How much of impact is the limitatiions of 5,000 pads in Circuit Studio?

[1lulu2]

I am considering purchasing CS at the discount price, but I see there is a limitation of 5,000 pads before the program starts to degrade. I am new to making PCBs, so how big, or size is a 5,000 pad equivalent PCB?

1lulu2

See attachment below and link for details of CS limitations:

http://documentation.circuitstudio.com/display/CSTU/CircuitStudio+-+((System+Requirements))

[T3sl4co1l]

Since I don't usually get computer board projects, I rarely see over 3000 pads.

Polygon repours are pretty slow at that scale, regardless.  (Altium is not renowned for their optimization talent...)

Tim (uses AD16)

[james_s]

I've never designed a board with 5,000 pads, but it depends on what you want to build. If you want to make boards with multiple 672 pin BGAs you could probably hit that pretty easily but short of doing a PC motherboard or high end video card it's probably not gonna happen. Certainly not for the typical hobbyist stuff.

[Jeroen3]

I made a board 220x140mm with many smd's, few to-220's and some relays. It has 1400 pads.
It only has 4300 copper objects. I would not worry about this for home use.

[T3sl4co1l]

What exactly does "has been engineered to make it impractical" means in plain English. Does it just run on a single thread? Does it have some inefficient algorithm for processing the datastructures that doesn't scale well? Does anyone know.  Maybe on a really fast machine the "noticible" point of degredation is 7500 pads.  And 2500 of a slow machine.

Unless they've made incredibly huge changes recently, Altium has always been single thread.  Including all the heavy lifting (such as simulation, rule checking, polygon repouring and autorouting).

I doubt it's any different from AD, but it's funny that they don't advertise such a limit for AD.

Tim