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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.
Well, this has been interesting.
I've got 3 Inventor systems, and I've played around with some hardware configurations for them, settings, etc. The results have been very illuminating. Numbers below are what I got from the spreadsheet output from Inventor Bench on all 3 systems.
System 1: Toshiba Satellite P755-S5269. i7-2630QM / GT540M / 8GB RAM / Samsung 840 250 GB(original, not evo) / 750 GB platter drive instead of DVD burner. Updated to Windows 10 Home, but last clean install was 2012 when I got the SSD. Predictably, this isn't a rocketship compared to my home office desktop, but Inventor is perfectly usable, particularly with smaller models and assemblies and there were a few major surprises with it. This is what runs my CNC router at home with Mach3, and I do a fair amount of Inventor work on it in the garage, particularly generating and tweaking toolpaths with HSM.
System 2: Home Office Desktop. i7-4770k / Radeon R9-270X / 16GB / Samsung 850 EVO 500GB / Samsung 840 250 GB (not evo) / misc platter drives / ASUS Z87-Pro motherboard / 2 monitors at 1080P, 1 at 1600x1200. Windows 10 Home, upgraded. The numbers shown here are from a test using the 840 as my system drive, with 66.9 GB free space remaining. Once the test was concluded, I used the Samsung drive migration software to clone that drive over to my new 500 GB 850 EVO, and re-ran the test. Unfortunately for some reason I didn't save the data, but I was surprised to see that the numbers were in fact just a hair lower on the brand new drive with 300+ GB of free space. I'll be re-running this test over the weekend, possibly in both drive configurations, with the addition of another 16 GB of RAM.
System 3: Day Job Workstation. HP Z220 workstation. Xeon E3-1240v2. AMD FirePro V3900. 1TB platter drive. Factory memory configuration was 2 sticks of 2GB each, 1 of 4GB. I ran the test both with those 8 GB and again with the 4GB removed and replaced with 2x8 of DDR3-1600. This is running Windows 10 Pro, upgraded from Win 7 Pro. This test had some pretty significant surprises, and made me re-evaluate some of the results from my other systems as well.
So. What were the surprises?
- I was surprised to find that my office workstation performed significantly better in almost everything except HD access time with only 8GB instead of 20. That really blew my mind. The difference is marginal, but it's still a difference.
- Graphics has a huge weight on how Inventor Bench calculates your Inventor Performance Index. If you compare the performance between my laptop and my office workstation, the laptop gets destroyed in every single category ... except for total graphics time. The margins aren't even close. Most of the time it's a difference of 50% or more ... but the IPI score for the laptop is actually higher than the score for the workstation: 3.89 vs 3.79/3.75.
- Speaking of graphics, good god - how does an entry level laptop graphics card smash a workstation card that badly, performance-wise? I'd expected the R9-270X to beat up on the FireGL V3900 pretty solidly, but I did NOT expect the laptop to win the same matchup.
- Model Save Time / Total HDD time was far worse than I'd expected on the two SSDs, and far better than I'd expected on the platter drive in my workstation. It's nothing special, just a 7200 RPM WD Blue 1TB. I haven't defragged it in, I dunno, probably a year or more now. Somehow it beat the SSD in my home desktop by well over a second, and it came in at almost HALF the time of the SSD in my laptop. (Which, BTW, isn't even close to being full.)
I'm looking forward to the results of the next batch of testing over the weekend. We'll see what the differences - if any - wind up being.
Rusty
I think this thread needs a 'conclusions' video or article, a single piece of reference material to conclude everything that's been learnt over the few hundreds of posts here. @LT.Rusty Basically a lot of what you're wondering has been explained over the course of this thread but nobody can be expected to read up on that amount of posts.
RAM doesn't matter. 4GB or 128GB, 1600MHz or 2600MHz, if what you're working on isn't consuming 100% of system RAM then putting more RAM in doesn't make anything go quicker, that counts for literally anything you do on a PC. More RAM just gives you more scope to work on bigger datasets and this bench test doesn't consume much RAM at all, likely less than 500MB RAM for Inventor.exe.
