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.

[blair]

It would be nice to see how cheap one could built a "fast" box for Inventor at the cheapest price. A screaming CPU that can be overclocked, liquid cooling for the CPU, reasonable memory, SSD for the O/S and programs and decent HD for the data.

Might even be able to get something down to a Micro AT size.

[dgeise]

My suggestion is to wait for the new Nvidia 'Pascal' based cards to come out in the next few months.  You won't be sorry you waited...

[Neil_Cross]

@blair That's exactly how I've done this  I decided to go down the mATX form factor route, the CPU is the Pentium G3258 and the GPU is a R9 380.  Both of those choices could backfire and flop, but on paper they're ideal as that G3258 can hold a stable OC of ~4.5GHz.  But it's only dual core no HT so that might be where it tumbles.

The R9 380 has some kick to it as well, same price point as the GTX 960 but bigger specs.

I've genuinely got no idea what kind of scores it will get, I'm hoping between 8-9, which doesn't seem much but given that this entire PC cost less than an average Quadro GPU, it'll be a win to hit that kind of score.

[Anonymous]

I recently had my computer upgraded here is my test run. I found it interesting that they put in the ram in 2 pairs 8G & 4G. Also why is my graphics card information showing onboard graphic instead of the installed quatro k4200?

[Neil_Cross]

Yah something is wrong there, I have the same CPU as you and my score was 12+, most others with the 4790K are getting over 11.

I've just built an entire PC for £400 and it beat that score, something isn't right there.  I'd take out those 4GB sticks and see what kind of difference it makes.  You should be way higher than that.

[Anonymous]

OK! I thought that was strange. I'll run it again. Thanks!

[blair]

Keep me posted on this, looking to build a new unit for work soon. I'll need enough space inside the case to add a Thunderbolt 2 PCIe card

[Neil_Cross]

Will do.

However, I'd never recommend that anyone buys this for work... this is purely an experiment, I've intentionally bought cheap stuff to see if someone on a ridiculously small budget can get relatively decent performance.  The components I've bought are entry level.

Based on everything we've seen so far, if I was buying a new daily driver PC I'd build it around the Skylake 6700K CPU.  

[blair]

Understandable,

[mmaes]

@Anonymous Along with what Neil recommended, go to the Invidia Control Panel and make sure Inventor is set up to use your Quadro card and not the integrated graphics.

[Neil_Cross]

It doesn't work like that mate, the bench tool is just reporting on the wrong device.  If you think about it the CPU based graphics module pumps out the visuals through a port on the motherboard I/O which in most cases won't be connected to a monitor if you have a dedicated graphics card.  So even if a PC could hot swap graphics output, the CPU graphics wouldn't even be connected to a monitor, the monitor is receiving its signal from the GPU card.

Unless he actually does have his monitor hooked up to the motherboard port and not the GPU... I think a small part of me would die if there was PCs out there with high powered Quadro cards but the monitors are hooked into the CPU graphics port! 

[mmaes]

@Neil_Cross my Nvidia control panel gives me the option to pick which GPU specific programs use.

[Anonymous]

@Neil_Cross Replaced the ancient Quadro FX4600 with an ATI Firepro W7100(already had this).  Here are the results.  Only went from 2.7 to 3.3.  Is the bottleneck now Inventor 2014?  We also have an NVidia M4000 to try.

[Anonymous]

Thanks! Great Tip! I will rerun my test to see if if has an effect.

[Neil_Cross]

@mmaes Is that screenshot taken from a laptop? A laptop can switch between GPUs as it all goes out from one port.  Edit: if it isn't taken from a laptop, perhaps you're getting that option because you have SLI enabled, I've never seen that option before on a desktop, definitely don't have that option on any of the desktops I've got here now!

@Anonymous Your drawing view creation time is off the charts, 70+ seconds, I've recently done the test with a £50 two core Pentium and it was 20+ seconds, there's something else not right with your setup which isn't GPU related.  Your modeling time is also sky high, the fastest machines are doing it in 6-7 seconds and yours is 20 seconds, do the test again and watch the part when it's modeling up the part with the A on a stick, is there anything else going on with your PC?

[mmaes]

@Neil_Cross That screen shot was in fact from a laptop.  My desktop doesn't have that option either.  I am wondering what would cause the bench tool to see his integrated GPU though???  Possibly unknowingly he is hooked up through his MOBO???

[Neil_Cross]

Possibly.  Some PCs have the Intel HD graphics shown as an active device even though it isn't being used, the bench tool could be picking up on that.

In other news, I'm seeing some massive performance differences between Windows versions at the moment.  I ran a test on Windows 10 and my FPS came out at 145Hz on my cheap PC build, I wiped the drive and put on Windows 7, same hardware, the FPS shows as ~50Hz.  Same hardware, same driver.   

[salariua]

@Neil_Cross

R9 380 seems to be DirectX 12 as is Window 10 but Inventor is only DirectX11 compatible so why would that improve performace in Inventor?

[Neil_Cross]

Right now I have absolutely no idea, but that's what I'm seeing.  Obviously this will all be visually captured and presented for everyone to see with their own eyes.  Windows 10 is currently going back onto the test box and I'll be running all the tests again to make sure I'm not going mad, but so far on Win10 the best bench score I got was ~8.2 and on Win7 ~5.3.  In both cases all environmental variables had been identical except for the OS.

I'll probs drop the dev team a shout and ask them to shed some light on it once I get the results documented.

[machiel.veldkamp]

Really this thread is gold