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.

[SMPConsulting]

@Anonymous I wasn't aware of that, when I was designing my system I asked the computer shop, and they said that the board would still run the i7 series but it didn't have all the functionality of the higher end boards such as ability to take extra GPU and RAM slots.

So what is the main performance limitation and how can I do this trickery you speak of. Any feedback would be gratefully appreciated.

[Anonymous]

@Anonymous thé performance limitations van be because of thé H series chipset, for example only overclocking for z series and there are a few other minor differences between H B and Z, but nothing major.

To run a 7 series chip in that motherboard thé board will need the latest bios drivers. If these are not installed you will need to flash thé bios using a 6th gen cpu

[Neil_Cross]

Can't say I've ever tried running a higher gen CPU in a motherboard but I figure if board doesn't recognise the CPU, it just wouldn't boot? Can't see how it would boot but then go into some kind of limp mode, the modelling and drawing times of his test seem in check with what I would have expected from a 7700.

Not sure if I'm missing something but his 7700 can't be overclocked anyway and the only other limitations of a H Series chipset are things like bus lane and port reductions, nothing which would be detrimental to processing power?

[Anonymous]

Except overclocking there are no major differences, but by default a 7th gen chip does not work in a 100 series chipset. It is recommended to use a 200 series chipset when using a 7th gen cpu

And you are right a 7700 cpu has no unlocked multiplier for overclocking

[Anonymous]

Thanks to Neil I was finally able to build my Inventor PC.

I have to say, this setup runs very smooth.

[Neil_Cross]

That's an amazing score for that build, good to see.

150-170Hz on a very old GeForce 660Ti, anybody is welcome to go back through the thread and see how many newer far more powerful cards don't get anywhere near that because they're bottlenecked by CPU.

Just saying, again.

[Neil_Cross]

Not bad at all for a PC with no graphics card, total PC cost £550 roughly.

See this video for more info on the PC used https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UHWwcStt868

[matroosoft]

Since most of the Inventor tasks use only one CPU thread, is the Passmark single thread performance score a good representation of how fast a certain CPU can do Inventor stuff?

https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html

[Anonymous]

Hi Guys,

hope to find some help here. First: On my workplace I´ve got an good Workstation. Now I started to make some homeoffice a few weeks ago.

I never thougt it will be that bad, but it is. Creating some drawings from a model with around 5k parts takes a lot of time here at home on my PC.

It makes me crazy because I´m used to much faster drawing creation of models like that. Orbiting with the 3D Mouse was also horrible. So I started the Bench Tool and thats the result:

Can you see some bottlenecks here? 😄 I think there are a few. So I already thouth about building a new PC for working at home, but don´t want to spend much money. I was thinking about the Ryzen 2400g with an WX3100, but it seems to make no sense to buy this CPU with the IGP. Can you give me some recommendations?

Thanks!

Greets from Germany.

[Anonymous]

@Anonymous, I am running a Ryzen 1700 in my workstation. You can find my results in this thread a couple of pages back. 

The new AMDs are very fast over what you have. Also they are very decently priced at the moment. You get a 1600x with 12 threads for less than a 180 € at the moment. The only thing that sucks are those DDR4 prices. Let me know if you want to get some info on what is a good config, I spend some time looking into how to configurate AM4 systems.

The 2400G is certainly a good alternative too and has a decently fast iGPU, If you think about what Neil got out of the 2400G and given how much that machine was.... I hope my boss doesn't see that, otherwise he will certainly not spend 3 times the money anymore for a sys that is 30% faster. But if you consider buying a WX3100 anyway, go for the 1600x. There is no need to pay for the iGPU and you'll get more CPU power out of that 6C/12T CPU.

EDIT: Here are the results from my Ryzen 1700

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/inventor-forum/how-fast-is-your-inventor-pc-really/m-p/7549058#M668667

You can see its basically twice of what you have now in every bench.

[Neil_Cross]

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@Anonymous wrote:

@Anonymous, I am running a Ryzen 1700 in my workstation. You can find my results in this thread a couple of pages back. 

The new AMDs are very fast over what you have. Also they are very decently priced at the moment. You get a 1600x with 12 threads for less than a 180 € at the moment. The only thing that sucks are those DDR4 prices. Let me know if you want to get some info on what is a good config, I spend some time looking into how to configurate AM4 systems.

The 2400G is certainly a good alternative too and has a decently fast iGPU, If you think about what Neil got out of the 2400G and given how much that machine was.... I hope my boss doesn't see that, otherwise he will certainly not spend 3 times the money anymore for a sys that is 30% faster. But if you consider buying a WX3100 anyway, go for the 1600x. There is no need to pay for the iGPU and you'll get more CPU power out of that 6C/12T CPU.

EDIT: Here are the results from my Ryzen 1700

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/inventor-forum/how-fast-is-your-inventor-pc-really/m-p/7549058#M668667

You can see its basically twice of what you have now in every bench.

---

Yep there's definitely no point in getting the APU with a view to then also getting a GPU, that's not a good move.

I've already ran the 2400G APU through this bench test and it pulled around a 7.0-7.5 which to be fair is pretty decent, and then in my real world tests it did admirably for the price.

