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.

[matroosoft]

Haven't changed any of the settings in the drivers. I've reinstalled the drivers a few times because I had a very laggy mouse and keyboard response. Seems it had something to do with conflicting drivers (Realtek vs Nvidia HD Audio driver).

My monitor is on default resolution (1600x3200) but the strange resolution Inventor Bench picks probably has something to do with having the task bar on the left instead of bottom? Btw, no I don't have any virtual machine running.

[Neil_Cross]

What's your monitor brand and model number? i.e. LG 34UC97C or Dell SE2216H

1600x3200 isn't a default standard resolution? Standard 16:9 monitors would be 1920x1080, 2560x1440 or 3840x2160

[matroosoft]

Sorry I meant 1600x1200.. Brand/model: LG L2000CN-SF.

[Neil_Cross]

Right click on your desktop, go to Nvidia Control Panel and then Change Resolution, can you see what your refresh rate is?

The 1050Ti doesn't have a VGA port but if you're using a really old adapter or cable it could be limiting the refresh rate to 30Hz.  Just checking to rule all this out.

[matroosoft]

It's on 60Hz..

[Anonymous]

Hi

Very nice tool 🙂

Here is the score on my desktop (I configured and built it myself)

I used to have a PNY Quadro P4000 8GB, but had to swap it due to "economic reasons" 🙂 

Perhaps the score would be better on graphics with that still onboard, but I honestly have not experienced any diffrence in my workflow after swapping it with a "gaming card"

[leowarren34]

Really nice bit of software, even my frakenstein rig does really well, the hex core chews through this,

My results:

[Neil_Cross]

You should be getting a much better score with that 7800X, something is causing a bottleneck somewhere.

Just for reference, this is buried way back in the thread now but I pulled a 9.16 using a 2 core Pentium, the entire PC parts list was £400 at the time. 

[leowarren34]

I should, I'm currently saving for 8gb more ram as i currently have 8gb, my graphics card is a GTX 960 which may be a minor bottle neck but with recent gpu prices an upgrade wont be soon

[brotherkennyh]

Just a shot in the dark, but have you benchmarked that SSD? Is it in an M.2 slot or a PCI-e slot? Not all motherboards can run these drives at full speed in every PCI-e slot, particularly if thats a slot sharing lanes with another slot/device.

Your motherboard manual will tell you which resources are available for each device.

[peter.ensing]

Hey Neil and all!

I'm getting confused about the choice to either go for a Xeon/Quadro, i7/Quadro or i7/GTX setup.

Most of the benchmarks here are i7/GTX it seems to be with 10+ scores.

Right now I have a HP Zbook G2 with i7-4810MQ CPU @ 2.80GHz and Quadro K4100M, 32 Gb ram and main SSD.

My colleague has a HP Zbook G3 with i7-6820HQ CPU @ 2.70GHz and Quadro M4000M, 32 Gb ram and main SSD.

We both get about the same average score of 1-7,71.

But whats with all the fuzz about a workstation that needs a Xeon for ECC modules with a dedicated Quadro card to be sure you have a solid rig? Is it true that Autodesk/Inventor ignores openGL so that standard gamingcards can be used just as good as Quadro?

Are the benefits of Xeon with ECC modules compared to a i7 CPU this much higher that you should use a Xeon which has often a slower core speed?

Hope you guys can give me some short info about what is "best" for Inventor.

PS. Thanks Neil for the great Inventor tutorials! it made my progress from Solidworks to Inventor way easier!

Cheers, Peter

[leowarren34]

As for GTX vs Quadro

Chip for chip they have brothers which use the same chip for each tier, eg a GK110 powers a quadro and a gtx 780, a bit old I know, the main benefit with quadros is that there is minimal variation as they are built by Nvidia rather than board partners, they often have more VRAM and have other features that may benefit CAD, however they have a price tag to reflect that.

GTX on the otherhand are designed for gamers are assembled by board partners and cost much less than a quadro. If you have the budget and don't require Quadro features like mosaic or massive amounts of VRAM, go with a TITAN or GTX card

I7 VS Xeon

Main bonus with Xeons is that they have more cores, can have ECC memory and are more power efficient, however I have found the current I7X/I9X to be fine as they have higher speeds and similar performance at a fraction of the cost due to different motherboards

Linus Explains GTX vs Quadro: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U5Npt1BSF04

Linus looks at CAD systems: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G-90qEJAVkU

Overall a Quadro will do massively better coupled with a Hex Core (8700k or 7800X)

[pball]

To add a little more.

The higher clock speeds of an i7/i9 cpu will help inventor more than additional cpu cores/threads. The ECC ram support Xeon adds has little use in non mission critical things like 3D modeling.

Quadros are good if you have other programs that can render on the gpu, other wise for just Inventor GTX cards are a much better investment cost to performance wise.

[Anonymous]

The main advantages of the XEONS are ECC-Support and much more important in some cases: Max Memory Size.

For non-overclocking the most important point to use Inventor is the turbo clock speed. The new workstation CPUs XEON W-2xxx can work with up to 4.5 GHz.

Comparison:

https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/compare-products.html/processors?productIds=123613,...

For raytracing 8 cores and more are very nice. 🙂

The best CPU depends always on your workflow. For simple part construction with Inventor, even a 800 Dollar Laptop could be much more than you need.

As long as Inventor does not use GPU-computing, the graphics-card (consumer vs. Quadro) doesn't matter.

[peter.ensing]

@leowarren34

@pball

@Anonymous

Many thanks for the info!                      

[leowarren34]

Anytime, 🙂

Best value for performance is an I7 or I9 X series as they have high clock speeds, high cores and are overclockable, GTX are better value but if want quadro like benefits go for TITAN

[Anonymous]

I downloaded the latest version which posted yesterday 05/18/2018. My pc is several years old.

[Anonymous]

My new build. Much better.

[Neil_Cross]

That is pretty good, what's with that resolution though? What kind of monitor are you using there?

[Anonymous]

It's an old Dynex LCD TV that I repurposed. 720P. https://www.amazon.com/dp/B001ANZPFQ/?tag=mh0b-20&hvadid=77996657963323&hvqmt=e&hvbmt=be&hvdev=c&ref...

It sucks being an over the hill pensioner. I have returned to school at 64 years of age and there is little money left over for frills such as a LG 34" LG 29.1 aspect ratio monitor. lol

default settings 1360x768.