Buying the right workstation for Inventor - AU 2018 Class

[Neil_Cross]

I'll put this in the other thread about Inventor performance, but this is a re-recording of my Autodesk University 2018 class discussing everything you need to know about buying the right PC for Inventor.  It's a 90 minute class and it covers everything from graphics cards through to CPU requirements.  If you haven't subscribed to the Youtube channel yet, now's a good time, there's a back catalogue of nearly 400 Inventor videos 

I've also tried to attach the accompanying handout which is a 40+ page report on everything you need to know about everything.  It might be too big to attach so I may need to edit that and make it a Dropbox link or something.

Feel free to refer anyone to this video who has a question on graphics cards or anything hardware related for Inventor, this is the end result of 4+ years of extensive testing and I'm going to pull back from repeating the same forum posts over and over again now, this is my contribution and I'll leave it there with this.

Cheers.

[DevinMedeiros2977]

Thanks!  Unfortunately, those are the only two models that we can order.

[Neil_Cross]

It's immaterial but just for my own curiosity,  why are they the only two models you can buy and who in the business decided that? Did they pick them at random or were they chosen based on their qualities and abilities at handling 3D CAD work?

I'm just interested in hearing how things work in other companies and why certain decisions are made!

[johan.degreef]

I also ordered an HP zbook 17 but with a Xeon 2286M inside a s suggested in your Dell Precision review.

[Anonymous]

Hey Neil,

Great video, very helpful, thanks. I had a couple questions from the video though. And sorry, this is longer than I intended it to be...

(Background first - I'm a mechanical engineer working with Inventor, but learnt that I could possibly get a home licence through my works licence, so having a look into upgrading my home PC. My budget means consumer grade parts, and it would be a mixed use PC, so Inventor not my only concern.)

1. When you talk about getting the latest generation CPU, I'm assuming you mean due to improvements in per core IPC at the same clock speed? I was wondering what your opinion on the latest Gen AMD Ryzen chips is, which are still slightly behind Intel in clock speed, but seem to have an advantage in IPC and overall per core performance? I was looking at 3600, 4.2Ghz boost, so not slow by any means, but the equivalent Intel are 4.3 - 4.5 and can probably be overclocked higher.

2. I was surprised to hear you say that memory speed has no effect. I understand that opening a certain size model is dependent on quantity not speed of ram, but is faster ram not more responsive to, for example, spinning a model?

3. When you do hit the limits of your system and start to go into virtual memory, did you do any testing on the effect of SSD read/write/IOPS speeds? Can higher speeds make the difference between the program just being a bit stuttery but usable and a program crash?

Thanks, Jamie

[Anonymous]

Hello Neil, I am searching for a new mobile workstation for my job, and also private uses.

I am working in an mechanical engineering department. We use also AutoDesk Vault for constriction 3D parts, and are using AutoCAD Mechanical for drawing schemes and building plans in 2D. But we are also looking at working with point clouds from a laser scanner, with programms like Recap or NavisWorks.

There are several notebook categories like mobile workstations or creator pc`s , or gaming notebooks with very good graphic cards in it and very fast CPUs .

You wrote/said that the CPUs should be the newest generation (Comete-Lake, Coffeel-Lake) , with a high clock frequency.

And only the difference between Xeons and Core are that xeons are tested to run 24/7, that is most important for servers. A notebook is not running 24/7 , but nearly 8h to 10h /workday. Intel Core i7-10875H Comet-Lake-Generation

You said also in the video, that the cards between GeForce or Quadro cards are also the same, only different tests, and throtteling of speed because of heat problems. eg. GeForce 1070 is the same like the Quadro P 4000

The best thing is the newest GPU Generation (Turing is better than Maxwell, Maxwell is better than Pascal)

But what about GeForce RTX or GeForce GTX cards like Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 Super Max-Q (8 GB VRAM)? Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 Max-Q (6 GB VRAM)

I would be very glad about tipps.

Thanks. @Neil_Cross