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.

[Neil_Cross]

@brotherkennyh

Haha yea, this is a snip from a Skype convo I had with a user only on Tuesday this week...

He's got a Quadro M4000 and a certified driver in a Dell Precision that I spec'd, so I can be comfortably cocky with people when this happens...! 

I can bang on at people all day about remembering to save, but y'know, we've all done it, you get in the zone and before you know it a few hours have passed and hitting save just doesn't cross your mind... even those pop up balloons can go unnoticed. 

[tom_vierling]

Been there, done that! Four hours of work down the drain I had to later replicate. I do partially wish there were small autosaves like there is in AutoCAD, so that there's a chance your work isnt completely loss, but eh, thats a discussion for a different thread.

[brotherkennyh]

Lol, I have exactly the same conversation all the time.
That save reminder was a big waste of developer time.

[arkelec]

Cheers peopes.

Here's what I've gone with:

ASUS PRIME Intel Z370-A

i8700K

4 x 16GB  DDR4 3200 RAM

PNY NVIDIA Quadro P4000

Samsung 960 Pro M.2 1TB (OS)
Samsung 960 Pro M.2 2TB (DATA)

I have spent 2 weeks fastidiously checking specs & compatibility for a range of builds before arriving at the above. Hopefully everything will go together nicely.  Will post up a benchmark report once completed.

P.S: I'm now done with RAID.

[Neil_Cross]

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@arkelec wrote:

Cheers peopes.

Here's what I've gone with:

ASUS PRIME Intel Z370-A

i8700K

4 x 16GB  DDR4 3200 RAM

PNY NVIDIA Quadro P4000

Samsung 960 Pro M.2 1TB (OS)
Samsung 960 Pro M.2 2TB (DATA)

I have spent 2 weeks fastidiously checking specs & compatibility for a range of builds before arriving at the above. Hopefully everything will go together nicely.  Will post up a benchmark report once completed.

P.S: I'm now done with RAID.

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That's possibly the most perfectly specced build for Inventor that you could have put together today.  You did very well there.

Don't be too disheartened if the benchmark score isn't top of the charts though, the absolute highest scores were cheesed by high overclocks.  This build will be better than anything that's gone before it for the wider bigger picture.

[arkelec]

Cheers Neil.

I'm not too fussed about the benchmark result.  When I build my last WS (which went bang 2 weeks ago), it was quick but the used of an SSD drive massively improved it.

That was in 2013 & things have move on as a fair pace since then. The old WS performed well, was in use almost 365 days per year & often running 3 Autodesk programmes simultaneously as well as others (3D lighting design etc).

I must confess, I'm a little excited now to see how this new one will perform. 

Have you got any views on data backup?  I used to run WHS which would perform a nice incremental backup to an HDD daily (which could be read in a hot-swap bay or caddy).  Can't seem to find anything equivalent though.

[Neil_Cross]

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@arkelec wrote:

Have you got any views on data backup?  I used to run WHS which would perform a nice incremental backup to an HDD daily (which could be read in a hot-swap bay or caddy).  Can't seem to find anything equivalent though.

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Nah backup isn't really something that I've got a lot of time invested into.  I don't keep anything valuable on my actual computers, I move around too much for anything to be only available on 1 computer.  So all my essential data & work is on an external 500GB Samsung T3 SSD which I manually clone as a backup, and everything else is in a Dropbox account which is permanently backed up to the cloud and accessible anywhere.  Basically my computers could all blow up at any time and I wouldn't lose any data.

I'm definitely not an expert on backups but I would imagine the millions of backup solutions will utilise NAS boxes now and that kind of thing.

[pball]

Just posting some updated and new scores.

Work PC I posted a while ago

i7-7700k GTX 1060 (12.54 score)

Personal PC

Older scores at stock and overclocked

New score.   The improvement seems to be from setting the windows power plan to keep the cpu at 100%.

                    Only affects this cpu as my work pc and laptop don't have this issue.

New XPS 15 Laptop

The laptop is personal but I expect I'll do some work on it eventually so I'm glad it does that good.

[arkelec]

Update:

The workstation is built.  It all went relatively smoothly except the cooling expansion.

