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... ๐
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. ๐
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.
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Hi Guys,
I've been asked to build a very fast inventor machine, the budget may vary between 5 and 10k, it just needs to be very fast overall.
The current specs of the (outdated) computers are:
intel xeon x5660 @ 2,8ghz (6cores)
24 GB RAM
Nvidea Quadro 4000
I would love some help in building de best machine for arround 5k, but if a 10k machine is still a bang for the buck, thats fine too.
Thanks in advance,
Niels
What currency is that? Are you looking to get a prebuilt workstation from Dell or HP or are you able to build something yourself from sourced components?
Hi Neil, thanks for replying, with 5 to 10k I meant 5000 to 10.000 dollars.
I want to build something myself.
Thanks in advance
That's an outrageous budget, at that price point you'll need to be very specific on which direction you want to go i.e. do you want a PC that just runs Inventor quite fast, or do you want a workhorse of a PC that'll beast out anything you throw at it. Even at that price there's no such thing as a PC which is best at everything though, so you'll need to know what you want from it.
https://pcpartpicker.com/list/mqcpQV
If you're spending that much money, obviously don't just buy the first thing you see, you'll need to think about it and buy carefully. I've put 2x 1080 in SLI in that build but if I had up to 10k I'd probably go for 2x Titans which I can't put in that list, they need to be bought direct from NVIDIA. Things like CPU coolers, storage, the case, that's up to you.
Again, at that price up to 10k, I'd consider how I would be using the PC and possibly consider a 7810 from Dell with dual Xeons again depending on what you're planning on doing with it.
Hello Neil
Why SLI, it was shown that neither Inventor nor Solidwork works with the SLI
Hi Neil,
Thank you very much for all your help.
The pc needs to be optimized for Inventor, thats the main focus.
A friend of mine asked for help in building a workstation for Inventor, but since I'm a Maya user, the specs we need are quite different.
I see you've put a 3.0ghz 10core in there, isnt Inventor supposed to have an as fast as possible single core? Since multicore processing isnt optimized in Inventor (for what I know).
The workstation needs to pull off insanely big scenes at Master Level of Detail.
Thanks again for you help and your time, I really appreciate it.
Niels
Good question. Inventor will still use 1 of the cards, the other will do nothing whilst using Inventor. But if you have 10k to spend, why not put in something like two Titans, it's not like the cash can be better spent somewhere else in the system... it's already the best that money can buy.
Regarding the CPU, at 5-10k you have your pick of anything on the market. The 6700K is brilliant, better than most people have and is affordable. But if money is no object, I'd still go for the best CPU on the market which is currently the 6950X and it can be overclocked to well over 4GHz. I'll not bog down the thread with details and stats so in a nutshell, if you're building a PC to win at this benchmark test then you'd go for a 6700K, if money is no object and you want the best real world performance with massive assemblies, I'd go for a 6950X or even the equivalent Xeon and get ECC RAM for that extra peace of mind.
If you're not hell bent on spending 5-10k then the 6700K is perfect.
If your friend wants a proper workstation with proper support though, buy a prebuilt Dell or HP with a Xeon, ECC RAM and a Quadro in.
To piggey back off this idea
Probably about 80% of inventors features are based on single core performance yes, but 20% utilize multi threaded processes, like stress analysis, renderings and flow tests (if any of those are things your client will be doing while in inventor)
Since you have the budget I would concur that the 6950X is the obvious CPU choice, as you can get the core speed close to the 6700K and then cut multi threaded processes time by more than half.
I think with that budget I would be waiting for the 7700K to be released in January. The early benchmarks show excellent single core performance. Initial reports indicate it may also have good headroom for overclocking and with a good budget you can get some decent cooling in there.
I wouldn't personally waste the money on having 2 graphics cards even if you have the budget, for Inventor, it is a waste. You will see no benefit. Put the rest of the money towards another PC for a colleague so someone else can also join you in the heavy lifting league.
The 7700K is essentially a slightly better tuned 6700K and in early tests have shown marginal improvements over its predecessor. It continues the quad core trend as well, so unless he is able to hit the OC's that I've seen done (one chip got to 5GHz at 98ยบC) there will not be much tangible benefit in real world applications just because he has a huge budget.
If he should wait for anything, it would be the RYZEN AMD CPU coming out in January. We still dont know what theyre entirely unveiling, and there might be good eight core options there (their flagship is rumored an eight core at $500)
If your main goal is to rotate a huge assembly on the screen with the best possible frame rate, then what you need is the best possible single threaded performance.
