 hardware requirements designbuilder is a professional graphics application and requires a reasonably high standard of computer hardware for successful use this page contains information on the recommended specification the main areas you should pay attention to if you are buying or upgrading your computer system to run designbuilder are  graphics adapter   a good 100 opengl compatible graphics adapter is required to run designbuilder the midrange and better nvidia cards are the most reliable some graphics adapters integrated with the motherboard we have tested are unable to run designbuilder memory   designbuilder will use all the memory you can provide at least 4gb is recommended and 816gb for serious modelling and simulations cpu speed  get as fast as you can afford i7 or xeon are ideal cores   having multiple processors does not necessarily speed up simulations in designbuilder but it does allow you to continue using your computer while simulations are running quad or more core processors also make the software more responsive in use if you plan to run optimisations and would prefer to avoid online services then a 1632 or more core server will allow multiple simulations to be run in parallel and allow optimisations to complete much more quickly than on a standard quad core desktop or laptop recommended windows 7 i5 i7 or xeon processor with 4 or more cores 816 gb or more ram at least 200 gb free disk space ssd speed up software operation and are more robust especially for laptops pointing device such as a mouse or laptop trackpad most users prefer using a mouse to trackpads 100 nvidia graphics adapter with hardware acceleration running in 32bit color mode 17 or more 1280x1024 pixels or larger screen for efficiency during the modelling process and for displaying highquality visualisation images and walkthroughs of designbuilder models and cfd results large screens eg 27 are ideal for use with designbuilder windows 10 8 7 designbuilder works well under windows 10 8 7 windows xp and vista are not recommended and are no longer supported by the designbuilder support desk updated 23mar2016   hardware requirements  