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.

[mechielvanvalen]

My colleagues did also a Benchmark with his PC:

[Rob67ert]

Look at the warm start from your PC and from your colleague. There is about 5 sec difference between them.
And also on disk performance there is 7 sec between them.
I think there is a lot of things wrong, as Neil Cross already mentioned.
On a CAD station you should use a SSD.

[mechielvanvalen]

there is alot wrong here.

We open our assembly's from a server. (Our biggest assembly has over the 100.000 parts this takes alot of time to open....) 

I had suggest by our IT to putt SSD cards in our stations, but they don't whan't it because SSD's have a shorter lifetime than a HDD.

We proposed to install Vault on our system for reducing our waiting time.

They don't wan't because they don't know the software and to instal the software:( 

[mechielvanvalen]

Neil,

Why is my GPU scoring low?

Because i have a slow CPU (Low Ghz)?

[Rob67ert]

What company are you working for?
They should fire the IT guys.

[Neil_Cross]

Assuming there isn't a unique weird use case going on with your local disk, I completely agree with Robert if that's really their reason for not using SSD's. There shouldn't be anything on the local disk which isn't backed up, and it's a moronic opinion for dozens more reasons which should be obvious to most people in IT.
Regarding the GPU score, I can't see the results as I'm using a mobile version at the moment but yes it probably is because of the CPU. I've banged this drum on every page in this thread and done many videos proving with evidence so I'll not repeat the details again, but the GPU is almost always bottlenecked by CPU in Inventor.

[mechielvanvalen]

my benchmark pc Home.

i made 2 benchmarks, i have a 24 inch 1080p monitor, and a 27 inch 4k monitor the difference are insane 

1080p monitor4k monitor

[Neil_Cross]

It's a little misleading because of the IPI score being affected so much by individual tests. All your other tests perform the same or better,but because just the graphics test is so different it weighs the final score back too much. That's something the test creator is working on for v2.0 of the test  

[mechielvanvalen]

Oke thanks!

What is the effect of the Displayport, i bought displayport 1.3/1.4 a couple of days ago and changed it after my to benchmarks with the 1080p and 4k monitor.

The different between the first and the second benchmark on my 4k monitor is also insane.

I can conclude that a good displayport also can make a big different?

4k 27" Displayport 1.44k 27" Displayport 1.21080p 24" HDMI

[jwitt1983]

Look at your pictures again... the tests aren't running at the same resolution. That is what is causing the difference.

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@mechielvanvalen wrote:

Oke thanks!

What is the effect of the Displayport, i bought displayport 1.3/1.4 a couple of days ago and changed it after my to benchmarks with the 1080p and 4k monitor.

The different between the first and the second benchmark on my 4k monitor is also insane.

I can conclude that a good displayport also can make a big different?

[LT.Rusty]

It's been a while since I've been able to sit at the desk for long enough to do any serious work with Inventor, but ... with a clean reinstall of Windows, Office and Product Design Suite, I've been getting some absolutely horrible performance.

Here's three test runs. First two are my current workstation. One at 1080p, the other at 4k. Hardware isn't the problem, that's for sure. This is all very good stuff. The speed shown for the CPU is a bit low, though: the XMP profile to get the full speed out of my RAM boosts the CPU multiplier by a bit, so it's running at a constant 3875 mHz. Third one is my old workstation. (Granted, the test is a couple years old, and was on Inventor 2016 rather than 2018, but still.)

It feels pretty responsive while it's running... but wow. That warm start time.

Current machine:

i7-6800k w/Corsair H110i water cooling (small OC to ~3.9 gHz)

Asus X99-E motherboard

32GB Adata DDR4-3000

EVGA GTX-1080ti SC2 Hybrid (slight factory overclock, water cooling)

System Disk: Samsung 850 Pro, 512 GB

Data and App disks: 3x Samsung 850 Evo, 500 GB. WD Black 1TB platter disk. External WD 3TB MyBook, WD 8TB EasyStore

Corsair RM-750i power supply

Old Machine:

i7-4770k, Corsair H100i water cooling (stock clocks)

Asus Z-87 Pro motherboard

32 GB Corsair Vengeance DDR3-1600

Sapphire Radeon R9-270X (4GB)

System Disk: Samsung 850 Evo, 500 GB

Data and Apps: Samsung 840 Pro (250), mixed WD Black platter drives

Corsair 1kw PSU, though I can't remember the model number

Man. I just can't get over how long it takes to load, and how marginal the difference is between the old and new system setups. This is a machine that can play Battlefront II in 4k at 60+ fps with no problems... yet it's this pathetic running Inventor. 😕  

[Neil_Cross]

Honestly everything looks in check there asides from the start time. The start up time doesn't contribute towards the test score though, I could be wrong but I'm 99% sure it's not taken into account. But there's definitely something causing a delay with it opening up, possible broken addin or AV? But a score of 9 is about what I would predict for something running under just under 4ghz. I don't think anyone has passed a score of 10 without being clocked at over 4ghz

[jwitt1983]

I'm running at 3.6ghz (7700 [non-k] no-oc) and avg about 10.4 on the test.

---

@Neil_Cross wrote:
... I don't think anyone has passed a score of 10 without being clocked at over 4ghz

---

[blair]

I managed a 11.18 with my machine that's now 2-years old. No overclocking. Just running the default-stock settings.

[Neil_Cross]

The 7700 non-k turbo boosts to 4.2ghz on a single core as stock

[Neil_Cross]

Same with the 6700k, without an OC it boosts from 4 to 4.2

[SMPConsulting]

So I just purchased a new computer with the following specification.

• i7 7770 Intel processor 3.6GHz – 4.2 GHz Turbo
• GB H110M M.2 Gigabyte mother board
• 2 x 8 GB DDR4 RAM
• 250 GB SSD 960 Evo Series Solid State Drive
• 700 W 80+ ATX Power Supply
• Win 10 Home 64 Bit Edition operating system

I've had to put my old graphics card in it which is a classic vintage NVIDIA Geforce GT 620 with a humungas  1Gb VRAM.

I feel like I've put diesel fuel into my Ferrari, however it's only until my NEW graphics card arrives, hopefully any day now, which is an AMD Radeon WX3100.

I purchased this card because @Neil_Cross gave it a fair wrap. I will post updated benchmark results when the new card gets here.

Below are my results with the old card, pretty crap huh, 

 

[Neil_Cross]

Yep the WX3100 is pretty solid, you'll not hit any bottlenecks with it in Inventor.  I think I posted a bench test with it, achieved the same results in this synthetic test as it did in my large assembly testing.  If you don't see a significant improvement, you should, but if you don't... post it here and I'll compare to my card.  I can put the WX3100 into my system again and re-run the test to compare.

[SMPConsulting]

Thanks @Neil_Cross, you are an absolute legend, I shall keep you updated.

[Anonymous]

@Anonymous are you sure that cpu and motherboard are compatible? An Intel 7 series processor should go in a 200 series chipset. Like a h250.
It is possible tot run that chip in that motherboard but you will need some bios trickery.
It's just not ideal