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.

[mmaes]

I built this PC right when the 7700K came out.  Just ran the test and still performing well for a 50 hour a week computer.  Been overclocked to 5.1ghz since day one (water cooled)

[Anonymous]

Could you please tell me around what score is ideal for handling inventor? I mean doing all the things?

I am new to inventor and I got an IPI score of 8.16 in my 15 inch macbook pro with radeon 455

Could anyone please enlighten me on this issue?

I still have time to return my macbook so Im weighing my options

[Neil_Cross]

Apple didn't have 3D CAD in mind when they labelled the Macbook as "pro".

But don't worry, the IPI doesn't refer to the systems ability to handle or not handle Inventor, currently it's just a performance metric to compare against other systems at running very light weight compute tasks.  But 8+ is absolutely fine, definitely not bad at all. 

[Anonymous]

Gotcha, yea I'll leave it alone since it's a company workstation 😉 Also the CPU cooler couldn't handle much more heat in the Node 202 mITX case it's in anyways. It's already much faster than anything else we've had.

[Neil_Cross]

I've just built a show PC for Youtube using the Fractal Design Node 202, the video isn't up yet but it was the worst possible case I could have used.  I used a Ryzen7 1700X at stock under a Cryorig C7 cooler, and Inventor was significantly slower in the Node 202 than it was when I used the same components in a different & bigger case.  Like you say it was purely due to heat.  I could see the CPU underclocking itself to stay at a reasonable temperature.

That was an 8 core Ryzen though, the 7700K might handle the thermals better, not sure.

[autodeskplusplanung]

Hi, I'm a pretty fresh user of inventor, currently 2017. At the moment, I'm worried about the performence. I'm not willing to drink as much coffee as I have time because of waiting for inventor. So I run the Inventor Bench and it seems, that I have probably the slowest pc in this forum. Or do I missinterpret the result?

unfortunatly, exept that I have a slow engine, I'm not sure what to do about. Other then buy a new one. Are there any sugestion?

kind regards

Daniel

[Neil_Cross]

There's a fault somewhere in your system for sure, your computer isn't that bad.  By the looks of it something is either limiting or straining the CPU, the modeling test shouldn't ever go up to anywhere near 30 seconds.  It's going to be pretty impossible to find out what the problem is over a forum so if you have a local IT team or anyone you know who can help, I'd get your PC cleaned up, look at the background processes, look to see what could be bogging it down because your hardware isn't that bad... I'd be expecting something around a 8-9 from that system.

[blair]

I have the same CPU in my home machine but have considerable better test numbers. I've never seen a machine with 4Gb and 2Gb memory sticks. I'm pretty sure that you must have the same sticks in each slot. This could be part of your issue. I would look at which programs are running in the background as well. I've included my test results with the same CPU.

[blair]

I would check the manufacture on the memory configuration. Your start time is good, chances are that your system only thinks it has 4Gb of memory. I'd try pulling out the 2Gb sticks and only running with the 2 x 4Gb sticks and follow the Mfg on which slots should be used.

[Anonymous]

[autodeskplusplanung]

Good morning

I tried to tweak my machine last night. It is a HP Z420. With an SSD 1TB HD. Speed there seems fine approx. 250MB/s. I tried to rearange my 44GB RAM. 

The strange thing about that is, if I arange them like HP suggest them, I get this 4gb 2gb 4gb 2gb. Now I arange all the 8gb under the fan (for cooling reason) because I guessed that the first for slots are under the cooler. Now now it seems they are slot 5-8. I will try to take out alll the 2gb and 4gb and see what happens.

Any suggestions about adjustments I can make on Inventor to run it smoother?

kind regards

Daniel

[autodeskplusplanung]

My system thinks it has 44gb. I run the diagnose tool mdsched. Nothing false was found. I placed the ram sticks as stated on the instruction of HP. The order of HP seems not to be the same as the motherboard reads them. If I place them like HP I get this 4gb 2gb 4gb 2gb. Next try will be all small ones out and only with 8gb. Will see what happens.

[autodeskplusplanung]

It's getting worse. I changed the System to 4 blocks of 8gb RAM. System gets them. All fine. Bench Test shows all 4 blocks of RAM. But Index is even worse. Enough playing around, I have work to do.

probably the graphic card?

[Neil_Cross]

Going from 2.61 to 2.15 is well within reasonable variance for this test, it can often change between tests by up to a full point even when you haven't changed any hardware.

It didn't do any harm to try but having different sized RAM sticks doesn't cause a big issue, usually if there's a RAM problem i.e. mixing DDR3 and DDR4 the system will just fail to post or boot.

My hunch is that you've got a rogue background application or process which is killing the PC, not sure if you're capable of doing it but a system rebuild could be the quickest way to sort it.  Spend half a day reinstalling Windows and all your programs can be a lot quicker than weeks of suffering with that performance and frustration trying to find the cause.  Not all people like doing that though, but that's what I would do.  I completely wipe and rebuild my PC at least once a year, keeps it pin sharp.

[autodeskplusplanung]

I will take your advise and start from scratch. But still, if I leave the taskmanager open while doing inventor, I'm not using more the 7gb RAM and the CPU is runs around by max 20%. So for me it is still strange. But well as I said, I have work to do....

[Anonymous]

@Neil_Cross, @blair

Is it possible that the RAM speed is a factor (in addition to CPU leeching background process) for @autodeskplusplanung?  Ignoring the GPU, which we know does not affect Inventor performance (thanks Neil!), that is the only difference I noticed between @blair and his computer, with respect to the modeling part of the bench test.  

I have not come across any experimentation with RAM speed that relates to 3D modeling so i am curious what effect it has on the software performance.

[Neil_Cross]

@Anonymous Not a problem 

I've done limited testing on RAM speeds as you're always limited to the frequency range of the generation of RAM supported by the CPU.  You can't use DDR3 and then just whack in DDR4 and crank the frequency up higher, you'll need to replace the mobo, CPU etc which invalidates any variance you see in the results.  I've done some basic testing within varying frequencies on DDR3 but there was hardly any noticeable difference until I went below 1000MHz which isn't something anyone would run DDR3 at anyway.  But I've done a CPU clock frequency test so I guess it makes sense to do the same again with varying RAM frequencies, will put that on the to-do list!

[Anonymous]

3 different computers at work.

 

[Anonymous]

Looks like your graphic card is running slow.  Check your graphic settings.  Set it to performance in inventor and see if benchmark improve.

Also check if you got latest video driver from nVidia.

The 2.5k monitor does increase work load on the video card.

[Anonymous]

The main problem I have with my macbook pro is thermal throttling,like the throttling is really bad. 

Even when I try to play FIFA 17 via Bootcamp it throttles to the point where it doesn't even move. 

I checked the thermals it was peaking around 80-90 or on the 70's.

Any tips to reduce these throttling issues?

My macbook is the 2016 model,Core i7,16 gigs,AMD radeon pro 455 with 2gigs of Vram