Graphics Workstations for Ansys

Understand Ansys’s hardware requirements and pick the perfect 3XS Systems graphics workstation for your project

What is Ansys?

Ansys is an advanced computer-aided engineering (CAE) software platform. It offers a comprehensive software suite that spans the entire range of physics, providing access to virtually any field of engineering simulation that a design process requires, including mechanical, fluid dynamics, optics and acoustics.

What makes the best workstation for Ansys?

Although there is no one ideal workstation for Ansys, this page will guide you through the most important factors to consider. The best place to start is your intended usage - Ansys is highly computationally intensive, with Computational Fuid Dynamics (CFD), Finite Element Analysis (FEA) to name just a couple of the simulations you can perform within Ansys. Selecting the correct hardware for your particular workflow is integral to ensuring the stability, reliability and performance you need.

Similarly you should also consider whether Ansys will be used standalone or whether other design or rendering packages will be used in your workflow - the below recommendations and guidance focus primarily on the requirements for Ansys software alone, so you may want to read other application pages to understand how systems specifications may be impacted if multiple software applications are used together.

What CPU should I choose for Ansys?

Although the modelling functions of Ansys are largely single-threaded, the majority of simulation functions and solvers are able to take full advantage of all available CPU cores - therefore, the more cores the better. It is also worth noting that Ansys is licensed to the number of CPU cores, therefore you should choose a configuration that will maximise the performance of your core license. Considering these parameters, we recommend AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO and Intel Xeon W CPUs.

What GPU do I need for Ansys?

Ansys does not require an especially powerful GPU for display purposes, in which case we recommend NVIDIA T-series GPUs.

However, an increasing number of solvers such as Mechanical and Fluent will complete far faster on GPU(s) than CPUs. These types of simulation are highly memory intensive and require GPUs with high FP64 double precision performance, and so we recommend the NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada GPU.

We recommend professional-grade NVIDIA GPUs, as they are officially certified for Ansys, so you may struggle to get support using other GPUs should you encounter a software issue.

How much RAM is recommended for Ansys?

The minimum RAM that we recommend for Ansys is 32GB, although 3-6GB per CPU core maybe a better way of looking at this. If your Ansys usage is heavier than average or if you require several models open alongside each other, or other applications open together then increasing the memory to 64GB or greater is probably wise.

What storage does Ansys need?

We always recommend using an SSD for the boot drive that will host your OS, Ansys itself, and any active projects you are working on. The high speed of SSDs allows your system to boot, launch applications, and load files many times faster than any traditional hard drive. Alternatively, as your work projects increase you may want to consider a second SSD or higher capacity HDD - depending on your budget - so your OS, Ansys and live projects benefit from SSD speed, but your archived work uses the HDD where speed isn’t a necessity and costs can be lowered. Another archive solution could be to employ an external NAS device allowing sharing and RAID protection.

When it comes to deciding on drive capacity, this will very much depend on your number of files and the model sizes. You should also consider the space required by other applications and their associated files too.

Recommended Ansys Workstation Specifications

Workstation Specifications
	High-End	Mid-Range	Entry-Level
CPU	AMD Threadripper PRO / Intel Xeon W	AMD Threadripper PRO / Intel Xeon W	AMD Threadripper PRO / Intel Xeon W
RAM	128GB	64GB	32GB
GPU	NVIDIA RTX 6000 Ada	NVIDIA RTX A6000	NVIDIA T1000