Hello frans.
This is the first 'plate' design i have ever used FEA on. I have done this to prove to myself the practicality of using solid elements in typical sheet / plate designs.
This is just an example of what can be done with a nine year old workstation, single 3.6Mhz Xeon 2Mb cache
2 Gb ram 512 Mb Nvidia Fx quadro 4500.
It took 2 m 30 sec to process using pardiso solver.
The size of the part is 2 m long , square tube 200mm x 200mm wall 2mm with thicker flanges top and bottom.
Additionally, i've added a bracket which is 0.5 mm off the tube sides ( not touching ) with attachment welds fully modelled attaching bracket assy to the main tube.
So , think of the surface area of the plate material - lets say approx 2m x 0.8m with thickness of 2mm - All
meshed in 3d solid elements. I believe this ratio of sheet area to sheet thickness would cover many real world produced articles. Office type metal cupboards are around 1mm and machine tool covers are around 2 to 3 mm thick so this example assembly is in the right ballpark.
This assembly was meshed outside of Aurora in Netgen 4.9.13 and input via an Abaqus file .inp - Mesh checked -'computable' . Pads on the bracket top plate had in total 1000N applied as surface load.
I do see that a simple surface mesh is easier to manipulate on the screen but i hope this example gives you confidence as to what can be done in Aurora with basic computing power.
Interestingly, i see instantly where i can remove material and where i can make improvements although it is not highly stressed with 1000N load.
To model the design, mesh it, import to Aurora, apply LBC's etc and report / post here has taken about 4 hours.
A great design aid!
Tim.
ps. the m/c you have ( as your post) has 4 cores to my one and 8 x the RAM memory - it's a very capable computer. If you're having troubles, perhaps it's the graphics card trying to manipulate all those tetrahedron - try hiding graphic info with the white cube button or, pan, zoom, spin etc with only wire frame - it does help.
Also, try adjusting the mouse velocity under tools>option>view - for each zoom scale you're using.
Also, i have given up on using the mouse wheel for zooming - it's so slow! Instead, i use the zoom setting tool and change it a few times during a session. (Sphere with arrow surrounding it).