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.

[gavbath]

HP ZBook 17"

[AlexFielder]

HP Elitebook 8770w:

The tool may already do this, I don't know but it would have server as a handy guide in terms of what to purchase if the developers had the tool phone home with the results of each test.

Perhaps there is an XML output or something we can collate as a kind of hardware survey?

EDIT: I checked the source using ILspy; it doesn't phone home or store any of the details of each run. The XML output would actually be fairly easy to implement.

[SBix26]

Any chance of posting this on your A360 account?  I can't reach Dropbox from work.

Sam B

[Mike_69]

Actually Alex, I think it shows just how much it is not important. Your save times are great, and that's all good and well, but your shading and rotations are half what the next post is and they have an i7 2600K, and really, when I am modeling it's all about how fast I can rotate, shade, translate/move, and insert or modify the next feature. I would only care about my save times when the delay gets into the minutes. As the next post below that stated, it really is all about graphics processors. i.e. your graphics card makes or brakes your scores/system insofar as CAD is concerned. Even the FEA and Fluid Dynamics applications are more and more graphics card based.

As a side note, I think I will be able to run the test on my system either tonight or tomorrow night. I am more and more interested to see how a non-hyper threaded CPU will do with a technically slow HD.

=============

My System:

Windows 7 Pro X64

EVGA Z68 SLI Motherboard

Intel i5 2500K

MSI GTX 970 ME

16Gb Corsair Vengeance DDR3 RAM

All saves to secondary HD, WD 1Tb Blue, 7500RPM. Applications loaded to Primary 300Gb Velociraptor 10K RPM.

AutoCAD/Inventor 2013

Display: Dell U2410F 1920X1200 (No graphics on secondary monitor of same type)

======================================================

[Raider_71]

Sure will do.


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[ASI_Aaron]

Was able to re-run this with Pieter's updated installer.  Finally received some graphics results...

[WHolzwarth]

That's interesting. My Desktop system (Working since September 2011) has pretty good results, but Model Save Time is rather slow (16,33 s).

What is saved in this task, and on which drive?

In my case, the Drive Information seems not correct. I have:

C: Samsung 850 SSD (1 TB nominal)

D:, F:, G:, H: HDD WD Caviar 2TB nominal (2x in RAID1)

HDD2 as noted on the list is built in, but not activated in BIOS.

Another remark: My system has 6 DIMM slots, but only 4 of them are listed.

Nevertheless I like this benchmark

Walter

[mcgyvr]

Sure hope my boss doesn't see this post...

He just told me they were thinking about getting me a new computer as I've had this for 1.5 years now

So spoiled am I 

My current system is ranking right at the top of all that have posted so far.. 

Since I ran this on my "old" computer a few minutes ago I'll post old and current (my computers get passed to IT guy when I'm done with them so I had him run it)

Current computer (already posted on page 1 but I'll post it again side by side the old computer)

My Old computer (IT computer now)

[ASI_Aaron]

---

@mcgyvr wrote:

Sure hope my boss doesn't see this post...

He just told me they were thinking about getting me a new computer as I've had this for 1.5 years now

So spoiled am I 

---

this is my 3rd machine in last 2 years.  I like being the IT department as well 

[WHolzwarth]

Hmm. I just noted that Ctrl-C didn't work well during my test comparisons. I've pasted the same pic most of the time.

I need to have some more looks. Perhaps it's time for testing a GTX card.

Walter 

[Raider_71 · Accepted solution]

Hi guys just to answer some of the questions out there:

First of all, there is a new version which solves the crash during the graphics test which some of you experienced. Thanks Aaron for testing the new version for me.

I have posted the new version ( version 1.1.1.0 ) on A360 here as well: http://a360.co/1Mfj8hG

I tried to edit my original post to add this link in there but could not find a way to. I thought it was possible to edit your own post??

As for the HDD detection sequence and the limitation of currently only supporting two drives’ information. I will look at changing the way this is represented. The sequence I would presume is reflecting the SATA port number the drive has been connected to. So SATA port 3 for instance could still end up being the C drive as during the Windows install process this is specified.

So the other question was about Model Save Time. This happens in the “My Documents” folder. After having run the app once you should see a file called “InventorbenchPart.ipt” inside your My Documents folder. So the time it takes to save this part in this location represents the Model Save Time i.e. HDD performance. Yes I know this is a bit presumptuous and rigid but I am willing to listen to some suggestions.

I will also have to look at representing the memory module information differently as some of you out there have more than 4 memory slots.

Regarding writing out the results. For sure, this can be done. I would prefer a CSV text file. Not too familiar with XML… 🙂

Thanks guys.

[sistcon]

[Daniel248]

Nice test Pieter - good work, well done!

My results (1 year old self-build PC, like @AlexFielder 😞

Seeing that some people run the test with ‘Inventor Hardware Setting = Quality’, I’ve re-run the test with that setting (not much difference, really):

Spoiler

If this Benchmark included a rendering test as well, it would have given something to do to my CPU’s spare cores… Maybe you can incorporate that later on – that would make it more comprehensive.

[Frank-Oosterwaal]

Hi,

Here's mine.

Computer build for fluid simulation and rendering.

[SBix26]

Thanks very much for this tool, Pieter.  My little home-built with an i3 did remarkably well on modeling, but the ancient consumer-grade Radeon card is a bit lacking.  It runs Inventor without any noticable problems, but I don't push it very hard, either.

Sam B

Inventor Professional 2016 R3 SP1
Vault Basic 2016
Windows 7 Enterprise 64-bit, SP1

[JDMather]

Can you upload a Windows zip rather than rar to A360?

[mcgyvr]

---

@Anonymous wrote:

Can you upload a Windows zip rather than rar to A360?

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@JDMather

JD.. Use 7 zip..

http://www.7-zip.org/

Its free and works with RARs and many others..

I've seen many of your posts about RAR files and I didn't want to pay for Winzip either.. 7zip works great and is free..

[JDMather]

Not a chance will I ever again download a "free" program onto my clean machine.

[blair]

Look at all the fun you could be missing out on, refomat the HD, a clean install of the O/S, wait for all the updates and security patches to install from Microsoft. All the required reboots and then a nice clean fresh install of all your ADSK software along with the rest of your software you use.

[JDMather]

Actually, I just realized - this app is a free app from an unkown source.  

My curiosity just about got the better of me.

I'm sure it doesn't have some mal-ware hidden that will try to sell an enhanced version in a couple of weeks, but...

Not going to do anything based on what the results were - so I guess I will pass by this one too.

Autodesk should purchase the app and include it in Inventor.