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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.
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.
Anti-virus shouldn't be a factor here, AV only ever becomes an issue when the on-access scanner ends up intercepting multiple files in a bulk operation, this benchmark tool is just working on a single file at a time so AV shouldn't be holding anything up.
Good luck getting first place, I've just ordered the top end Alienware 17 laptop with a graphics amplifier and I've got a FirePro W9100 ready to slot in, so game on!
@mmaes That's the plan! A contact at AMD has said he doesn't expect it to work, but according to all the Alienware spec sheets the amplifier works with all desktop cards, both AMD and NVIDIA, with a TDP of 375W or less. However I reckon it might be driver support from AMD which lets me down here. They've created a driver for the Radeon cards but I highly doubt there's one for the FirePro range.
It's got the top end Skylake 6820HK in at 4.1GHz, the Dell Precision I was looking at could have a Xeon @ 3.8GHz but that laptop was almost exactly double the price for a similar spec. The mobile GPU in the Alienware will be the 980M which is the equivalent to the Quadro M5000M, which is ridiculously expensive.
Agreed the W9100 won't do much for Inventor, but Showcase is buttery smooth on it! And if I never need to run 6 screens simultaneously at 4K the W9100 has me covered 
This is up from an IPI of 7.3 after I OC'd to 3.6 GHz and bumped up the turbo to 4.5 GHz.
After quickly going through all 29 pages I would say that my modeling time might be in the top five. 
@Neil_Cross: this makes for some interesting reading: http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core-i7-6820HK-vs-Intel-Core-i7-6700K
I expected the 6800HK to blow the 6700K CPU out of the water but from the figures on the page above, the only difference I could see is the memory bandwidth of the 6800HK is doubled whereas everything else is identical. (with the notable exception of the default Turbo clock speed).
Is that page correct?
I would have expected the 6700K to be the better chip as the other one on the sheet, the 6820HK, is a mobile CPU in a laptop... I'd always expect a desktop chip to outperform a mobile chip from the same generation
No idea who is interested in this, but I've just found a registry switch for Inventor which has increased my graphics performance by up to 50% on an already impressive score.
I need to make sure it doesn't screw up anything else before I mention it! But **** the graphic test went turbo mode!
Ladies and gents, Skylake fans, I present to you the first 12.0 point score in the bench test and a new 1st place (I think), game on!
The above was done as a one off quick test, the next test was then re-run using 3 cycles. Slightly differing bench totals but the same 12.0 result.
If the stars aligned on all bench totals I think it might have jumped to 12.1, but I'm happy with that.
Hi @Neil_Cross
Yes please tell! 🙂
Oh and well done on that score! I believe you are king of the hill for the moment. 
Allriiiight. 
Here's my benchmark. Old stuff low score.
What's that register tho?!
So obviously do this entirely at your own risk, I haven't established the long term implications of changing these settings and they have been changed purely because it makes stuff go faster, there are visible quality decreases going on as a result.
With Inventor closed, go to key:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\SOFTWARE\Autodesk\Inventor\RegistryVersion20.0\System\Preferences\GraphicsUtil
Change:
UseMultiThreading to 0 | this gives an immediate 50% boost to FPS and as you can see from my results, gives a marginal increase to other processes however this could have a negative impact on other areas of Inventor.
UseAdvancedEffect to 0 | this simplifies and dumbs down the graphics by a noticeable margin, but still workable. There is a visible lack of anti-aliasing when this is at 0.
UseAccel to 0 | no idea what this does, but having it set on sounds like something is accelerating so setting it to 0 can only make shiz go fastah ryt?
Modify these at your own risk, backup the registry if you need to, obviously I'm not responsible for anything going wrong nor are Autodesk or anyone else other than the person who changed the keys!
Edit: I don't have a system to test it on but I suspect the "UseMultiThreading" key will only apply to computers with a CPU which supports hyperthreading.
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