How fast is your Inventor PC really?

[Raider_71]

Hi guys,

We have had to do some testing on a bunch of Inventor PC's recently to determine which of the PC's needs to be replaced. Obviously we needed to find out which of the PC's are the worst eprformers as there was only budget to replace 50% of the design PC's. So we thought the Darwin theory will come in handy right... 🙂

Anyways I started searching on the net for toppics on how to benchmark an Inventor PC. Then I thought whats the point of using gaming benchmark tools because Inventor is not a game and there are more aspects than just graphics performance when it comes to percieved performance on an Inventor PC right.

So we decided to create our own Inventor benchmark tool which tests various aspects of an Inventor PC to give us an overview of our PC's performance. This then helped us make a decision as to whcih pc's to replace.

We have made the tool available free of charge to anyone interested in checking how their PC stacks up to their peers or friends. 🙂

Please download it here and post your results here as well if you want. Would be interesting to see what beast workstations are out there.

I would like to say thanks to Kirk #karthur1, for helping in testing the app.

Please feel free to send any suggestions our way. There is an email link in the app.

Download and Install

The application will work with Inventor 2014 to 2016 only.

IMPORTANT: After installation there will be an Inventor Bench icon on your desktop that looks like this: 

My resluts:

HP Elitebook 8560w with an SSD upgrade.

[Raider_71]

Hi @JDMather

The installer and all the files are digitally signed with a security certificate. This will ensure that all files installed on your PC are tracable.

I have uploaded the zip file to A360 as well so if you feal adventourous and decide to live on the edge a bit here is the download link ok. 🙂

http://a360.co/1TTt725

Pieter

[Torben.pedersen]

my test

[Curtis_Waguespack]

Hi Raider_007,

Just some more quick feedback, and an FYI to anyone else that might experience the same results:

Firstly, I was able to run all three tests successfully this time.

Secondly, when running this benchmark tool, I have noticed that I lose my ilogic browser ( I always keep this browser docked on the left, alongside the model browser).

After the benchmark is done running the ilogic bowser is missing and I have to reset it from the registry as described here:

http://forums.autodesk.com/t5/inventor-general-discussion/ilogic-windows-gone/m-p/4577113#M487223

I hope this helps.
Best of luck to you in all of your Inventor pursuits,
Curtis
http://inventortrenches.blogspot.com

[Raider_71]

Hi Curtis,

Thanks for the info. I could replicate the issue on my PC. After the bench the iLogic browser was gone. Then I resterted Inventor and it came back. Very strange behaviour.

The funny thing is the bench tool is not using any method or proprtie thats related to iLogic functions in the API so not sure why this would be hapenning...

Anyways thanks for the info!

Pieter

[CadUser46]

Raider.  This is great work and i cant believe i never spotted this before now.  Im am going to go bench some stuff!

If i may humbly suggest:

• Include the windows username on the form so you knows whose is who's.
• If you did export this to a csv file i could imagine ultimately having the tests tabulated in excel so i could see results side by side or row by row.

[karthur1]

During Beta testing, I noticed that after running the app, I would loose some of the add-ins like Stress Analysis, Tube and Pipe, Cable and Harness....etc.

Not a big deal b/c I would just close and restart Inventor and they would be right back.

Kirk

[karthur1]

Here is my benchmark for 2016 install.

[Raider_71]

Hi I have added a new version (1.1.2) which can be downloaded using the original download link.

The only change is that it will display the Compuetr Name on the page header next to the version number. Hope this helps in identifying the computer when benching loads of PC's

Also for exporting. What would you guys need exported?

If I export Computer Name and maybe the results, would that be fine or do you need all the other information about the PC as well?

Cheers

[karthur1]

---

@Raider_71 wrote:
...

Also for exporting. What would you guys need exported?

If I export Computer Name and maybe the results, would that be fine or do you need all the other information about the PC as well?

Cheers

---

I would say to export all the information.

Another suggestion .....It is good how you are benchmarking each different matrix (Modeling, Graphics and Drawing Test).  Would it be possible to come up with a single number to say where the system benchmarked? Maybe a weighted average of each matrix or something.  That way it would be easier to compare each system.

Kirk

[proj964]

Hi, I have having trouble understanding some of the system data in the posted results. the max clock speed shown is often the same as the base clock speed for the processor. most of the intel processors used have a turbo mode with a higher clock speed. i would expect the max clock speed to show the turbo mode speed. wouldn't this have a direct effect on the cpu intensive test results? maybe i don't understand the max clock speed data. thanks, jon

[Anonymous]

[hosford]

Finding my computer was much slower than most of the examples, I decided it was windows settings causing the speed loss.

Did a search "how to strip windos 7 and tune for speed"

I made many of the changes listed, my times droped by about a third, I would recoment looking at your system with JR's tuning method.

If anyone out there has good tuning advice, please share.

[Raider_71]

Hi thanks for sharing! What is the link to the page with the PC tuning advice?

Thanks

Pieter

[Torben.pedersen]

I think it is this site: http://www.advantage77.com/2014/02/22/how-to-strip-windows-7-and-tune-for-speed/

Feel free to leave me a kudo if this was helpful

[hosford]

After some addditional tweaking, I believe I arrived at a decent test result.

[Raider_71]

Hi guys,

Just to let you know I have uploaded a new build (1.2.0) of InventorBench, which can now export the results to an Excel file. There are two commands. Export to a new Excel file and Append to an existing Excel file. This will hopefully make it easier for testing a bunch of PC's and then to compare results.

Also just to clear up something about the graphics test results. The three boxes on the left displays the time, in seconds, in how long it took to rotate the part. The three boxes on the right displays the refresh rate as a frequecy in hertz or frames per second. So they are two different units of measure. They are related but should not be averaged for instance. Hope it makes sense.

I will add unit labels next to the text boxes in the next minour build.

Thanks and cheers

Pieter

[Neil_Cross]

This is like, this is beyond amazing... I've spent the last 4 weeks extensively benchmarking a number of different hardware builds with Inventor but with more of a real world approach, with a view to putting this on my YouTube channel.  I have an old Quadro 2000, a new Quadro M4000, a GeForce 970 and a monstrous W9100 which is one of the most powerful graphics cards in the world, and I've tested them all in build with a 10 core Xeon E5-2687W v3 and a i7-4790K.  All the testing was manual with real world customer data.  This test is phenomenal, the only downside is that it doesn't highlight where a system weakness is but if you collate all the results and compare them, it should fill that gap.

Here's my results for a PC originally built with gaming, CAD & running VM's in mind:

I changed my hardware setting to Performance as most others seem to have had that set.

[Neil_Cross]

@Anonymous @Torben.pedersen Just curious, are you guys running an overclock on the 4790K? I have mine at stock 4.4GHz and you guys are getting a marginally faster CPU computation time with the same CPU

[Neil_Cross]

@blair I know this is a bit weird and cheeky, but when you get a moment is there any chance you could possibly re-run your test? Do it at 1920x1080?

I'm categorising all 24 sets of results and comparing them, so far your result doesn't make any sense which suggests something went off in the test, possibly your background download or something else going off at the time.  You have a beast of a GTX980 but your FPS is lower than @-niels- who has a mobile 970M and a CPU with a lower base clock and turbo frequency.  You beat him in the CPU intensive task as expected but the video check, which is more CPU intensive than GPU these days, yours should have been far higher.

If you don't care about it, no worries, I'm just trying to make sense of all the results with a view to putting them into a presentable format

[blair]

Will do Monday. I have a pretty good idea it because I'm running a pretty high screen resolution compared to everyone else.