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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.
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.
@machiel.veldkamp wrote:
Really this thread is gold
An appropriate description considering how many people have went out and spent money as a result of this thread haha
It would appear so. However, in my cheap system build I went for an AMD graphics card and honestly it wouldn't surprise me if it was some kind of weird AMD thing. I've got 2 NVIDIA cards here though and 2 AMD cards, so I can test almost every scenario.
But yea I've put Windows 10 back on, ran the test again, I'm getting 300% increase in visual performance.
Another thing I've noticed is that Windows 10 passively consumes a lot more video card RAM than Windows 7. This is all stuff I'll be investigating further though.
@Neil_Cross We did the test again with a complete restart and only opened Inventor to run the bench. We watched the CPU utilization and the GPU utilization. The bench completely spikes one core of one CPU. GPU utilization from Process Explorer stays around 38%. When drawing the "A" the screen stutters a little. We use Autodesk ETO which requires us to have defer updates on. Changing this didn't appear to make a difference however. We are going to do some additional testing with 2016 to see if this helps with the CPU utilization.
Finally got around to overclocking my new personal computer after some delays. Here is the stock score and the 4.3ghz overclock score. I'm a little confused why the graphics scores are a little lower with my overclock as I did nothing with my graphics card, since that hurt my score some.
3.3ghz Stock
4.3ghz Overclock
@Raider_71 There's something extremely funky weird about the test part (the VGA one) that the bench tool uses. When the bench tool runs the graphics test, on Windows 7 I'm seeing a result of around 45Hz, the EXACT same computer with Windows 10 runs that test at 160-170Hz.
Windows 7
Windows 10
The two results above are from the exact same system, it has a dual boot setup off the same SSD, so basically both tests are utilising the exact same hardware in every respect. The version of Inventor is identical, the application settings are identical, graphics driver is identical, but look at the graphics scores.
Originally I thought it could have been Windows 10 handling the engine differently, but manually observing the frame rates on other models shows that this isn't doesn't appear to be the case, it seems to be an isolated issue with the part provided in the bench tool. If that's the case, which I'm by no means saying it is as I still can't explain the above, but there's a potential chance that people running Windows 7 are seeing an artificially low score?
FYI the above is the score from the £400 / 500 Euro / $570 budget giant slayer system I've built.
@pball That was my plan, I bought and built this budget PC just to run this bench tool. My plan was to pick the right parts for an Inventor build, and beat PC's that cost 10 times as much as this, I think I've done that. I wouldn't ever recommend that someone buys this very spec for work, that wasn't the point, the point was to prove that you don't need to spend the equivalent of Greece's national financial deficit to get a PC which performs. It's all about being wise with the choices you make.
It's all about the CPU, the SSD makes a massive difference as well, but there's no benefit in having a PCIe NVME drive over a SATA3 drive for example, although the PCIe drive can physically write to the disk 3-4 times faster than the SATA3 drive you don't see that in Inventor, the rate in which Inventor writes to the disk is bottlenecked by other factors. But with that said you'd still want to go for the fastest drive as other programs could benefit from the things that Inventor doesn't.
@Raider_71Strange indeed, it's not a one off either. I've formatted and rebuilt this PC several times now and it's been consistently like that across each rebuild. But then when I open up something else, an assembly for example, I don't see the frame rate differences across Win 7 & 10.
So here's the results of my budget build, giant slayer, not at all cheesy. Full spec and prices.
CPU: Intel Pentium Dual Core G3258 3.2GHz Socket 1150 3MB L3 Cache Retail Boxed Processor | £44.15 | $65 |
Mobo: Asus H81M-PLUS Socket 1150 DVI HDMI 8-Channel HD Audio mATX Motherboard | £38.32 | $55 |
Case: Thermaltake Core V21 Matx Mesh Stackable Case With 200MM Fan | £36.65 | $60 |
HDD: Crucial BX200 240GB 2.5 inch SSD | £47.49 | $65 |
PSU: Coolermaster GM-Series 550W Semi Modular 80+ Bronze Power Supply | £33.74 | $50 |
GPU: MSI Radeon R9 380 Gaming 2GB GDDR5 Dual-Link DVI-D HDMI DisplayPort PCI-E Graphics Card | £134.15 | $210 |
RAM: Crucial Sport BLS8G3D1609DS1S00CEU 8GB Ballistix 240-pin DIMM DDR3 PC3-12800 memory module | £23.32 | $35 |
Total System Cost = £360 exc VAT // or // $540 all in.
The winner here is the Pentium G3258. That CPU was built and sold by Intel on it's overclocking strength, you're actively encouraged to overclock this chip. As a result, people are reporting safe and stable overclocks at 4.7-4.8GHz. However the silicon lottery wasn't good to me, I couldn't hold it past 4.2GHz. If I had received a good chip, I think the score could have easily been over 10+. This is all done on the stock cooler and temps rarely went over 70c.
If I was buying for a business, I would never recommend this build however the purpose was to highlight the fact that if you pick the right spec, you don't need to spend a fortune. I see far too many people paying thousands for wrongly specified computers, thinking they're going to be adequate because there's a Xeon/Quadro/Precision/Z Workstation/Precision badge on the box. One poorly chosen component can handicap a system which costs thousands.
I'm chuffed to bits with the score. It was never going to top the tables, but looking back through the results, it's beaten the majority of computers excluding the Skylake (6XXX) and Devils Canyon (4790K) CPU builds. This system was a fresh build of Windows, no AV, no third party applications i.e. Office etc, does that make this a fair test? Who knows, but the results are the results.
Hope this helps, it was a fun experiment!
That's a quality build, it's entirely personal preference but coming from a 100% NVIDIA fan boy here and having never owned an AMD card in my life, I went with the R9 380 over the GTX 960 in my budget build and it came up trumps. They're both at the same price point but the R9 380 had more to offer on paper. But on paper it's all gaming focused stats, who knows how that translates here.
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