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]

I just can't make any sense of this.  

The Quadro P2000 is a $400 GPU and has no input on the modelling test.  Look at the modelling time.

The Quadro P5000 is a $2000 GPU and has no input on the modelling test.  Look at the modelling time.

I must have ran 100+ tests with the P5000 installed over the past 3 days and I absolutely cannot get the modelling time to ever finish below 7.2 seconds, it's typically around 7.4 consistently.  I've practically shut down every service to the point where the CPU is exactly at 0% prior to the test.

I then put the P2000 back in, and it's back to doing it in 5.2 - 5.4 seconds again.

How the heck can lesser GPU make a non-GPU task go 40% faster.  Every single thing was identical between the tests.  There was zero background processes, bare bones everything.

The P5000 consumes more power but the GPU is practically idling throughout the test, it's barely consuming any power at all.  And if the PSU was insufficient it wouldn't boot.

I really don't have time to figure this out, but I need to!

[Mario-Villada]

Did you notice you have software graphics enable = true?

[Mario-Villada]

Sorry, that is how you disable it right, nevermind my comment.

[nutral]

Is it a  P5000 max Q? The P5000 has 2000 shaders compared to the 768 of the P2000. But the P5000 has a higher clock speed than a P5000 Max Q.

The same is also the case for the P2000, but because that is a smaller gpu, generally they put in the full version.

So a P5000 Max Q would have about 1350mhz compared to the 1600mhz max of the P2000 normal. Normally that shouldn't matter because of the extra shaders.

Have you tried to run the benchmark at a higher resolution? For example at 4k. If the P5000 performs better, then it would have been a cpu bottleneck (frames limited by cpu).

I usually get better performance on Quality than on performance btw.

[Anonymous]

Hey guys,

can you check my bench? Is there something I can do better? The HDD-Score seems to be a bit weird for an NVMe, or am I wrong??

Thanks!

[Neil_Cross]

Yea it's a standard full fat desktop P5000 and I can't run it at 4K as it's hooked into a regular 1080p display.

I agree with what you're saying about CPU bottlenecks, but the modelling test is 100% CPU, there is no or should be no GPU input.  I would have gone down that path if the graphics score was completely different, but how can the CPU compute the modelling tasks faster with a lesser GPU

[Neil_Cross]

Saving files isn't just a straight up "write to disk" operation, it would finish in a fraction of a second if it was purely on how fast the disk write metrics are, it's the CPU which mostly dictates the save performance.

That's actually not a bad overall score, my Ryzen7 1700X is pretty much in the same ball park.

[nutral]

On my pc it takes a couple of seconds to switch to 3d mode. Open GPU-Z and look at the actual clocks. It might stay in 2d mode longer, which lowers the performance significantly.

[gavin.allenHSSRX]

Hi Raider_007,

I know that you have done a few updates since your original. Did you continue to update this for the latest versions like 2018 and 2019?

Regards

Gavin

[Anonymous]

can someone help? im running into issues with crashing with big assembly's and uploading from autocad and valor.

i thought i had a pretty good setup but im having these issues i think 1 problem is my cpu it is running at 80 -100% contently. we have 2 pcs the same setup and same issues.

[gavin.allenHSSRX]

Morning,

I am being told that it is down to how we do our assemblies, though TBH, I'm not 100% that this is correct, but as a precaution I have just ordered a new high end workstation to try and help with the issues.  I have also booked in a days training on how to make assemblies/large assemblies correctly. Again whether this make any difference is another question, to which I wait patiently to find out. 

The one thing I do know is that if you have a RED CROSS at the top of your screen then something is wrong in the assembly and needs to be corrected.  This does make a difference in having to wait for an hour or 3 for the model to load and when you rotate it and having to wait for another half hour to an hour before you can do anything else.

My current/old PC (still waiting for IT on my new PC) would, could and can crash out of assemblies, upto 6 times in just the morning.

Since I have been correcting assemblies and making simplified views of sub assemblies within the main assemblies, my system has made some improvements, albeit marginal, but this has by no means resolved it completely.

I am convinced that years ago that this was not an issue. I was building complex large assemblies on an old i5 with 16GB RAM and a Fire Pro 5700 without any of these issues.

I do wonder if it is the antivirus software we have to use nowadays, but I'll never find out as IT won't let me use my new PC on the network to Vault without it.

If, (BIG IF), after we have spent on this new PC and training this have improved dramatically then I will be typing it in this forum in capitals, and if it doesn't I will be typing it in CAPITALS.

[Anonymous]

Just got an upgrade at work from our 2013 PC builds.  We were running an i7-4770 with a GTX 770 and 16gb ram.  Now we are on the new i7-9700 with a Quadro P2000 and 32gb ram.  Here's the before and after:

Before (2013)After (2018

[leowarren34]

Thats a decent change just shows how much and how little hardware has changed.

[blair]

Can someone point me to the page with the current program download. The first page is throwing up a file error, I want to bench my new laptop.

Thanks,

[Neil_Cross · Accepted solution]

https://www.mgfx.co.za/cad-software/autodesk-inventor/tools-for-inventor/

[blair]

thanks,

[blair]

New 2018 MacBook Pro running Parallels 14. I will try and change some native MAC settings and Parallels settings in how much MAC OS resources are allocated to Parallels and Windows 10. It doesn't seem to be using the "Turbo" mode on the CPU with only sharing two of the cores and 8Gb of memory. 

[mluterman]

today;s bench; now running an 8GB Primo Ramdisk for the UNDO file.  Static page file size set to Windows recommendation.  OC'd to 4.7

[Neil_Cross]

Oh I forgot, I've done my AU class now so I can post this. 

The story here is that I did a class called "Buying the right workstation for Inventor" at Autodesk University, I picked the parts and asked HP to build it, they did and sent it over.  And indeed, it's an absolute rocket for Inventor.  The below score is a HP Z2 G4 Tower Workstation.

This is quite literally the best workstation that you can buy today for Inventor*.  The GPU is a P2000 but it can be upgraded if needed.  This system should set you back less than $2000.  

* Obviously not everyone is the same, if you work on 500,000+ part assemblies then you might need more RAM etc

** You can also get the Xeon E-2186G which runs 100Mhz faster on the base clock with the same turbo clock, which will be insignificantly marginal compared with the E-2176G.  They just didn't have the E-2186G in stock at the time.

The AU staff messed up and didn't record my class when I asked them, so I'm going to do it again for a Youtube video.  But anyone buying a vendor workstation for an office to be used exclusively for Inventor, that's the best spec on offer today.  It's marginally quicker at all measured Inventor functions than a stock 8700K.  Inc. shrinkwrapping, large view creation, simulation, rendering, AnyCAD workflows etc.

[Anonymous]

@Neil_Cross, when do you think you will be doing the youtube video? Unfortunately, I did not realize you had already completed the webinar.