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]

Good points.  

I don't believe though that the bottleneck there is with the CPU itself, I think there's a software/setting/driver issue at play here.  That's the 4690K and I have the 4790K which is the i7 variant on the same architecture, and I'm pulling a score of 12+.  I'd find it hard to believe there'd be that much of a drop down from an i7 to an i5 on the same platform.

[pb]

 HP EliteBook 8770w

Not impressive for such an expensive computer. 😞

[Anonymous]

thanks for the fast replys guys.

I'm not new in solving problems, but i dont have enought experience with inventor. The other pcs ive tested have the 4790K on it, but the same problem as mentioned before. and i have no access to the bios and oc features because they are all workstations (except one which i build myself).

here are the other pc results in comparison:

thats a total of 4 pcs with near similar hardware. the one with the 980 ti test was build by myself, so i have full access to all parts of the system.

I'll now check ram usage and cpu usage. something to mention: the 16GB of ram were NEVER even close to full. even smaller assemblies have bad performance.
brb with the results.

edit:

cpu is at 20-30% usage average (60% peak).

Ram at ~4500MB while benching.

PS: i have access to IV16 and 17 but have to talk to the admin first.

[brotherkennyh]

the CPU is a limitation here. its a 4 core CPU so inventor will max out at 25% for single headed operations. the peaking above that from time to time is the few operations it as able to do in parallel or other system processes running.

As you have a newer version of inventor go kick your admins into gear. You have already paid for performance and productivity improvements that are simply sitting on the shelf.

Take a look at your drivers as well. Older drivers may have higher CPU overhead. If you CAD software is 3 years behind would it be a good bet much of your PC maintenance is also not dealt with unless something fails? Again go see the admins and get them to give your Pc some general TLC.

[Anonymous]

thanks.

It's really hard to belive that the cpus are the problem. ill try to get a newer inventor version. do they have multi threaded optimized calculations or is it still single threaded?

on top of that i'm still pretty sure that there is another issue forcing the system to render that slow. i mean, look at other similar system. none of them are even that worse compared to my systems.

[-niels-]

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@Anonymous wrote:

i'm still pretty sure that there is another issue forcing the system to render that slow.

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You could try starting the system in safe mode so it doesn't load any other services and only run inventor to see if that improves things...

Your screenshots say 2014 SP2, does that include all updates?

(might not make any difference, but you never know)

[Neil_Cross]

You should be pulling at least over 100Hz with that spec, my cheap 2 core G3258 Pentium was able to hit 150Hz+.

Have you changed anything in the BIOS? You're not running this over remote desktop or in a virtual environment, nothing like that?

[Neil_Cross]

Just for a point of reference, this is a god awful 7 year old Dell T3500 Workstation with an archaic Xeon which isn't worth a ****, and a horrific Quadro 2000 which probably has less power than the GPU in my phone.  The graphics scores are better than what you're getting.

What power supply do you have in the PC? 

[Anonymous]

BIOSes are at default settings and cpus are clocking right to their working frequency.

no remote, no virtual machines.

I'm experienced in 15 years of pc building and ~5 years of extreme overclocking with liquid nitrogen, so i know how to set up PCs (just for information that you are not speaking to a newbie 😄 ).

[andrewdroth]

is it possible your 'My Documents' folder is linked to a network drive?

I know ours are here, it's controlled by a group policy on the domain. I needed to log out of the domain and into a local user account in order to get accurate results.

It changed the numbers a lot, and we have a gigabit network.

[Neil_Cross]

Gotcha.  That helps.  In that case have you ran something like Geekbench or Firestrike or Heaven to verify that the PC is performing as it should in comparison to others of a similar build? I think most of those programs show you what spec other people had who ran the tests.  If it was me I'd do that to completely rule out the hardware being at fault, then you can focus on software troubleshooting.

[Anonymous]

it's indeed set to a network drive because the university users have their folders on the network.

only thing i changed in IV is the temp folder under "options > files" to a local drive C:.

what is the problem with ne my doc folder? is there anything other IV files located?

@Neil_Cross

i can run a 3d mark (or similar) to verify that its not a hardware problem. but i have very similar hardware in all pcs, so i wont see a very big range of results. can anyone else gimme some reference results with 4690/4790 i7 and a quadro K420?

[Neil_Cross]

A couple of pages back I posted my 4790K with a 12+ score, I've also posted a score of my 4790K with a GTX970 in hitting 12+.

Can you temporarily disable the use of the my documents redirect? The file the bench tool uses is saved and ran from the my documents area, so this can and probably will gimp the performance.  

[Anonymous]

i will try this on tuesday. long weekend here 😄

thanks for the replys so far!

[mdavis22569]

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@Neil_Cross wrote:

This is probably the best I'm gonna push out on my old i7 Haswell platform, so far I think 13.45 from @mdavis22569 is top dog.

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13.57   I forgot to share this one 

[Neil_Cross]

I've been busy working on a little something something...

[machiel.veldkamp]

I demand an explanation! 9Hz CPU? Tesla clasified? HYPE

[Neil_Cross]

An explanation... oh, right.  It's fake

When I say I've been busy, I mean I've been busy falsifying a screen print and typing fake text over the image to make it look real, because apparently for some reason I find myself doing these things instead of normal things that normal people do past midnight on a Thursday.

To be fair, Rolls Royce manufacturing RAM sticks with a part number 69LOLJK exposes my scam.

I'll freak out a few people with it and then delete the image a bit later on!  

[-niels-]

Lol, funny fake but if it were real then you should be disapointed... more than twice the GHz as MDavis but not double the score...
I laughed at the "lol joke" part number for the 512Gb memory and love the "Grid Hive Mind(TM)"

[tom_vierling]

You went through a lot of trouble to make sure this didnt look like a bad Photoshop. 

Honestly if you had used the Kabylake 7700K with a clock speed of 4.2 (or hell, lower the core count and made it more realistic 10/12 core @3.0ghz) and used DDR4 4266 mhz ram, with 128gb sticks I might have sorta believed you were a secret beta tester for Intel.....

And if you're going to have that baller of a system, you at least need a 12 TB m.2 SSD 😛