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]

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@Mario-Villada wrote:

It looks like the guys from Solid Works copied the hardware recommendations from this forum

see here :

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Oh my gosh, that's a bit embarrassing.  I scanned over it and the first thing I noticed was the guy saying "they had plugged the monitor cable into the onboard graphics card"

What's an onboard graphics card? It's an integrated graphics processor, it's a processing unit on the same die as the CPU, it's a chip not a card!

That's understandable though, possibly a misprint or a poor use of terminology, but then he said this:

"The best solution is to have two SSDs with Windows on one, and the data on the other, but not everybody can afford two"

I think you're confusing a "SSD" for a "diamond ring" or a "pet tiger".  What year is this...!? You can buy a 1TB Samsung SSD for $100! Or a 512GB SSD for $50! If you can't afford that then the quality of your SSD is the least of your worries!

I do enjoy listening to people who exhibit symptoms of the Dunning-Kruger effect

[Anonymous]

XPS 9570 stats

[cfagerst]

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@AtleOdegaard wrote:

This certainly confirms my suspicions of the i9-9900K being the best available CPU for use with Inventor. Now to find a workstation that actually features this CPU. Any pointers anyone? The company I work for usually buys HP workstations but they don't offer the 9900 as far as I can find. 

I know, build it yourself!  But we need something with a service plan.. 

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i9-9900k would be best for inventor, yes, because of the 5GHz max turbo speed. (Not because of the 8 cores, except for rendering). The i7-8086K would perform similarly. The main reason you don't get these yet in any big brand ISV certified workstations is that they have a motherboard with the C246 chipset in order to support the E series Xeons and ECC ram too. The chipset only seems to support 8th gen CPUs at this point. Also looking at the VRMs on these cheap looking OEM workstation boards, one will draw the conclusion that there's no way they would run the insanely power hungry (up to 200W even on stock settings according to some reviews) i9-9900K.

I have some workstations with a 8700K, and even that one overheats on both cpu and VRMs and throttles like crazy under full load (Cinebench score only 1000 when properly cooled custom build with exact same spec does 1400, that's a 40% difference...). Inventorbench score was similar though, as it mostly uses only 1 core...

If you need a big brand machine with 3 year onsite warranty, you need to look at the gaming systems of said brand. I just ordered a Dell Alienware Area 51m laptop with the 9900K and a RTX2080. I was able to get it with the same 3yr prosupport as their workstations. I'll post ivbench scores when it arrives. I'm a bit concerned on how they've managed to cool this beast CPU in an laptop... I think this is the only laptop which you can get with a 9900K (They've actually used the socketed desktop part) at the moment.

[cfagerst]

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@Anonymous wrote:

XPS 9570 stats

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5.65 seems a bit low for that spec. Then again, you seem to be running 4K, which most likely will be the reason for that score. In FullHD you shold get something between 9-10, with framerates up to 150fps (or Hz like ivbench likes to call it). How are the temps with that hexacore i7 on e.g Cinebench or a similar test that utilizes all 12 threads to 100%? I've found all i7 8th gen (H model 6core version) laptops to be quite toasty and noisy because that cpu likes to draw 80W when you stress it, even though it has a 45W TDP.

[Neil_Cross]

The i7-8850H in a HP Zbook 17.

This one:

[mdavis22569]

Is this the laptop you were showing me and telling me about at AU? 

I'm over carrying that brick Alienware laptop everywhere when traveling..... 

[Neil_Cross]

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@mdavis22569 wrote:

Is this the laptop you were showing me and telling me about at AU? 

I'm over carrying that brick Alienware laptop everywhere when traveling..... 

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It is indeed.  However it's even more of a brick than the Alienware, it's like carrying a sack of concrete posts in your bag.  Could look at the 15" variations but a 17" mobile workstation is always gonna be like this for now.

[mdavis22569]

I've been using my Surface Pro more and more ... 

While it can't get crazy on it with large files... 

I have Inventor / Revit  running on it with Vault Basic. 

Betting the Benchmark would be low... but I might do it for the fun of it for others to see.

[nutral]

Below is my Test with the same cpu, Good thing about this cpu is that the multiplier is not locked, so i upped the turbo clock to 4,4ghz.

Weird thing is that my score is faster than the zbook except the graphics test.

[Anonymous]

It does get quite warm, and the fan doesn't seem to help. Although, I've seen multiple threads online about others with the same laptop having the same problem.

[leowarren34]

The biggest issue I have with laptops is not all have adequate cooling solutions and so never reach true potential due to t-junction, however the above laptop scores are really good.

@mdavis22569 

I'm definitely interested in the Surface benchmark data, see how well the small form factors do.

[edarlak]

Can someone educate me a bit on what the results mean?

If I have one workstation with an IPI of 6.08, and another with an IPI of 10.57, how much "faster" is the second machine?

We have a corporate IT manager looking to push HP Z440 workstations on us, and looking at the E5-1650V4/Quadro M4000 specs, it seems like that will be a very slow workstation for Inventor compared to what we already have.

I will be testing one of the HP Z440's next week and comparing it to my i7-6700k GTX980Ti workstation.  I'd like to present the performance difference in a XX% faster/slower format.

