Workstation CPU + Graphics Card for Fusion 360 and 3D printing uses

[Anonymous]

Hi

The motherboard on my very old PC just died.

I'm looking for advice on what spec PC to build.

I will mainly use the PC for creating new products/parts in Fusion 360 or importing 3D scans and modifing existing objects to then output them and use a slicer app (ie Cura) to send to the 3D printer.

I would like to explore using the PC to view my 3D models with a VR headset but thats not in the short term plan.

A few things I am considering and could do with some advice...

1. Should I go for a CPU with more cores for multithreading such as the AMD RYZEN 7  8-Core Processor or something that is faster on single threaded processes like the Intel Core i7-7700K 4.2 GHz.

2. Should I go for a gaming graphics card or a professional card nvidia geforce or a Quadro.

From what I have been reading, gaming cards work well with Fusion 360 while the more professional / business cards are for tradiotnal CAD software?

3. If I do go for a gaming card, which which one should I go for? Do I go for something lie the more expensive GeForce GTX 1080 because of my (possible) future VR needs or something cheper?

4. Lastly would anyone have any advice about practical uses of VR with Fusion 360 

Thanks very much

[ryan.kelly155]

Hi there, I actually have been following this thread since you posted it hoping to get some answers, but grew impatient and built my Ryzen 7 system anyway.  I have similar needs to yours, I work as a product design engineer.  At work I built a liquid colled Intel i7 4790k with 32 gig of ~2700 Mhz RAM which runs a Quadro K2200 about a year ago.  For home I recently built a Ryzen 1700X with 32 gig 3000 Mhz ram with a 1080 ti.

 I cant say I notice any difference in fusion 360 functionality between them, then again I have only had the Ryzen build for a week, and haven't been able to torture it yet, any ideas on something to put it through its paces? I would be happy to do a little A/B comparison...   I could also go more into depth about what I put in each build if you would like to know more of the specifics, let me know! 

[HughesTooling]

Here's a file that's a good test for modeling and rendering. If you import and run a compute all Ctrl+B the fillet rule will give you a good test, on my 2.4ghz i7 note book it takes about 3 minutes for a single component. Note only 18% utilisation and speed 3.36Ghz. I have read on the forum that Fusion is supposed to use multiple cores if you have independent components that don't have any references to other components but testing with 2 of the components in the attached file it looks like Fusion is just running the timeline in sequence so 3 minutes for one component and 6 for 2!

@ryan.kelly155 It will be an interesting test of your Ryzen PC in the render workspace as all cores are used so it would be interesting to see how your i7 and Ryzen PCs compare. An in canvas render just to the Excellent setting took 1228 seconds, just over 20 minutes.

Mark

[HughesTooling]

@Anonymous Why did you start another thread, you already had some good advice in this one.

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/design-validate-document/pc-spec-overkill/td-p/7019287

Your question about whether to go for a Quatro or gaming card, Fusion uses DirectX and Quadro cards are optimized for OpenGL so the gaming card will be a better bet. This post by @PhilProcarioJr might be worth reading.

Mark

[ryan.kelly155]

@HughesToolingSo I have only tested the render time so far, took about 330 seconds to get to excellent, rendering pegged all 16 threads which was the first time I did that. unmodified CPU got up to 58 degrees Celsius and stayed there with a pretty run of the mill air cooler, (evo 212) I have a large liquid cooler radiator in the mail which I plan on overclocking the Ryzen with, hopefully I can get the speeds down even further then 

[ryan.kelly155]

Just checked the force rebuild time and its pretty much the same as your stated time, ~ 3 min for 1 and 6 min for 2... I wonder what the bottleneck there is, my CPU and GPU both were barely trying but fusion stopped responding multiple times

[TrippyLighting]

Not all algorithms in Fusion 360 lend themselves to be parallelized and hyper threaded.

Rendering algorithms can be very much parallelized and thus uses all possible processor power on multicore machines.

[HughesTooling]

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@ryan.kelly155 wrote:

Just checked the force rebuild time and its pretty much the same as your stated time, ~ 3 min for 1 and 6 min for 2... I wonder what the bottleneck there is, my CPU and GPU both were barely trying but fusion stopped responding multiple times

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In another thread looking for advice on a new computer I recommend going for a more GHz over cores and someone wanted to argue that Fusion would multithread and use all cores. It's pretty well know that CAD is not good at paralyzation so I made this part to show the problem, you can't start adding the fillets before the holes are added. Also adding the fillets can only be done by one process because each one modifies the body and some surfaces disappear. 

Unless you're doing a lot of rendering of CAM work I'd still recommend going for the fastest processor, your Ryzen is pretty impressive almost 4 times faster with only twice as many cores.

Mark

[ryan.kelly155]

Yeah I was impressed by how long it took that part to rebuild, I have worked on large assemblies with dependency trees 4 or 5 parts long with hundreds of parts in the main assembly and they never take more than a few seconds to rebuild, a minute in the extreme case.  For my work flow and parts the Ryzen is the right choice, for someone who finds themselves constantly waiting significant amounts of time for parts or assemblies to rebuild the Intel may still be the right choice.  I know in Solid works there is a "lock bar" on the model tree that can be pulled over the features you dont want rebuilt in order to save time while rebuilding in more complex models.  Does fusion have similar functionality?  

Generally I try to avoid such taxing computationally intense features in my models until the very end to keep things efficient. Mirroring symmetrical bodies to mirror a part instead of features in a part,  also copying entire bodies instead of features to duplicate parts can speed up a work flow since its copying geometry that has already been calculated.  

[Anonymous]

Hi Mark: Not idea I realise but I started this thread a few days before the other but after receiving no response I narrowed it down myself and threw the final spec out on a new thread. The new thread received responses. I'm glad this thread has now had these useful responses, it's been very informative. Thanks v much for the inputs so far.