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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.
Haha yea I intentionally made it ridiculous so it didn't look like I was hoping to pass it off as real, or is it, THE HIVE MIND IS REAL, BELIEVE IN THE HIVE MIND 
I'm still here with my 4790K resisting the pull of Broadwell-E and the X99 benefits, will definitely be jumping to Kaby Lake though.
Hey guys, i did the step from windows 7 to windows 10, from inventor 14 to 17 and from the old domain to the new one.
Here is the comparison. 50% more performance, but still not what i expected.
First pic is the old software/windows/domain
Way back in this thread I posted a score of 12+ on a i7-4790K, same 1600MHz DDR3 RAM, very similar cheap SATA3 SSD. I've since put in a Samsung SM961 512gb drive and it made exactly diddly squat difference to this test. I also upgraded from a 970 to a 1070 and it made exactly no difference as well.
@Anonymous that GPU is pretty bad like. Forget about the test, the 1GB of VRAM in that card just isn't going to cut it on Windows 10 and Inv2017. If you can, drop around $130-150 on a GTX1050Ti or 1060 and you'll notice a world of difference in performance and reliability. A struggling Quadro will be much more unstable than a new modern unstressed GeForce with Inventor.
@Mirko_Opitz wrote:
Is that any good?
Yep that's pretty good for a pre-built workstation. I might have expected slightly better scores from that CPU in some areas but that could be background software/processes/services holding things up a little, but 8+ is good.
Personally (and purely personal opinion) I don't take benchmarks for Inventor seriously from somewhere like Tom's Hardware, unless there's someone behind that work with some credibility and significant experience with this software, it's too specialised and isn't comparable to gaming benchmarks, so I wouldn't recognise the results as being definitive and legit as I wouldn't know for sure that it was done in the right way with consistent and reliable data sets.
But yea I've got a fair bit of experience and history with AMD. Before I mention more though, FYI Inventor doesn't support dual or SLI cards the same way in that it doesn't support dual Xeons. So for your dual Quadro system, one of those cards is doing literally nothing for Inventor, which is why you see zero scaling with performance on that system. I sincerely hope you weren't sold the system on the advice that the two cards would benefit Inventor, because they most certainly do not.
Comparing the two identical systems, 1 point can be within normal variance and likely isn't anything to do with the GPU. You could lose a point purely through a keen background process existing on one system but not another, taking minimal CPU resource causing the tests to run ever so slightly slower, I think in real terms you're not likely to notice any real world differences between 2 systems with a 1 point variance. Can you do a 5 or 10 cycle test on both systems and post the results here?
Regarding AMD though, they've had a choppy history with Autodesk, at one point in the past (a long time ago) Showcase just didn't run at all on AMD cards and Inventor had all sorts of graphical issues. AMD also never had as good of a driver release schedule as NVIDIA, the NVIDIA team release drivers on a regular basis whereas AMD could go several months sometimes longer without any software optimised drivers.
Regarding the actual hardware, AMD are widely considered to be second best and are openly happy to admit they cannot compete with NVIDIA at the top end of the market. For example with this generation of gaming cards, AMD have absolutely nothing to compete with even the GTX1070 which is the current third tier card from NVIDIA after the Titan X and GTX1080. So AMD with their current generation of cards are way behind NVIDIA.
It's kind of a different story for 3D CAD though. I personally own a FirePro W9100 and a Radeon RX 380 from AMD, and from NVIDIA a GTX1070, GTX970, Quadro M4000 and a Quadro 2000. In terms of real world performance, they're all pretty much identical under light load except for the Quadro 2000 which is too old to cope. On the bench test, again all the cards bar the Quadro 2000 push out the same performance. Variations will begin to occur when the system hits VRAM limits on each card, the W9100 has 16GB of VRAM whereas the RX 380 has 2GB and the GTX970 has 3.5-4GB. Another thing I noted with AMD is that their FirePro cards run extremely hot, it didn't take much for the W9100 to hit 92 degrees causing the awful reference blower fan to scream like a jet engine, causing some thermal throttling on the core clock.
Soz for the long reply, the short answer is that as of today I would choose NVIDIA over AMD. However AMD are soon going to be releasing their Radeon Pro cards which replace and supersede FirePro, so it remains to be seen what they'll be like with respect to actual performance and driver support for Autodesk software.
How are these results for an ASUS ROG GL552VW-DH74? I thought they weren't too bad for a $1000 gaming laptop.
I've got a i7 6700HQ @2.6 GHz w/turbo boost and a GeForce 960m as well as 16GB RAM.
I really like the case ....
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Mike Davis
Yea that's a nice looking case.
Perfectly good build, should be more than adequate however if it was my money I'd be choosing a few different parts.
I'd drop a few more $$ for the 6700K instead of the 6700, just in case you want to overclock in the future which is perfectly safe to do within reasonable limits.
You're buying two identical SSDs, are you thinking about putting them in RAID? Because that mobo doesn't have RAID support.
All the SSDs are SATA, if you're not going for a PCIe SSD boot drive (4x faster than a SATA SSD) I'd look to swap out that primary 128GB drive with a larger 512GB 2.5" SATA SSD rather than a M.2 SATA SSD.
If you shop around you can get a 6GB GTX 1060 for the price of that 4GB 1050Ti, there's not too much in it but the 1060 is a slightly better card.
There's not too much info on that fanless cooler so it'll be interesting to see how that performs and looks in a build, I'll await that as my H100i sounds like a space shuttle launch at full tilt.
In other news, someone brought this to my attention today, an official Autodesk video which I'd never seen before:
Has anyone else seen this? Some of the advice in here is questionable at best and I felt a little awkward watching it.
There's a lot of digression in there, but for example at 14:50 the guy goes on to say that the best recommended CPU setup for Inventor is dual Xeons... because... because it allows for the rest of your applications to have resource in addition to Inventor...?!
Dual Xeons are absolutely not a good idea for an Inventor workstation, massive waste of a LOT of money. Your average user does not do enough at any one time to require more than 6 cores and 12 threads on one Xeon never mind needing two Xeons.
The rest of the video feels like it's stuck in the past, maybe would have been relevant back in 2005 when you might have seen a benefit from disabling background pictures/Windows themes and shutting off Windows services, it feels like the guy is basing this info on still working with Pentium 4's and 512MB RAM with a GPU from 2005, but you just don't need to do that any more, modern hardware has vastly outpaced the development of Inventor, a large amount of the advice in that video is probably more potentially damaging to the functionality of your PC than any good at all.
I'd be curious to speak to this guy to ask where the metrics are for a lot of these recommendations, i.e what benchmarked performance gain did they see on a modern workstation after (his recommendation) changing the Inventor background from a gradient to a single colour!!??
Ok fair enough, just curious. Makes sense if the TDP is that much lower, it'll give the cooler less work to do.
Just wondering, apologies if you know this, but do you know that M.2 just refers to the form factor/shape/size of the SSD? That ADATA M.2 drive will be exactly the same speed as the other drives as it's SATA based just like the other drives are.
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with the M.2 drive you've picked, it's perfectly fine. I just thought you might have chosen the 128GB option thinking that it was a super fast drive which you'll only put essential programs on, when in fact it's no faster than the other drives you will have in the PC.
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