Does Inventor benefits from RAM frequency ?

[Anonymous]

I'm building a new Inventor only Workstation. Users will be use Inventor to design only and they won't render at all. %90 of their needs is to have faster orbit and zoom in- zoom out while drawing. 

Since it's very well known that Inventor only benefits from single-core while posting images to the screen, I thought it would be wiser to overclock an i5 9600k to work at around 5Ghz. 

My build is like this:

• i5 9600k

• Noctua D15

• AMD rx580 8gb

• 32 GB ddr4 ram 2400 MHz

• Radeon RX580 8GB
• m2 SSD 256 GB
• 2 TB HDD

And I wonder if RAM frequency of 2400 MHz would bottleneck my @5GHz CPU performance? Or another way of asking is that does Inventor benefits from RAM frequency?

Thank you very much for your help in advance!

[johnsonshiue]

Hi! I am not sure if we have studied the impact of RAM frequency on Inventor performance. I would assume the faster the better. But, the exact correlation is unclear. Your hardware is very impressive. Unless you are working on assemblies with 100K components or complex parts, you should not encounter any performance issue (if there is, it could be a bug and we need to look into it).

Many thanks!

[Anonymous]

Hi @johnsonshiue  I'm glad you answered to my question

As my understanding, how many bytes can CPU processes be limited to how fast can RAM feeds the CPU in a second? In another way of saying, I took this directly from Autodesk Inventor's required hardware list "Choose RAM that transfers data at the same frequency as the processor". So if I overclock my CPU and don't get the required RAM speed to feed my CPU in that scale, it's simply going to bottleneck my CPU.

I wonder how can I calculate ram data transfer rate and possible CPU data processes rate after overclocking and compare them to find the sweet spot. The answer doesn't have to be exact, it can also be conceptual since it would help me with the calculations. 

Edit: I will be using CPU overclocked @ 5GHz. Forgot to mention that part. 

[johnsonshiue]

Hi! I personally would discourage you overclock your CPU. Inventor as an application is partially multi-threaded (graphics, feature compute, import/export, constraint solve, and so on). If you overclock your CPU, you may interfere with the multi-threaded operations and you may encounter instability. I am not sure how much performance gain you will get by doing so.

Please note that Inventor is a CAD software, not a game software. It does not directly interact with hardware. For the most part, Windows dictates how Inventor uses hardware resource. Faster CPU and more RAM certainly help but the application performance is not necessarily directly correlated with the hardware.

I don't know what kind of models you are build. But, I don't believe you should see any performance issue. If you do, please let us know and share an example that exhibits the issue.

Many thanks!

[arron.craig]

I wonder if underclocking your ram and running the Inventor benchmark would be a reasonable test? I have never under/over clocked ram so am not sure if it would be a reasonable experiment or not.

[leowarren34 · Accepted solution]

Hi, @Anonymous 2400MHz is considered slow compared to RAM available today which is available at 3600+MHz and even 3000MHz doesn't have much of a price premium compared to 2400MHz. I run my RAM at 2400MHz as I'm on a 7800x which only supports 2400MHz and my PC handles Inventor fine on reasonable large assemblies. 

RAM speed is one of those things where higher is better but it's not worth getting the fastest since the price to performance isn't usually worth it.

I definitely wouldn't OC RAM unless it's a profile like XMP 2 as it's known to instability far quicker than an OC CPU.

I have personally OC'd my CPU to 4.5GHz with no issues on Inventor but it's not something worth risking on a professional machine.

Finally, I'd also like to point out that there is more to RAM speed than just the MHz number - factors such as timings and latency can make a huge difference irrespective of Clock Speed.

[Anonymous]

Thank you very much @leowarren34 for your reply. I did some testing on my personal PC to see how much does RAM speed actually effects Inventor and it does. Then I saw this post. I posted my potential build and also the outcomes of the test I just did, and also I shared our engineer's expectations from this build and my budget. I would be really grateful if you could check my post there too. 

[leowarren34]

Hi @Anonymous,

I've looked at your data but Neil has already pipped me to the post.

Without flogging a dead horse the results are either within a margin of error or anomalous - RAM speed can a make a difference but the difference is super subtle unless you're transferring files back and forth between the RAM and storage to which storage becomes the next bottleneck.

If you want a reliable data set run the test multiple times until concordant and they should be very similar.

At the end of the day, it's not worth getting frustrated since 3000MHz RAM is almost the same price as 2400MHz and any faster isn't worth the money for the performance gains you'll get.

[Frederick_Law]

Two important numbers for RAM: freq and timing.

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/pc-memory-ram-frequency-timings,6328.html

Read the spec carefully.  Some RAM run at higher freq but with higher latency which may not be faster.

I've OC everything.  Test for stable max OC.  Cooling, testing, cooling and more testing.

Fan on the RAM.  Fan on SSD, HDD.

Watercool is nice.  You do need one with enough water or else you'll have a boiler.

Also you'll need to remember to keep it fill up.

[dgorsman]

Hardware will only get you so far.  Good data management and work processes will usually show better improvements than the small fiddly hardware choices, and at a much better cost. 

[imajar]

Hi @Anonymous ,

Last year I did a study to see if RAM frequency affects inventor performance using Inventor Bench, and the answer is yes - but the effect is minimal.  Fortunately I saved my screenshots . . . see below.

The ram provided with our machines came with built in XMP profiles, but did not come enabled.  Stock frequency:  2133 MHz, XMP profile:  2800 MHz.  So I enabled them just to see if it made a difference.  Just to add my 2 cents to @dgorsman  I definitely agree with about being smart with managing your data.   (just ask about our 200,000 part assembly . . . The work I put into optimizing it was well worth the time it has saved since.)

RAM speed comparison:

CPU at stock frequency,

Stock RAM frequency (2133 MHz)                                        XMP (2800 MHz)

    

CPU overclock at 4.2 GHz

Stock RAM frequency (2133 MHz)                                        XMP (2800 MHz)

 

[Anonymous]

Thank you very much, I did my purchase by looking at this review