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.

[Anonymous]

Couldn't agree with Neil more. Great suggestion if you're going the xeon route. 

[Mario-Villada]

Yes mate, I also agree with Neil, I could not get a good Xeon based workstation form HP back in January so I ended up getting a Dell Precision 3630 that comes with a Xeon E-2286G and I am very happy with it. We also have custom builds with I7 in the office but this Dell is much better and more reliable. I bet you could get a newer Xeon E-2288G build as Neil suggested from Dell in case HP cannot offer you the option.

[Anonymous]

Ok I've finished the build.  These benchmarks are right after setting up the new PC and without any settings or adjustments.  I'm scanning thru this long thread to learn about how you guys work with hyperthreading (to do it or not), as well as how to turbo / overclock the 3800x.  Compared to the list I posted previously, I did change a couple of components due to availability and prices increasing on the original list.  

Here's a before (dinosaur PC), and new one.  I hope to get in the 12s but I'm still happy with being in 11s for a $1300 build.  Any advice would be appreciated but I'll do my due diligence to learn from the 95 pages of posts LOL!

Before (old PC): 

After (new PC Build):

[Neil_Cross]

Hyperthreading/SMT doesn't do anything to Inventor in any measurable way, the literature and info relating to it is all obsolete and wrong now.  I've tested this extensively and proven that there is no impact on Inventor performance.

[johan.degreef]

@Neil_Cross 

Hello Neil, I saw your youtube video's about best laptop.

This is the HP zbook one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jskuSdJcCsM

this is the Dell precision one:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b3zO6gzcxOU

Now I have a quote for a HP Zbook with the Xeon E-2286M 8 core CPU:

HP Zbook 17 G6 Mobile Workstation
Intel® Xeon® E-2286M 2.4GHz 16MB 8-Core
Windows 10 Pro 64 Workstations Plus
NVIDIA Quadro RTX 3000 6GB Graphics
64GB (2x32GB) DDR4 2666
1TB PCIe NVMe Three Layer Cell Solid State Drive

I guess the Xeon CPU in an HP Zbook will serve as well as placed in the Dell Precision?

Many thanks!

[aleksander.mork.strandBA34H]

Hi,

We've been using Lenovo P52 laptop for CAD for some years now, but now we have tested the MSI GS66 Stealth 15,6" laptop with Core i9-10980HK and RTX 2070. I really like this PC, but have only tested it briefly so far. (I still have my P52 a while longer) So I can't say how well it is regarding fan noise etc.

Didn't get a screenshot, but I have the results in excel. Seems promising.

We will install 32 GB ram.

(Btw, why am I getting so long start time on my P52??)

[leowarren34]

@aleksander.mork.strandBA34H What storage are you running on your P52? How much capacity do you have left?

Another thing to check would any background processes especially when you run the benchmark from a restart since I know some processes like antivirus can ramp up at the beginning. Check the task manager and make sure the graph is flat as that will make sure nothing is hogging the HDD/SSD more than normal.

[freesbee]

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@mikejones wrote:

My everyday working laptop is a little quicker though

Mike

...I also want such a laptop that scores 14!!!!

My gaming rig only goes up to 12 😪

 

[Anonymous]

Had to come on and drop the specs on our brand new line of laptops for the group to judge. 🙂 

Our 17" Will be running the 10900K 10core/20thread up to 5.3Ghz 10th Gen i9, up to 64GB DDR4 3200 speed RAM, Boot Drive will be a 500GB 970 Evo+ with 3x addition m.2 slots for future expansion, 2070 super (not a max Q) - can upgrade to 2080 super, and is 1.5" at its thickest. Price a little over $3500

For our 15" we decided to go with a mobile processor due to some of the high clocks and the desire to offer an extremely slim mobile option. It is running the 10875H 8core/16thread up to 5.1Ghz 10th Gen i7, up to 64GB DDR4 3200 speed RAM, Boot Drive will be a 500GB 970 Evo+, and a 2070 Super (not max Q). Price is close to $3000

These will officially be released at the end of the month and will be posting benchmark results upon official release. 

@Anonymous- We are going to have to catch up at an event to get you some gear to test out. 🙂

[Neil_Cross]

@Anonymous check your DM's 👍

[Neil_Cross]

FAO everyone subscribed to this thread, it's a shame this will end up getting buried, but you might want to see this before it does.  I'm going to make a separate new post on the forum for this video too.

Permission was granted by Autodesk to present the never seen before evidence/proof that I'm referring to.

[freesbee]

Many thanks for this very interesting video.

As we are currently composing our next workstation, we will try to bring to management our motivation in this form:

120 QUADRO workstations vs 120 GeForce workstations

The former will be so expensive that management will want to keep them running for at least 6 years. The latter are so much cheaper, that can be replaced after 3 years. At the end of the 6 years period the latter will have better overall performance. I'll let you know if this argumentation will work out...

[Anonymous]

IT depends on what models you're looking at. What are the two you are
debating about?

[andrew.tom.reynolds]

@mikejoneswhat is the brand & model of your work laptop with the 14.71 result? I'm currently looking at options.

