Laptop Specification

[Dreadnought]

Good Morning all, I've decided to teach myself 3D CAD and have been recommended FreeCAD to get going with. My day job is Engineering and being a Professional Engineer I'm well used to 2D CAD (AutoCAD) however, this is becoming limiting and the younger generation are all modelling using 3D and I want to explore 3D CAD to better understand what is possible and to design parts (modifying old motorcycles) for manufacture.

So the first problem is that my laptop seems to be a whimp, and I'm firstly wondering if its base specification is worth updating to run FreeCAD or if I need to invest in a professional CAD Laptop? I'm running an AMD A9 processor with 8mb of RAM and a AMD Radeon R5 Graphics adaptor. I'm guessing that 32gb of RAM would help and perhaps a better graphic card but I'm not too sure what I can / should aim for, therefore, any help would be appreciated as I'm out of touch with PC specs as I find off the shelf if I buy a new one every two years or so they do 99% of what I want.

Many thanks

[chrisb]

FreeCAD is not very demanding as far as hardware is concerned. Just give it a try, and if it's too slow by something with a fast CPU and I recommend SSD harddrive. The GPU must be OpenGL compatible.

[Dreadnought]

Hi,
Many thanks for this, I guess I'm too green to use the software then, looks like back to the tutorials

Cheers

[openBrain]

with 8mb of RAM

Guess it's 8GB actually.
Your hardware should be far enough to start using FC in a comfortable way. May also depend if you've been infected by the so-called "Windows" virus from Microsoft.

[bejant]

I'm firstly wondering if its base specification is worth updating to run FreeCAD or if I need to invest in a professional CAD Laptop? I'm running an AMD A9 processor with 8mb of RAM and a AMD Radeon R5 Graphics adaptor.

Hi Dreadnought, and welcome! My suggestion is: don't buy a new laptop just to learn FreeCAD; your laptop has better specs than the one I'm using. Try FreeCAD on your laptop first.


OS: Windows 7 SP 1 (6.1)
Word size of OS: 64-bit
Word size of FreeCAD: 64-bit
Version: 0.19.20943 (Git)
Build type: Release
Branch: master
Hash: ceb23799c76df3ebfa7be4b9fe83bb62de60bc6c
Python version: 3.8.2
Qt version: 5.12.5
Coin version: 4.0.0
OCC version: 7.4.0
Locale: English/United States (en_US)

4 GB RAM
Intel On-board graphics

[Dreadnought]

Thanks all, seems I'm a bit of a muppet all round.

Yep 8GB of Ram, and being used to Autodesk products it's taking a while to get my head around this program.

[RatonLaveur]

Hey dreadnought, there is a plethora of tutorials that are more or less up-to-date (be mindful of the year of release for videos). FreeCAD is an ever evolving program and that is especially true in the current 0.19 development cycle. Things are moving fast and generally in the direction of more robust and more intuitive modelling tools. On the flipside, it means many tutorials will show you somewhat outdated (although functional) information.

If you really want to get into CAD, start simple. Engineering CAD in 3D is not much more than 2D drafting (known as Sketching) extruded or pocketed.
pointer 1: try to keep your sketches simple (basic shapes).
pointer 2: try to use geometric constraints instead of lengths (parallelism, normality, equality and everything in between).

Go to the tutorial files in the Start Workbench (inside FreeCAD). They should show you a few pointers.

Do not get discouraged. The workflow is sometimes a little more convoluted than can be wished, but FreeCAD has a lot of functionalities. The Help forum will let you join a very active and helpful community of coders, power-users and users. Don't hesitate to post your questions in details, you may share files, screenshots...etc to get some very effective guidance.

EDIT: also don't change your laptop. What other users said here is very true. FreeCAD is deceptively light for a LOUD bang.

[Dreadnought]

Once again, many thanks