SOLIDWORKS Laptops

*For items in stock items delivery in UK and Northern Ireland is typically next day for orders paid/processed before 12 Noon Monday-Friday. For Republic of Ireland we have a smaller range of stock items available for delivery in 1-2 working days for orders processed before Noon Monday-Friday.
Please ensure all goods are checked upon receipt, and any issues/ damages reported as soon as possible after delivery

Dell revamped their Desktop and Laptop ranges in 2025, retiring well known brands such as Inspiron & XPS, for consumers, Latitude & OptiPlex for office workers and most importantly for engineering users the Dell Precision brand was retired

Fro 2025 Dell will have just 3 main brands"Dell" for home/school, "Dell Pro" for regular office applications and "Dell Pro Max" offering the highest performance and crucial certification for compatibility with professional applications such as SOLIDWORKS and CATIA

New Dell workstations in 2025 will launch under the Dell Pro Max brand, bringing the same performance, reliability and support as Dell Precision and while you will still see systems under the Precision brand for some time be sure to check with us on the best options for your use case.

For the Dell Pro Max 14  and Dell Pro Max 16 laptops the recommended docking station is the Dell Pro Thunderbolt 4 Smart Dock-SD25TB4 which can supply up to 130W of power required by these laptops 

For the Dell Pro Max 16 Plus and Dell Pro Max 18 Plus models the recommended docking station is the Dell Pro Thunderbolt 5 Smart Dock-SD25TB5 which can supply the 280W of power required by these more powerful laptops. These laptops also support the increased bandwidth thunderbolt 5 provides. 

The Dell Pro Thunderbolt 5 Smart Dock-SD25TB5 also supports the less powerful laptops so can be a good choice for future proofing and hot desk situations where you have a mix of laptops. See the Dell Pro Docking Station compatibility guide for more information 

We recommend monitors from the Dell Pro and Dell Ultrasharp ranges for use by designers and engineers. 

Our current recommendations monitors we can supply are: 

24 Inch 

Dell UltraSharp 24 Monitor - U2424H

27 Inch 

Dell UltraSharp 27 QHD Monitor - U2724D

32 Inch 

Dell Pro 32 Plus QHD USB-C Hub Monitor - P3225DE

All new laptops have to be supplied with Windows 11, Windows 10 support from Microsoft and SOLIDWORKS ends in 2025. Users can use downgrade rights to install and run Windows 10 Professional until Microsoft support ends.

We also recommend customers are on a supported release of SOLIDWORKS to ensure they have the latest software enhancements and security patches. SOLIDWORKS software receives a year of service pack enhancements followed by 1 year of hotfix support for critical issue.

For users running older releases there is a graphics from the SOLIDWORKS Hardware Certification website to use NVIDIA Ampere (A Prefix) or NVIDIA Ada generation graphics cards. for SOLIDWORKS Visualize version 2021 SP3 or newer is required, no patch is available for older Visualize versions.

See Dassault Systemes website for compatibility with other Dassault products or third party websites for other partner/non Dassault solutions

There are many reasons to choose a workstation rather than a consumer level or custom built workstation. Below are our top 3.

Testing & Certification

Dell Pro Max Desktops and laptops are based on a tightly controlled set of components which undergo extensive internal tests to ensure they can run intensive workloads for sustained periods. Dell then send workstations to software vendors such as SOLIDWORKS & Dassault Systemes for certification testing with their various software products giving peace of mind that they have been tested and certified by the software developers. Your time is better spent on design rather than diagnosing issues with component, driver compatibility of PC's built from off the shelf components.

Professional Graphics

For CAD use desktops and laptops should also feature professional graphics cards which are the only supported options for applications such as SOLIDWORKS & CATIA. Running an unsupported card often results in performance & stability issues for which we cannot get assistance from the developers to resolve. We recommend NVIDIA Professional graphics for best performance and compatibility, previously known as Quadro the latest cards are now branded NVIDIA RTX Ada Generation graphics cards e.g. RTX 2000 Ada Generation, RTX 4000 Ada Generation etc. GeForce RTX graphics cards are intended for gaming/consumer use and are not supported.

Warranty & Support

Dell Pro Max workstations we provide are backed up by Dell Pro Support with next business day onsite service. This is a expert team of remote support engineers to diagnose any hardware issue you may encounter, if they cannot resolve it remotely an engineer will be onsite the next business day to replace any required components free of charge; subject to part availability/ time of call. This keeps you or your team productive rather than losing engineering time returning the system to the supplier and waiting for a resolution.

Key to specifying a CAD workstation is an in depth understanding the requirements of the software in use. We carry out extensive benchmarking for various different software and workflows so that we can recommend the best options for you. In this case the simple answer is we found the latest "Sapphire Rapids" Intel Xeon CPU's significantly slower for CAD work, which favours CPU speed over number of cores, these Xeon CPU's have a lower maximum "turbo boost" speed and therefore complete tasks slower.

Added to this in 2022 Intel simplified their range and supported workstation features such as Error Correction Code (EEC) RAM on their i5, i7 and i9 CPU's for increased stability when used in combination with a workstation chipset while also offering up to 24 cores for more multi-threaded tasks.

Intel now only produce Xeon CPU's in more expensive workstations where users may require more than 128GB of RAM or multiple graphics cards, for the vast majority of CAD users this is not required.