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MAc Addict Alert! How To Use SolidWorks on a Mac

Published
by
Josh
on May 21, 2008
in SolidWorks Tips
. Tags: , , .

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Oh, the trials of being a Mac user in the CAD world. There’s just no justice for your simple and elegant character personified in a simple and elegant computer. Who is out there to understand you? SolidSmack has your back and we want to show you how easy it it is to get SolidWorks runnin’ on your Mac.

To show this, I turn to a friend that use SolidWorks with a Mac on a consistent basis. Ben Eadie, from SolidMentor, shares this step-by-step and has a few tips.

Step-by-Step SolidWorks on a Mac

  1. Install Bootcamp on your Mac (this comes as a standard install on a new mac).
  2. Reboot and install Windows (any version will do including Vista).
  3. Install SW and MS office.
  4. Voila!

Additional Tips from Ben

  • If you want to have RealView you may have to hack your video card but this is as simple as installing a driver. You either have to find the hacked driver online or buy me a beer to send one to you for the first gen macbook pro’s. Send Ben a Beer.
  • Mac Book Pro and lesser models will work, but no RealView and performance will be lacking like any lesser computer.
  • Generally, Vista will run better on a Mac.

Other options?
You can also install Windows via Parallels, Vmware, or other emulators, but you will not get much from your graphics card this way. There are more details for Parallels and VM , like using the Bootcamp partition as a Virtual machine so you can boot natively or as a virtual machine. The drawback to this is you have to re-register SolidWorks each time you change the way you boot, i.e. boot into Bootcamp and then later boot into Parallels. When you start SolidWorks you will have to re-register… Don’t worry, Ben has done this hundreds of times and it is only 2 extra mouse clicks.

Have a question about using SolidWorks on a Mac? Hit the comments!

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Viewing 41 Comments

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    It always amazes me that Mac fans run out and the first piece of software they buy is a program that allows them to run Windows! It seems to me they are basically paying 2-3 times as much for a computer just to have a neat looking case, a neat light up logo, or a fun to play with dock thingy.

    When asked, most Mac users site that Macs are virus proof. Well according to a recently held contest the Mac Book Air running Leopard was the first O/S to fail virus attempts within hours of being subjected to everyday virus attempts (malicious website or link in an email). In fact, it took another day, and a further relaxing of the rules before Vista, and then Linux finally gave in a submitted to the virus. The team hacking the Mac was the only team that was able to win the full prize money because it was easier to hack then the Vista or Linux machines.
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    Linux is the future! No garbage just optimized os.
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    I just went apple nuts man - got myself a macbook air and for the first few months, I ran bootcamp and did everything the old way - then I decided time was enough and deleted the partition. No, I don't run much cad on it, but I have a workstation for that. What I do have on it at the moment is iRhino (you should check out the testing they're doing on an OSX version of Rhino, it rocks) and HyperShot - both work well.. What else is there in the way of CAD for the mac? not a lot - there's ashlar vellum, vectorworks, couple of other bits and bobs.. will the likes of solidworks ever port over? nope - its too damned expensive.. Siemens got stung with the Apple platform with NX and they're skipping releases..

    I do love this mac thing though - its kinda pretty.. Mike said "paying 2-3 times as much for a computer just to have a neat looking case, a neat light up logo, or a fun to play with dock thingy" - umm - not here, I paid around the same as I would for a decent small, lightweight laptop that actually works, the light up logo I never see and the dock is OK - just the same as the bar in XP.. but one thing is does do is power on instantly - that's worth the price differential alone. I can pop it open, work on my reviews, our accounts, email, look at videos of monkeys on youtube, whatever and as with most things, if you can attribute a cost to the time you work, and hence the cost of the time you do nothing but watch a machine boot, then it doesn't take too long to pay back the extra...
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    "Siemens got stung with the Apple platform with NX and they�re skipping releases.."UG NX 6 will run native on Mac OS X. Details Here
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    This is the deal. You buy a Mac because you want/need to run Mac programs. If you want to do both Windows and Mac then a Mac is choice. I have 2 MacBook Pro Laptops and both of them out perform Dell M90 in every test but most impressively a head to head with COSMOSFloWorks. I was able to get 15% quicker calculation times with my Mac than a M90 with the same specs. Mac fan boys will say they are virus free and in many cases this is true since there is really nothing in the wild. My buddy Mike is referring to a closed competition which the specifics were not told to the public but were sent to Apple to fix them. The hacker that got into Leopard had a pre-built site that took advantage of a Safari exploit he found. With Mac's holding a 5-7% market share virus authors are not targeting Macs. It is not to say if the market share grows they will find a way in. They always will. That is the nature of software.