[andrew.tom.reynolds]

Hi @Neil_Cross - is there any benefit to having 2 vs 1 physical drives in these days of M2 SSDs?

For example, is there any performance benefit to specifying 2 x 512GB SSDs vs 1 x 1TB SSD if you set it up with OS and Inventor installed on 1st drive and Inventor workspace located on 2nd drive?

[Neil_Cross]

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@andrew.tom.reynolds wrote:

Hi @Neil_Cross - is there any benefit to having 2 vs 1 physical drives in these days of M2 SSDs?

For example, is there any performance benefit to specifying 2 x 512GB SSDs vs 1 x 1TB SSD if you set it up with OS and Inventor installed on 1st drive and Inventor workspace located on 2nd drive?

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If you're asking about a performance benefit to having 2 vs 1 physical M2 SSDs, absolutely none, unless you put them in RAID but even then, all the research shows it doesn't make any meaningful real world difference to performance.  We're also now at a point whereby the advice "having two drives slows you downs because data has to transfer across the drives" is now almost obsolete due to the vast amounts of bandwidth that we now have over the likes of the PCIe (32GB/s on PCIe 3.0).  That's something I'm quite interested in testing out though when I get some spare time.

It depends on what kind of benefit you're looking for though.

Larger storage capacity SSDs (within the same product family) have better performance i.e. a 1TB Samsung 970 Pro has higher stats than the 512GB Samsung 970 Pro as that does the 256GB variant, because the controller on the SSD can access more NAND chips over more channels in parallel on the device.  So you're always going to realise a faster device by going with the larger single drive.  Whether you actually notice that is another story, Inventor won't, it has far too much else going on when you open and save data for the SSD speeds to come into play.  Just look at the save time on the Inventor bench tool, the fastest systems with the best SSDs on the market still take 3+ seconds to save a 20mb part file.  But if you just want the fastest drive possible even if you might not notice it, but it might help for overall wider system usage, just go for a single larger SSD.

Another benefit to having two separate drives is physical separation for system recovery.  There's definitely other and arguably better ways of doing it, but if you have your OS and all applications installed on drive 1 on a C drive, but save all your files and date to drive 2 on a D drive, your Windows OS drive becomes easily recoverable.  This is how my system is set up.  At any point even 2 years down the line, I can safely format my C drive (drive 1) or even completely replace it, and I know there's absolutely no data on there that I can't re-download or re-install from the internet, I have nothing on my main drive 1 that I can't easily replace.  And this has been super useful for me as I like to re-roll a complete clean install of Windows 10 onto my PC at least once every year, usually around April when Autodesk bring out their new stuff.

So long story short, single larger drive is faster, but there's non-performance related benefits to having two.

[mikejones]

Hi @andrew.tom.reynolds . The laptop was bought from a company called PC Specialists in the UK and its from their Defiance Series: 17.3" range. Currently about £1500+vat

Very happy with it and great service from the company, it's the second laptop I've bought from them.

Mike

[nutral]

I was checking the HP workstations, Apparently HP is selling workstations with gaming hardware ? This is a HP Z2 workstation with an intel 9900k, Nvidia Geforce 2080Ti, 512gb nvme ssd and 64gb ram non-ecc for about 3000 euros (specs are a bit overkill), which is not all that expensive. (especially compared to the quadro counterpart.)

https://www.centralpoint.nl/pcs/hp/hp-z2-twr-g4-intel-core-i9-9900k-64gb-art-9lp62esabb-num-12984511...

Without tax it would come out to 2600 euros. The prebuilt one is 1800 euros, so it is still more expensive, but i am thinking of recommending we switch over. (previously the offered HP workstation was 4000 euros and it was with quadro P4000 and 12core intel with a max turbo of like 3,9ghz.)

[Anonymous]

This question may have been answered.  When running Inventor Bench, are these IPI scores based on default Application options?  What I mean is, I was running an average of 11.2 on my IPI with default settings and then I found this link in Autodesk that lays out how to set Preferences to handle large assemblies.  

http://help.autodesk.com/view/INVNTOR/2020/ENU/?guid=GUID-B48A5D18-A77F-4770-8B0F-F55C3669B140

With that said, my IPI jumped up to an average of 12.8.  Of course, you're losing a lot of visual aids and smooth representation of the models so I'm sure it will take some tweaking to see what works best for our needs.  Are these settings worth playing with?  I may have answered my own question but I'm just wanting to be sure we're comparing apples to apples.  Leave the settings alone?  Or are there some that are worth adjusting and make a significant difference?  My drawing test times improved quite a bit for example.  Thank you!

[freesbee]

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@nutral wrote:

I was checking the HP workstations, Apparently HP is selling workstations with gaming hardware ? This is a HP Z2 workstation with an intel 9900k, Nvidia Geforce 2080Ti, 512gb nvme ssd and 64gb ram non-ecc (...)

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...if I could decide for my company I would buy this immediately!! This is the best CAD workstation for "inventor general use" that I could imagine. Also the price/performance ratio is much better than the Dell stuff we are currently forced to purchase. Only improvement I could imagine: Ryzen7 instead of Intel, but that does not have a huge impact on Inventor specific use.