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.

[mcgyvr]

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@pball wrote:

@mcgyvr
That is a 1337 score you have there, also a nice post number lol. You have the fastest score that I've seen yet in this thread. I can only hope clock speeds like that become stock eventually.

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@pball Thanks..

Not bad at all for a machine that was only $2500.. Thats basically the budget each time we get computers and its just amazing how much more you can get now..

[Neil_Cross]

I'm currently remotely connected into a brand NEW workstation, bought specifically for Inventor, which cost $7500 that will be lucky to pull a 6.0

I can't wait to run the test on it.  It's a textbook example of an IT dept not listening to advice.

[Neil_Cross]

So yea, here's a $7500 brand new Lenovo workstation bought for an engineer using Inventor, and it's worse than a PC I built for $450.  I gave the IT team a spec and they went off and bought something totally different, a dual Xeon box with two CPUs designed for data centre servers.  This is hilariously shambolic.

[pball]

@Neil_Cross

I would love that computer for doing other things, like video encoding. But would probably murder my IT department if they gave me that for Inventor usage. I'm lucky that we are a small company and I was in charge of the specs with IT making minor changes like choosing the gpu, psu, and case brands.

It's painful to see a pc that costs 3 times as much do half as well.

@mcgyvr

I wish I had a $2.5k budget for pcs. I ended up with a $1,400 pc that was accepted with the last gen 7700k and 1060 gpus which was nearly the best at the time so I can't complain much. I'll have to try a bit harder in a few years to get a better budget.

[nutral]

Im looking for a new work laptop for inventor and i'm kind of looking at gaming laptops. Has anyone tried the i9 cpu for these? the can clock to 4,8ghz on a single core which would be great for inventor. It can also be overclocked.

Only problem is that something like the Dell 7530 is incredibly expensive with the i9 and the P3200 gpu (like 3000). And most laptops don't come with the i9, Something like the alienware 15 R4 works but is very heavy with 3,5kg.

Nice thing about the i7 8850H is that it can be overclocked by 0,4ghz, with the max boost being 4,3ghz it can reach 4,7.

Im looking for some benchmarks that compare the i7 8750H and the i9

[leowarren34]

The big issue with high perf laptops is cooling, don't think about overclocking as it will kill it quickly, and anything with an I9 will have considerable mass to cool it

Have a look at pcspecialist: https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/notebooks/defianceV-17-QHD-i9/

[nutral]

The laptops have 6 core cpu's but inventor only uses one, so using one core isn't really that hard on the laptop and the cooling.

When using 6 cores it will clock back to a lower speed like 3,6ghz, but generally i don't mind that.

I care most about the single core speed because that is most of the time spent waiting in inventor, i've noticed this is really the case when using ilogic stuff, meshing in FEA and in autocad(3D).

I'm currently looking at the Aorus x5 v8 which has adequate cooling with a good cpu/gpu and is right at my 2,5kg laptop limit, only problem is the noise, battery life and support that the dells/HP do have.

https://www.notebookcheck.net/Aorus-X5-v8-i7-8850H-GTX-1070-Full-HD-Laptop-Review.305300.0.html

Another option is the Dell xps 15 with the i9 cpu, but i'm not sure it has enough cooling for the 4,8ghz, and it will throttle with 6 core usage. The graphics card is much slower.

I've also looked at the MSI GS65, Gigabyte Aero 15X, asus GM501. The workstation alternatives are sadly not really available, like the Zbook 15 G5 and thinkpad P52.

I have read that the thinkpad P52 has half a heatpipe for the cpu, so i don't expect much from that.

http://forum.notebookreview.com/attachments/cooling_comparison-png.160125/

The dell 7530 looks good, but there are no reviews on how good the cooling is. It does seem that the GPU has a strict power limit.

[S_May]

800€...

[peter.ensing]

@Neil_Cross Its like you have shown earlier that CPU core speed is key in this matter (except rendering and stuff).

I've got a pretty old pc but it scores high just because of the fast CPU.

I made the same mistake for Solidworks 2 years ago with a dual Xeon CPU, 40 hyperthreaded cores total.

It was a beast when it comes to rendering and calculating Scia Engineer. But for both Solidworks as Inventor it isnt much of a performance boost for modeling and drawings.

I guess you just have to buy the right 8th gen Xeon CPU with a minimum turboboost to 4.3 GHz.

[Neil_Cross]

When I spec a workstation for someone I always ask what else they plan on using it for, if it's just Inventor usage then it'll go one way, but if they use Ansys or something else as part of their typical work then I'll make compromises so that you don't completely handicap one application by benefiting another.  It can be a tricky balancing act whilst also considering budget restraints.

But your test there is a textbook example of the CPU dominating everything.  I've posted results using a GTX1070 GPU which has a lower graphics score than that, because the CPU I had for that test wasn't as powerful.  The 4790K even today is still a formidable CPU.

[Anonymous]

HP1 ZBOOK 15U G5 

[Anonymous]

[Neil_Cross]

Oooo the 8086K - I reckon you could pull a 14-15 if you change your resolution down to 1920x1080 just for the test.

Which model monitor is that? Widescreen 21:9?

[leowarren34]

Going to be honest Xeons IMO arent really that great for Inventor unless you want to render or do tasks that can be parallelised as they just lack the clock speed- A 6 core currently is the sweet spot as it allows for some multitasking without sacrificing clock speed which you have to do if you get more cores; I have a 7800X OC to 4.5gHz and it works a treat however my ram and GPU - from my old rig are my biggest limitations. My recomendations are a Core-X series CPU as they have the best power delivery and can be really well overclocked if needs be

[peter.ensing]

@leowarren34 the 8th gen Intel xeon processors can climb up to 4.8 GHz. yes they cant be overclocked but they are pretty fast now days. If its for a home rig or small company I would recommend an i7 serie too because they are cheaper. But if you want more stability and insurance the new xeons are good to use.

[Neil_Cross]

The i7-8086K is clocked at 5.0ghz out the box, someone just posted a result using that, 12+

[hosford]

Here is a Dell 7510 running a fresh install of IV 2019, its a few years old.

[Anonymous]

Just upgraded from an FX-8320E with 16GB of DDR3-1333 to a Ryzen 7 2700X with 16GB of DDR4-3000.

Original score was a 5.20, new score is 10.36.  I guess that old processor was holding me back way more than I expected.

[skatzY7HV8]

Here are two tests - one on my workstation, and another on a friends home gaming computer. I expected the gaming pc perform much better than the other, but perhaps this is due to the CPU?

Workstation -

Gaming PC -

[nutral]

Did a benchmark on the new laptop. Runs pretty well, altough there is a problem with turbo boost. It's also held back a bit by the slower ssd.

The gpu doesn't really have much effect the benchmark, when running it at 1080p. I wonder if similarly as in games, when the 3d models get larger, and the framerate gets lower, it starts depending on the gpu. This would be even more the case when running it at 4k. My screen is 4k, and at that resolution it gets a score of 6,8 weirdly, it shows the first 2 graphics tests at 4fps, while that is only a short bit in the start.