Workstation Requirements for AutoCAD

AutoCAD 2011 (Electrical & Mechanical) is provided as 32-bit and 64-bit applications for installation and should be used on the corresponding operating system only. Autodesk Vault Explorer 2010 is a 32-bit application and can be installed on either 32-bit or 64-bit operating systems.

The main advantage of 64bit operating systems, such as Vista 64, is the amount of addressable physical RAM. XP Professional 32 is limited to addressing 4GB of RAM, of which 2GB can be allocated to a single process or application. A 3GB switch option is available for XP Professional 32, but is only a short term work around and steals valuable resources away from the operating system. As you can see from the table below, the higher end versions of Vista can allow a single process or application to address much more.

AutoCAD (Electrical & Mechanical) and Autodesk Vault must all be the same language on a given computer. English versions of these applications will run on any language operating system. Versions of these applications in other languages will run on operating systems of that same language.

Autodesk recommends settings that allow Microsoft Windows to manage virtual memory, as needed. There should always be at least twice as much free hard disk space as system memory (RAM).

Workstation Requirements

System Requirements for 32-bit AutoCAD

• Microsoft® Windows® XP Home and Professional (SP2 or later), or Microsoft® Windows Vista® (SP1 or later), including Enterprise, Business, Ultimate, and Home Premium editions (compare Windows Vista versions)
• Intel® Pentium® or AMD Athlon® dual-core processor, 1.6 GHz or higher with SSE2 technology for Windows XP; Intel Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon dual-core, 3.0 GHz or higher with SSE2 technology for Windows Vista
• 2 GB RAM or greater
• 2.8 GB free disk space for installation (3.4 GB for a clean machine with no .NET installed)
• 4 GB minimum free hard disk available after installation
• 1,280 x 1,024 32-bit color video display adapter (true color) 128 MB or greater, Direct3D®-capable workstation-class graphics card (ATI FireGL or NVidia Quadro)
• Microsoft® Internet Explorer® 7.0 or later
• Microsoft Mouse-compliant pointing device
• Download and installation from DVD

System Requirements for 64-bit AutoCAD

• Microsoft Windows XP Professional x64 Edition (SP2 and later), or Microsoft Windows Vista (SP1 or later), including Enterprise, Business, Ultimate, and Home Premium editions (compare Windows Vista versions)
• AMD Athlon with SSE2 technology, AMD Opteron® with SSE2 technology, Intel® Xeon® with Intel EM64T support with SSE2 technology, or Intel Pentium 4 with Intel EM64T support with SSE2 technology
• 2 GB RAM or greater
• 2.9 GB free disk space for installation (3.5 GB for a clean system with no .NET installed)
• 4 GB minimum free hard disk available after installation
• 1,280 x 1,024 32-bit color video display adapter (true color) 128 MB or greater, Direct3D®-capable workstation-class graphics card (ATI FireGL or NVidia Quadro)
• Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0 or later
• Microsoft Mouse-compliant point device
• Download and Installation from DVD