    Again, if you do not have Mac software you want to run then don't buy a Mac. But if you do, the price is almost the same as a PC. Sorry Mike the costs are not that outrageous any longer but they are pretty and I must say they weigh about half as much as equivalent PC laptops. ~Lou
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    Oh, BTW I wrote/hacked the driver that supports RealView that Ben is referring to. I have posted it up on the Apple Forums is anyone is interested. ~Lou
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    Hey Lou, could you post the link to that driver please?
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    I've been running sworks on my imac for a bit now, and am extremely happy w/ the performance. I have the late 07 aluminum imac. 2.8 GHz dual processor, 4 gb ram, and the Radeon HD 2600 Pro 256mb card. I'll have to check what drivers I have when i get home tonight.

    @ work I use a pc for sworks. dell precision, 2.5 GHz dual processor, 3 gb ram, quadro fx1700 512mb card.

    In comparing the two in running sworks, I don't notice any difference.

    Cost? iMac - $2150 - plus $90 dollars later for the 4 gb ram, plus $85 for XP
    dell - $2800 and thats for computer alone (no monitor keyboard, etc) plus a business program discount, the dell has a better graphics card, but that doesn't effect sworks much, except realview, which I don't use yet.

    the iMac was much the better deal imho. plus the applications that come w/ leopard and iLife blows any preloaded software on a windows computer away. (no trial software )



    I installed xp when I first got it w/ bootcamp. I only had 2 gb ram and vista being a bit to heavy of a os, picked xp. but now that I have 4 gb ram, (xp only recognizes 2.9 gb) do you think I'll see much performance increases w/ vista (recognizing all 4 gb)
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    "the dell has a better graphics card, but that doesn’t effect sworks much"

    geez, where do they find people like this? Since when does a graphics card not affect SW much? Does gravity exist in your world? Keep drinkin' that koolaid.
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    @ matt

    to clarify: obviously you need an ok graphics card, but the difference in performance between the two I was comparing makes a nominal difference in SW, especially w/out realview. I use photoworks regularly, (2007 still... waiting for work to upgrade) and photoworks doesn't even use the GPU on the graphics card.

    they find lots of people like me, sadly too many like you, who jump to conclusions and feel the need to point out somebody's assumed blunder instead of giving helpful comments.
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    Here's a great review of the Lenovo X300 that puts some of it's features up against the Macbook Air. I'd love to have both actually. Mac for the graphics/video and PC for the CAD.
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    aaahhh... Many different arguments for/against Mac, what fun! It's good that we still have the choice to buy the system we want. But when making comparisons it's tough to say this is how it is, without going into real specifics about hardware and application, or how your testing the software. I've lived on Windows long and know it good but using my MacBook Pro at home is a dream. Mac software to me just rocks, but that's beside the point. I've had nothing but good results using SW2007 with Bootcamp. And using it well, not just modeling toothpicks and candles. Great topic Josh, thanks for the tips!
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    What is this? The SolidWorks forum all over again :-)

    You have the pro crowd and the VERY against crowd. Personally as 3 Mac owner and a 3 PC owner I'm split. Just bought a new HP workstation to run SolidWorks, when I had planned on buyign a new Mac Pro but when it came down to it hard cash talks. For £1100 I get a HP xw4600, 4GB RAM, 500GB HD, Vista 32 with XP downgrade (imaging my surprise when I open the box and find Vista DVDs and Vista stickers and then think great its got Vista after all, then I start up and find its got XP pre-installed! Sorry I digress...), NVidia Quadro 1700 card, HP 24" screen (NICE screen) and 3 year onsite warranty.....For the same money you are talking 20" iMac (with warranty), which is good, but I've got a 20" iMac anyway, but the HP is a Quad core and Hypershot FLIES on the Quad.

