Community
Inventor Forum
Welcome to Autodesk’s Inventor Forums. Share your knowledge, ask questions, and explore popular Inventor topics.
cancel
Showing results for 
Show  only  | Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Best Workstation Configuration for Inventor Design Suite Ulitimate 2012

11 REPLIES 11
Reply
Message 1 of 12
lalitkmr
2465 Views, 11 Replies

Best Workstation Configuration for Inventor Design Suite Ulitimate 2012

Hi,
I am in the process of finalizing the workstation configuration for Autodesk inventor product design suite 2012. Currently we are using Inventor 2011 on windows xp (32 bit), with 4 GB ram .

We are a small company in manufacturing. Our top assemblies use 1100+ parts. 

I am thinking of using one of the following configurations for new workstations.

Option 1

Windows 7 Pro 64
Intel QuadCore Xeon W3565 3.20 GHz 8M smart cache, 4.8 GT/s
NVIDIA Quadro FX 1500 Graphics Controller (From existing work stations)
12GB DDR3-1333/PC3-10600 RAM (with room to add more)
1 TB SATA 7200RPM Hard Drive
DVD+-RW


Option 2

Windows 7 Pro 64
Intel Core I-7-970 six core, 3.2 Ghz, 1.5 MB L2 + 12MB shared L3 cache
1GB DDR3 RAdeon HD 6670 Graphics controller
12GB DDR3-1333 SDRAM
2TB 7200 rpm SATA


Option 3:

Upgrade our current configuration which is

Windows XP 32 Bit
Xeon Dual-Core 5150 2.66GHz
Quadro FX 1500
4 GB Ram
250 GB HDD

To

Windows 7 Pro 64
12 GB Ram


our budget  is about USD 2000 per workstation (w/o Monitor)


Any Guidance is appreciated

 

Lalit

Tags (1)
11 REPLIES 11
Message 2 of 12
Xun.Zhang
in reply to: lalitkmr

Hi Lalit,

In my opinion, option 3 is not that proper, oprtion 2 with larger Harddisk, but it's up to your dataset.

I think option 1 is much suitable for your chioce, low cost, good graphic card, enough RAM.

just for your information, hopefully you like it.


Xun
Tags (1)
Message 3 of 12
SBix26
in reply to: Xun.Zhang

I think option 1 looks fine, with the exception of the graphics card.  The FX 1500 is quite old, and certainly won't support DirectX 11, possibly not even 10.  How about a HD 6870 or 6970?  Or Nvidia GTX 560/570/580?

Message 4 of 12
mcgyvr
in reply to: SBix26

Do you use Vault or work with local files on your hard drive?

At the very least you should have 2 regular hard drives in raid 0 but I will never build an Inventor machine without a solid state drive from now on. One big enough for the Inventor application and your working directory is all you need to ensure your hard drive isn't your bottleneck

 

If you are lucky and not forced to buy HP or Dell I'd highly suggest building a machine from cyberpowerpc. I am very happy with their hardware selection and the machine I have from them is doing excellent. You should be able to build a really sweet machine for right about 2K.

 

Loving my HD6970 by the way..



-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Inventor 2023 - Dell Precision 5570

Did you find this reply helpful ? If so please use the Accept Solution button below.
Maybe buy me a beer through Venmo @mcgyvr1269
Message 5 of 12
Xun.Zhang
in reply to: lalitkmr

Yeah, it's better to set up 6670 Graphic card for Option 1.


Xun
Message 6 of 12
autoboot
in reply to: Xun.Zhang

Option 2 

 

The 6670 is a lower-end gaming video card. 

 

Switch the video card for something like this for workstations (esp inventor):

 

NVIDIA Quadro 2000 by PNY 1.0GB GDDR5 PCI-E16 DVI 2x Display Port Fermi Workstation Video Card

 

 

Message 7 of 12
SBix26
in reply to: autoboot

The Quadro series offers no performance benefit for Inventor, and costs a lot more than comparable gaming cards.

Message 8 of 12
autoboot
in reply to: SBix26

@sbixler

 

I don't understand how a quadro wouldn't easily outperform a low-end gaming card.

 

I can see how making very simple assemblies would be fine for the gaming card but once we get into complex assemblies at high resolutions how can the gaming card even come close to the workstation card's performance? Can you explain? Does the workstation card not have the hardware designed to work with complex 3D assemblies & high-polygon models?

 

I ask this honestly - I am not well endowed with insider knowledge in this subject; if I'm wrong on this I'd like to correct my thinking. 

Message 9 of 12
SBix26
in reply to: autoboot

Quadro cards run the gamut from low-end to high-end, as do gaming cards.  Comparable performance costs far less for a gaming card.  I'd like to defer to Sam M, here, who has researched this a lot more than I have, but perhaps if you search for posts by him you could learn more than I can tell you.

 

If I understand correctly, OpenGL, formerly used by Inventor and most other solid modelers as their graphics engines, required a heavy investment of time from both graphic chip manufacturers and from application writers.  Drivers primarily for gaming with OpenGL did not make use of all the OpenGL functionality, which the "workstation" drivers did.  I believe that is still true for OpenGL.  However, Microsoft decided to try to standardize the whole graphics subsystem and bring some order to the chaos.  They produced DirectX, allowing chip makers to write drivers for Windows, instead of for every conceivable application that might run on Windows, and these drivers were then certified by Microsoft.  This is the WHQL (Windows® Hardware Quality Labs) certification that you see recommended for video drivers.

 

Autodesk switched Inventor from OpenGL to DirectX several years ago, and with that change, the performance benefit of the "workstation" cards vanished.  Now, you can get a lot more bang for your buck with a gaming card, because they all use the same graphics subsystem.  Mcgyvr has a high-end AMD (ATI) gaming card in his workstation, and I just bought a mid-to-high-end Nvidia gaming card for our new workstation.  No issues, happiness all around as far as I can tell.

 

However... if you use other applications that depend on OpenGL, you will want to get a workstation video card.

 

Hope that's useful.  And I really, really hope that it's correct!

Message 10 of 12
autoboot
in reply to: SBix26

Thank you for the response. I'm starting to get a grasp on why workstation cards are so expensive now.

 

At home I have an HD6970 - perhaps I'll give her a good run with some huge inventor assemblies 😄

 

The question is, now, is if autocad, maya, showcase, 3dsmax, or a competitor like solidworks, etc. have switched to directx or not. I wouldn't want to be limited to a certain set of software when the wrong set of circumstances smack me in the face!

 

I've used some of openGL for a project in school - what a pain. 

 

Message 11 of 12
lalitkmr
in reply to: lalitkmr

Thanks for your replies. Now I know much more than I did 2 days ago :).

I have another doubt

I know that Inventor is still mostly a single thread application, so having multiple cores does not help as much as a processor with faster speed.

The question is
Are other components of the inventor product design suite ( Alias Design, 3ds Max, AutoCAD Mechanical, Showcase, SketchBook Designer, Mudbox) also single thread or multiple threaded applications and whether we should go for multi core for them, hoping they will still be a part of the suite in the future.

Also I did a little digging on the importance of various components in a system and found following

as per this article,

http://danmiles.blogs.com/files/ml111-1p_dan-miles-1.pdf

If you deal with large assemblies, the order of preference comes as

1 RAM
2 Video Card
3 Processor
4 Hard Drive

Thanks for your inputs

Lalit

Tags (1)
Message 12 of 12
lalitkmr
in reply to: mcgyvr

We use Vault for our designs. The vault  is on a separate server.

Can't find what you're looking for? Ask the community or share your knowledge.

Post to forums  

Autodesk Design & Make Report