Hello Zine,

GPU acceleration works only in Abaqus Standard, so you wouldn't benefit from a better graphics card in the case of explicit simulations. If you want max performance for explicit simulations, you'd want a high number of fast cores, if your available Abaqus licenses allow it. The i7 offers 6 performance cores; the i5 only 4 performance cores (which are also a little slower). Thus, for explicit simulations, the I7 would be the better choice.

In Abaqus Standard, it depends on your model if you can benefit from the GPU acceleration. Linear analyses of large models would benefit most from the GPU. Also, the direct sparse solver would run faster on the GPU. For iterative nonlinear, I would definitely prefer the i7 and a lot of system memory. Memory is often the bottleneck for larger models.

Regards,

Raffael

Forgot to mention one thing: If you're doing a lot of pre-/post processing of larger models in Abaqus CAE, you still might consider the configuration with the NVIDIA GPU, as handling larger models would feel significantly smoother with this configuration.

How can I determine whether a numerical model in Abaqus is considered large, and whether its pre-/post-processing requires the use of a dedicated graphics card ؟