Check it Out: NVIDIA SolidWorks 2013 ROI Calculator

So, Kevin Youkilis inked a $12 million, one-year deal to play third base for the NY Yankees while Alex Rodriquez recovers from surgery. The Yankees are known as a team that views players like they are workstation components. This got me thinkin’: What if Youk were a CADslinger instead of a bat and glove for hire? Seriously, what if Youk was the Sultan of Sweep when it came to wielding SolidWorks 2013? At $12M (MM if you went to private school) a season, what sort of ROI (return on investment) might the Yankees expect? How about $4.86M to $5.94M? Very, very respectable.

I developed these numbers thanks to NVIDIA and SolidWorks. They collaborated on an online ROI Calculator where you can figure out your ROI running SolidWorks 2013 on a 3.3GHz, 6GB RAM Xeon workstation equipped with either an NVIDIA Quadro 2000, 4000, or K5000 professional-level graphics cards. I adapted it for our purposes.

Youk’s a career .283 hitter. I designated the mid-range Quadro 4000 as equal to his career batting average; the other Quadro accelerators I deemed minus or plus 10 percent of that average. I said he works 4 hours a day, 220 days a year (post-season not included), and slings SolidWorks 100 percent of the time. His design projects are large ” 500 components ” to account for his excellent fielding and exciting manner of play. These variables returned a Youk ROI on the $12M investment of 255926%, 183164%, and 121262% with the Quadro 2000, 4000, and K5000, respectively. A steal, I’d say.

OK, so I abused the NVIDIA SolidWorks 2013 ROI Calculator with this Youk-y exercise. But the point is serious: Since you last upgraded your engineering workstation, SolidWorks and all of your other applications have been upgraded ” what? ” four times? You went out and upgraded to SolidWorks 2013, but all of its faster overall performance, new applications like flow simulation and costing, increased functionality, and stunning rendering that you bought are actually chugging along on a workstation designed when George W. Bush was president. You’re just not getting your upgrade’s full potential.

Hey, I understand. I’ve run businesses. I know all too well that spending dough on the hardware you need is easy to nix out of the budget. Software? Well, its gets upgraded because you don’t want to get too out of synch. But you run hardware into the ground. You think you’re saving money. The question is are you? That’s what makes the NVIDIA SolidWorks 2013 ROI Calculator so valuable. You can find out the time and money you really can save keeping your hardware in synch with your engineering tools.

It takes no time at all to gin up some useful results. You plug real numbers into the ROI Calculator: users and their annual salary, the size projects typically done ” e.g., design, simulation, and rendering ” days and hours worked, and so on. The ROI Calculator crunches your data and returns hard numbers on the time, money, hours, payback period, and the ROI you could achieve with an investment in a Quadro-equipped workstation running SolidWorks 2013. Sure, the numbers are only estimates, and your actual ROI may vary. That doesn’t matter. The results give you good reason to reconsider your capital strategy.

Hit the link over there and take a swing at the NVIDIA SolidWorks 2013 ROI Calculator. Your investment in the time it takes to get answers is too valuable to miss.

Thanks, Pal. – Lockwood

Anthony J. Lockwood

Editor at Large, Desktop Engineering

NVIDIA SolidWorks 2013 ROI Calculator