It's air cooled so wanted a couple of extra fans.  Here's some free tips for ASUS - if you're going to suggest a solution to a problem on your product website, your product literature & also inside the BIOS GUI, make sure it's compatible & ACTUALLY EXISTS!  Also, make sure that the downloadable 3D part file for the M.2 fan bracket isn't two separate files which don't have any obvious use.  Finally, don't let people (or automatons) respond to technical queries with "look on our website" if the information is rubbish or wrong.

As for the backup, I resurrected an old Intel 5520SC WS onto which I loaded a trial (6 months) of WSE 2016.  Got a few mods to make to get some Coolermaster fans on the CPU's (the stock Intel ones are like an air-raid siren). The server build went relatively well though considering I haven't touched one for 5 years.

Will post some numbers once things have settled down.

Happy days 🙂

[Anonymous]

Quadro P600 benchmark. Not bad 

[tom_vierling]

Finally updated from the E5-1607v0 to the 7700k. Doubled the score (5.02 to 10.49 11.25), though as far as 7700K's go it seems low. It's running stock, so that might be partially why (made sure nothing was running in the background)

*Update* re ran the test with the 3 cycle and got the updated score. Neat!

Graphics window doesnt affect the score correct?

[Anonymous]

Hand here is the apparently first AMD Ryzen result as far as I can see.

Inventor 2018 was running from the HDD, not the SSD (as a remark)

System is a AMD Ryzen 7 1700 in a mITX Box Node304 on a Fatal1ty X370 Gaming-ITX/ac paired with a Radeon 470 4gb and 16gb of DDR4 RAM.

Best!

Sven

[Neil_Cross]

I think I posted a 1700X result a while back but it'll be lost in the backlog of this thread.

I'll post an updated score from my new system soon, 8700K

[SharkDesign]

This tool is awesome! However, my colleague has a way better computer than me, except his score is 5 and mine is 9. 

We have the same graphics card, SSD.

He has twice as much ram.

My clock speed is 1ghz faster, but he has an 8 core CPU whilst mine is only 4. 

Any ideas as to why his could be doing so poorly?

Is it due to hyperthreading/multi cores not being utilised well by Inventor?

[jwitt1983]

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@SharkDesign wrote:
....

Is it due to hyperthreading/multi cores not being utilised well by Inventor?

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Nail on the head.

[SharkDesign]

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@jwitt1983 wrote:

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Nail on the head.

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Wow, could have saved £500 on that purchase!

[Neil_Cross]

The brand new 8700K with no overclock and no hacks, minus 8GB of RAM because long story.  Avoid the UK store called CCL Online, long story.

[arkelec]

Interesting comments Neil.

I used CCL for one item via Amazon but wasn't impressed with their "in stock" status which meant a 3-day turn around as "in stock" reflected their supplier.

I had to pay circa £100 premium to get the CPU early.  Scan had a massive order outstanding with a long backlog of customer orders.

I got most of the rest of the kit from them though.

Amazon stiffed me on the SSD's - "suddenly went out of stock a day after I ordered. 

I cancelled one & sourced from Scan.

What motherboard did you choose?

[Neil_Cross]

Considering the order was £1100, what they sent me was deplorable.  The CPU box was battered and the RAM was a previously purchased kit which was RMA'd as faulty, then simply restocked and resold to me still faulty... hence why I'm missing an 8GB stick.  It's the second time I've bought from them and both times what I received looked like it had been dragged along the road on a rope from the shop to my door.  It's not even the carriers fault, it was delivered in the same van as a Scan order I'd placed which turned up pristine.

I went with the Asrock Taichi Z370 board, G.Skill Trident 3000MHz RAM and re-used the rest from my existing build... 1080Ti, Samsung SM961 512GB NVMe M.2 and a Kraken X62 AIO cooler.  Oh and an obscene amount of money on those fans which are ludicrously good looking in person, those are Corsair LL 140mm RGB with the Node Pro controller.

[tom_vierling]

A moment of silence for our fallen brother, for he has fallen for the Evolv ATXs' charm. 

As great as that case looks, it's almost unusable in terms of airflow. There are aftermarket solutions like spacers fro the front panel and even completly custom front and top panels that have vents, but IMO if you're spending $180 USD on a case, you shouldn't need to spend $50 to fix an issue with the case.

Also, those LL fans.... Man are they great, but boy are they expensive... I'll stick with something like Noctua and just use RGB strips