.

(8) Novell networks and non-Windows based network storage devices are not tested or recommended.
(9) The Windows operating system requirements follow the Microsoft Windows life-cycle policy, which can be
     viewed at http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifeselect.

(10) Windows 7 Professional, Ultimate, and Enterprise editions only.
(11) Intel® Pentium® 3, AMD Athlon™ and Athon XP CPU’s are not supported. CPU must support SSE2
      (Streaming SIMD Extensions 2), see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SSE2 for more details.
(12) SolidWorks 2010 is the last release to support Excel 2002. We do not recommend using Excel 2002.

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