If you're building this for home use, there's possible more than just Inventor to take care of.  Can you specify a max budget (and what country you're in), and also what other things you'd want to do on the PC? i.e. occasional gaming, what kind of games, other work related programs you might use etc

[blair]

Normally I build a new machine every 2-years but looking at my system results I'm not sure that I'm going to see much improvement until the CPU clock speed steps up. I should re-run the test with Inventor 2018 to see if there is much of a change in performance.

[Neil_Cross]

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@blair wrote:

Normally I build a new machine every 2-years but looking at my system results I'm not sure that I'm going to see much improvement until the CPU clock speed steps up. I should re-run the test with Inventor 2018 to see if there is much of a change in performance.

---

Agreed.  Unless you do other stuff which could use the extra 2 cores you get now on the flagship i7, there's no massive gain from the 8700k over the 6700k for Inventor.  That's a good result.  I doubt Inventor 2018 would see it much higher.

[Anonymous]

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@Neil_Crosswrote:

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@blairwrote:

Normally I build a new machine every 2-years but looking at my system results I'm not sure that I'm going to see much improvement until the CPU clock speed steps up. I should re-run the test with Inventor 2018 to see if there is much of a change in performance.

---

Agreed.  Unless you do other stuff which could use the extra 2 cores you get now on the flagship i7, there's no massive gain from the 8700k over the 6700k for Inventor.  That's a good result.  I doubt Inventor 2018 would see it much higher.

---

Yep, for Inventor that really makes very little sense. I do other stuff too, including rendering with Blender and Cinema 4D. That's where many cores really pay off. Here are for example the results from a run in Cinebench on my rig. 

https://ibin.co/3uQVK3aKh9mL.png

The good thing for my work using Inventor is, that I can submit a render job to Blender and keep working with basically no impact on performance. That's why I am really a fan of these new many core processors.

Hope that's not too off topic here.

[Anonymous]

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@Neil_Crosswrote:

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@Anonymouswrote:

@Anonymous, I am running a Ryzen 1700 in my workstation. You can find my results in this thread a couple of pages back. 

The new AMDs are very fast over what you have. Also they are very decently priced at the moment. You get a 1600x with 12 threads for less than a 180 € at the moment. The only thing that sucks are those DDR4 prices. Let me know if you want to get some info on what is a good config, I spend some time looking into how to configurate AM4 systems.

The 2400G is certainly a good alternative too and has a decently fast iGPU, If you think about what Neil got out of the 2400G and given how much that machine was.... I hope my boss doesn't see that, otherwise he will certainly not spend 3 times the money anymore for a sys that is 30% faster. But if you consider buying a WX3100 anyway, go for the 1600x. There is no need to pay for the iGPU and you'll get more CPU power out of that 6C/12T CPU.

EDIT: Here are the results from my Ryzen 1700

https://forums.autodesk.com/t5/inventor-forum/how-fast-is-your-inventor-pc-really/m-p/7549058#M668667

You can see its basically twice of what you have now in every bench.

---

Yep there's definitely no point in getting the APU with a view to then also getting a GPU, that's not a good move.

I've already ran the 2400G APU through this bench test and it pulled around a 7.0-7.5 which to be fair is pretty decent, and then in my real world tests it did admirably for the price.

If you're building this for home use, there's possible more than just Inventor to take care of.  Can you specify a max budget (and what country you're in), and also what other things you'd want to do on the PC? i.e. occasional gaming, what kind of games, other work related programs you might use etc

---

Thanks for your replies!

I´ve had been thinking, that the Ryzen 2400g is equal to the Ryzen 1600... Someone told me that - wrong. Ok so I surfed on the net today here and there reading about CPU´s and so on. The 1600x seems to be a nice choice.

To answer your points, @Neil_Cross: My Budget is around 500€, Case (mATX Corsair Obsidian 350D) and PSU (BeQuiet PurePower 530W) i want to reuse. Gaming wasn´t a thing since a long time. May come back, but it´s not important for me right now. Beside Inventor, AutoCAD and Vault I work a lot on Microsoft Office, programming Python and VBA, surfing on the WWW, editing Photos in Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. I think that´s it...

Maybe there are consumer graphics cards that are a better choice than the Radeon Pro WX3100 for home use? Right now it´s priced for around 170€ to 190€ here in Germany.

[Anonymous]

@Anonymous

Given your use case I would possibly try to aim for 16gb of RAM. You already have an SSD and HDD which you can also reuse.

As a base I would go for this:

Ryzen 1600x

2x8gb 2666MHz Dual Rank DDR4

Gigabyte B350 µATX Board

Ben Nevis AM4 Cooler
 

This adds up to about 420.- Euros

If you think that the 7850/7870 you seem to be running is to slow, you could reduce the RAM to 2x4gb which will save you about 70 Euros. If you think you can overclock yourself, you can go for the 1600 (non x) which saves you another 40.- (-20.- cpu, -20.- cooler).

[blair]

FEA and some rendering which would use the extra cores. Still think I'll hold off for a bit and wait for clock speeds to increase.

[Neil_Cross]

FWIW, these are my findings on how varying PCs with varying core counts and frequencies handle FEA meshing and solving.

4C, 6C = 4 cores or 6 cores etc.

[blair]

Thanks,

[Mario-Villada]

Good to see my 5 year old devil's canyon is among the fastest.