Also the save time of Inventor doesn't scale with SSD speed. I've tested a workstation which had one of the fastest PCIe M.2 NVMe drives you can buy today (within reason) and the save time for that drive was slower than my home PC here which has a bog standard SATA3 SSD. If you think about it, a bog standard SSD can write to the disk at 500MB per second. The file being saved in the bench test is only around 20-30MB in size, but the fastest ever save time we've seen is 3 seconds. That's because saving a file isn't just a file copy, Inventor has to calculate and compile all kinds of things before it actually physically writes the changes to the file on disk. What is in control of how fast that happens is your CPU, and to some extent your RAM and various other things but the machines with the fastest save times are generally the PCs with the most efficient and fastest CPUs.
I could waffle on about this for years because I'm a nerd and love this stuff, but @LT.Rusty the scores look about right to me. The FirePro V3900 is a poor card by todays standards, 1GB of video RAM isn't enough for todays applications and it's quite a low end card now. There could be other factors at play but if you submit any other scores, please submit a screen shot of the results page rather than a spreadsheet as that shows other info which is helpful for comparing against others and troubleshooting.
I wouldnt mind a conclusion post. I dont have a measure to how well a IPI of 5,02 stacks up to a 6.0, or a 10.0
Granted, my system is close to four years old at this point, and Inventor is running on the HDD not the SSD due to space issues (my company decided agianst replacing the SSD and just getting an aditonal HDD instead 
) I have a 4790K and a GTX970 at home which I would love to test but I dont have Inventor on that computer sadly.
Side note, did anyone have any of the enthusiast CPUs from X99 chipset platform like the 5930k? I didnt go through all 59 pages to see, I just dont have the time.
A conclusion post here wouldn't do any good, it'll just get lost behind more additional future posts, I'll think about doing a video on my channel.
The score of 5.02 is quite poor, it's workable but it's not brilliant in comparison to other builds. I tested my old laptop which wasn't even a professional unit, it was a mid range Dell Inspiron and that scored 6+ so a 5.0 will get you by but it isn't going to power through anything in a hurry.
Your 4790K and GTX970 is exactly what I've got here and scored 12.1 I think, only beaten by the lads with the Skylakes at 12.2 and beyond. Nobody has hit 13 yet. For the 4790K to get above 10.5 it needed an overclock and a few tweaks, but apparently the Skylake 6700K was a winner right out the box.
We did have a couple of people with a 5960X get some solid scores early on, this is one from very early before Pieter implemented the IPI rating, this was No.1 for a little while and you can compare the individual test results with yours I guess:
I didn't catch a word of that sorry. Can you please upload the image to the thread rather than link to it, if you use the rich text editor there's an insert image button which lets you embed the image into the post. I personally don't trust file hosting sites that I haven't heard of and I haven't heard of zupimages.
sorry
I7 990x @ stock
I7 990x @ 4,6Ghz
It shows that the most important is the CPU is not the GPU, as you said
I'm not sure if it's me, but Inventor 2017 seems to run better than its predecessor. I mean yes, my "workstation" still gets beaten out by the above glorified iPad, but I did notice a performance boost when I first opened the program. So there's that.
I didn't notice anything worth mentioning when I tested 2017, it was up, but within the usual fluctuations of any repeat tests done on 2016 so I didn't think anything of it.
Here are the results from my new system.
Xi® Workstation
Intel® Core™ i7-6700K 4.0/4.2GHz
32GB DDR4 @ 2666MHz
NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 970 4GB
512GB Solid State Drive Samsung® MZHPV512HDGL
DVD+RW/DL/+R-R/CD-RW
ASUS® Z170M-PLUS Intel® Z170 Chipset-Micro ATX
850W Rosewill® Glacier Power Supply
MTower™ Silent CM-352M
So it's been a while, and I've since installed 2017. Got a pretty decent score since my last...
Sorry to bump an old thread, but it's been a few weeks since I've been around...
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