At the moment that would be the 6700K with the highest OC possible on the first core. I've been experimenting with core clocks with this benchmark and have noticed that the frame rate scales linearly with the clock frequency of the processor.
If you can wait until JAN 5, you should be able to get the 7700K, which should OC a little bit better and also have a slight clock for clock performance advantage over the 6700K.
Getting the better more expensive 6950X if max. frame rate is the target is just not very recommended due to its lower single threaded performance. Sure you'll be able to OC it to close to the same clocks on one core, but the chip is also based on the older Broadwell core which is a bit slower clock for clock than Skylake and upcoming Kaby-Lake.
Getting a Dell with dual Xeons is going to give you the worst frame rate in this case. You could get a 2x14core or maybe a 2x18core beast (I see there's even a 24 core Xeon E7 available on ark.intel.com if you got the dough), but be limited to around 3GHz max turbo on one core with no OC options whatsoever, so framerate would scale accordingly...
For GPU, one GTX1080 or one RX480 should be more than enough, you can always get another one if Autodesk all of the sudden decides to support SLI/CF. I didn't get much of an improvement in the framerate when testing a single RX470 vs RX480 vs GTX 1070 vs GTX 1080 on this benchmark in Inventor 2017. Testing crossfire with two older radeons (280X) actually brought my frame rate down by a few fps, strangely though my modelling time and view creation times and total score improved... Didn't run the test enough times with this CF vs non CF configuration to be able to draw any conclusions though.
Oh, almost forgot about Ryzen.. If the single threaded performance is there, It will be AthlonXP vs P4 all over again and then Ryzen will be the chip to get for all Inventor machines.
No reliable benchmarks seem to exist yet, so at this point we'll just have to wait and see (and hope). There should be some more info and hopefully some benchmarks at the time of the release of Kaby Lake in January.
Let's just hope Ryzen is even remotely good so that Intel needs to do something about their ridiculous pricing of their bigger chips.
I cant see the point using SLI/CF with Inventor, even if Autodesk did support it. Inventor does not push the graphics card and the CPU holds it back from being able to do so. Going to SLI/CF may add more power, but you just end up with more power you are unable to use. The CPU just cant keep up.
Autodesk really need to spend some time optimising the application to require less CPU usage to perform the same functions, make use of multithreading some more or somehow pass some of the calcs off to the graphics card.
I'm not sure if frame rates are the target of this build, I had interpreted the intended use as being general large assembly management rather than just have smooth navigation. But that's still open to interpretation I guess.
I still stand by the 6950X or a Xeon build being the best choice here. The 6700K and all logic coming out of this benchmark test is based on a single part light weight not very real world accurate, when you've got potentially 10,000 parts to handle (OP said massive scenes), having more CPU cache, more bandwidth, more cores, more memory channels, ECC RAM etc, in my view that's a different story to spinning around a single part in a bench test.
I overclocked a 2C G3258 to 4.3GHz and pulled massive frame rates in Inventor, but nobody should be putting one of those into a build which will see large assemblies.
Personally, and it's just me, if I was building myself a PC which I knew would be handling massive datasets, I'd forget all about bench tests and go for something reliable and powerful, bearing in mind that the devs are adding more multi-core support as each release comes.
That indeed is the main goal. Thanks for all the information guys, you really gave me a clearer view on the whole topic, I'll be waiting for the 7700K and try that out. One more thing, HP and Autodesk always recommend quadro GPU's for inventor workstations, however I see a lot of people talking about better performance with a GTX 980 or 1080, whats with that?
Absolutely nothing learned from this benchmark test program, or discussed in this thread, should be used in the same breath as discussing the build requirements for a PC to handle large assemblies.
I see, so with a target of handling a scene with 50.000 parts (I know its crazy but lets assume it for now). What would be the best choice?
I'm not trying to disregard what anyone else is saying, all I'm saying is this test is based on testing Inventor with a single part, it's a quick and dirty test to compare one PC with another to find a bad apple.
At the 50k part level, this test doesn't mean anything.
Can you explain what will happen to these assemblies? What kind of designs are they? Are all the parts native Inventor models? Once someone has opened the assembly, what happens next.
Don't worry, I understand what you mean. And I appreciate your time in helping me out. ๐
Its like a huge factory filled with recycling-machines. The main focus is to be able to navigate through these scenes while keeping a nice framerate to work with. No need for raytracing or anything.
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