    Laptops - I'll go with Macs in future though. Problem for Apple is that there is nothing in the middle in the desktop range. iMacs are great, then you step up to serious money (double) with the Mac Pro 8 core, and teamed up with a decent display and more RAM that takes you over £2250.

    Apple could do some serious business if they had a quad core machine with 24" screen, 4GB Ram, certified card for around £1600. I'd have bought it. Still it's June next week and the Apple developer conference where all the big product launches take place...so who knows.
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    Hi. I have been running SWX08 on my new MBP for a few weeks now and have generally been impressed with its performance in both VMware and Bootcamp. Graphics are not great when running in the VM, and I have been running into some repaint issues when running in Bootcamp, which I attribute to the non-MCAD gaming/multimedia video card. Does anybody know of any updated drivers for the NVIDIA GeForce 8600M GT video card that will improve SWX08 performance? Thanks!
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    hey peter, when bootcamp was in beta, there were issues with gpu support. not sure where it's at now that it's packaged with Leopard. your best bet is to go to the nVidia site and check for driver updates. you can also try to adjust some of the setting for your card to see if that affects it at all.
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    The SW CAD work that my company has been doing these days has gotten very dependent upon surfaces derived from scan data. This equals an incredible slow down in SW performance. I was tasked by the big boss to find a way to speed our work up. A hot rod AMD powered workstation was built by our IT guy and I benchmarked it with an 07 SW benchmark from www.spec.org. The numbers were not too impressive compared to our 6 month old Dell workstation. I had read alot about SW on a Mac booted in Windows XP so I decided to try it out at home on my 20" iMac with the ATI 2600 Pro graphics card and 2 GB of RAM. The benchmark results were great once I forced the proper drivers to load for the video card that was actually in the machine through Windows XP (I found the directions online to do so and it was cake). After seeing better results on my slightly out of date iMac I ordered the hottest 24" iMac I could with the newest NVIDIA card in it. The results were not nearly as impressive and that machine actually lives in our graphics department now. I did try again though and ordered the hottest 24" with the 256 MB ATI HD 2600 Pro card in it like I have in my machine at home. Once that machine came and I loaded it up properly and fixed the driver, it scored amazing on the benchmark beating the AMD PC by almost 25% and beating my iMac at home by almost 20%. I have been doing my SW work on that machine for a couple weeks now. SW 2007 had a couple strange video card type issues, but once we went to SW 2008 it has worked quickly and beautifully. I have since gotten one more engineer on one and have another on order. So far so good. I am investigating replacing our engineering laptop with a MacBook Pro or and Air, but I am not sure if the Air could handle it. We will see how that goes and please let me know if there are any questions I can answer for you from my experience of ruining a Mac by loading XP, but by having the most awesome engineering machine that tears though the surface work we do. Alan alan.morine@otterbox.com
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    Has anyone had glitches with solidworks when running in bootcamp? I have tried both running in fusion (which takes away graphics performance) and in bootcamp. I kept having a glitch in bootcamp where when i was in sketch mode, the sketch would dissapear except for the line which the mouse arrow was over. Very annoying and hard to sketch. I am using a iMac with 256mb graphics card and 2.5gb ram with windows vista home basic. Can anyone help me?
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    Has anyone had a problem with sketches disappearing? When I try to draw in sketch mode the whole sketch disappears except for the line that the mouse arrow is over. I am running solidworks with bootcamp, i also run solidworks through fusion and it works ok, but it is a bit slow because fusion sucks the graphics power out. I would really like to run solidworks through bootcamp because it is so much faster, but i cannot take the sketches disappearing. Does anyone know what to do?
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    James,

    What version of SW are you running? I had similar issues with sketches in SW 2007, but switching to 2008 resolved all issues. Are you running the ATI HD 2600 Pro card? You may want to make sure the video card drivers installed are for that card and update them if they are not. You wil find a tremendous performace increase with the proper video card drivers. I can't find the site with the how to instructions on updating the drivers. Its pretty simple if you have the ATI card just download the driver pack, run the install, you will get an error and just quit the install at that point, opening device manager, right click on the video card driver update, browse to the ati folder in the C drive and select the appropriate file that will list all video card drivers that are available and then pick the exact ATI video card that is installed in the machine. After update the driver I foudn at least a 25% increase in perfomance as well as less issues. If I come across the link I will post it.
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