[Neil_Cross]

It sounds like you're in a time warp here, both the 1650v4 and the 6700k are almost 3 and 4 years old respectively, neither should be considered an option for a 'new' workstation (I assume you're just using the 6700k as a reference?).  But for perspective, I have the 1650v4 in all my workstations in the office and they're soon to be up for replacement as part of a regular refresh cycle.  The 1650v4 was the absolute top notch best Xeon you could run Inventor on... 3 years ago.  It's still actually a great CPU for Inventor, but it's madness to consider it for a new workstation today, my AU class should explain what is the best choice and the PC used was a HP Z Workstation.  Also, the Quadro M4000 is 2 generations old now, just as crazy to buy that as it is the old Xeon.

Also the IPI score shouldn't be used as a metric in that context, it's too simple for that.  Way back in this thread I built a cheap PC for £400 and cheesed the test for a score of around IPI 9.0... but that PC was completely unsuitable for Inventor.

So to I guess answer the questions you didn't ask:

Don't buy the Z440 with the 1650v4, that's stupid, it's too old and already made obsolete by newer products.

Watch my AU class and buy the PC I showcased there, it's still the best proper workstation that money can buy for Inventor today.

[cfagerst]

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@edarlak wrote:

Can someone educate me a bit on what the results mean?

If I have one workstation with an IPI of 6.08, and another with an IPI of 10.57, how much "faster" is the second machine?

We have a corporate IT manager looking to push HP Z440 workstations on us, and looking at the E5-1650V4/Quadro M4000 specs, it seems like that will be a very slow workstation for Inventor compared to what we already have.

I will be testing one of the HP Z440's next week and comparing it to my i7-6700k GTX980Ti workstation.  I'd like to present the performance difference in a XX% faster/slower format.

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The IPI number is not the best indicator of the performance you'll get, although it's a pretty good indicator of how inventor is going to run, but the loading/saving times etc. can fluctuate a lot based on how/where inventor is installed etc. and IMO have too large of an impact on the final IPI score.

I would mostly look at the refresh rate numbers for shaded, and shaded with edges, and make a presentation out of those.

The spec your IT manager is trying to push is ancient. Big facepalm for anyone who buys such equipment new in 2019. Both the CPU and GPU is over 4 years old... A P2000 quadro will outperform the M4000, and will in most scenarios be enough for the heavily CPU bottlenecked inventor. https://gpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Nvidia-Quadro-M4000-vs-Nvidia-Quadro-P2000/m37687vsm257811

Basicly what inventor needs in order to be as fast as possible is a CPU with as fast as possible IPC (Instructions per clock) and clock speed. Currently the i9-9900K and the i7-8086K would be the fastest ones on stock speeds. For an easy comparison on how fast a cpu will be in inventor, just look at any of the many Cinebench single threaded performance charts you can find on the web, for example this: https://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/cpu_benchmark-cinebench_r15_single_core-7

That i7-6700K/GT 980ti is going to smoke that Z440 in inventorbench... I'm estimating IPI 8ish vs 10-11 with refresh rate speeds 30-60% faster on the 6700K machine. When OC:ed to 5GHz the 6700K will perform similarly to the 5GHz (on single core turbo) 9900K and 8086K. Intel's IPC hasn't increased since skylake...

[edarlak]

It seems as though I was sent the wrong specs, hence the outdated Z440.

So, long story short, I have been building the workstations for the last ~15 years at my company, last workstation I built was an i7-6700K GTX 980Ti, my current workstation. A new corporate IT dept is taking over all workstation builds.

The correct spec for the proposed new workstations are:

HP Workstation Z2 Mini G3 - Xeon E3-1245V5 3.5 GHz - 16 GB -512 GB

Almost fell out of my chair when I saw these specs.  The machine costs about what I would have spent on a RTX 2080Ti...

What kind of perf in Inventor can I expect from this unit vs my current i7-6700K GTX 980Ti machine?

[Neil_Cross]

It's going to be far worse.  The Mini G3 is absolutely unsuitable for 3D CAD, if you buy them you're going to have a REALLY bad time.  They use Intel HD Graphics, there's only one variation which comes with a GPU and that's a rotten awful old completely dismal Quadro M620.  Do not buy the Mini G3 for Inventor, it's not suitable.

[mdavis22569]

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What kind of perf in Inventor can I expect from this unit vs my current i7-6700K GTX 980Ti machine?

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I have an i7-6700k ....use it daily for support for Inventor / Revit / Civil 3D / AutoCAD / 3DS Max ...

but I have a GTX1070 card. Can you update the card?

[Neil_Cross]

I dunno if you're aware of it, but my AU class defines what the right workstation should be.  It's pinned to the front page of the Inventor forum, it's endorsed by the Inventor team, it's the gospel textbook on what should be purchased right now for a vendor/OEM unit.

Can you not just send that to your IT guys and if they choose to ignore the advice, then that's on them?

[mdavis22569]

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@Neil_Cross wrote:

I dunno if you're aware of it, but my AU class defines what the right workstation should be.  It's pinned to the front page of the Inventor forum, it's endorsed by the Inventor team, it's the gospel textbook on what should be purchased right now for a vendor/OEM unit.

Can you not just send that to your IT guys and if they choose to ignore the advice, then that's on them?

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@Neil_Cross I think I've shared it 50-60 times .... share it for all of the Autodesk software. Give people some insight.

Only thing I add is for those not watching ..the Power Supply.   I make sure they have 800-1000 watt 

[Neil_Cross]

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@mdavis22569 wrote:

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@Neil_Cross wrote:

I dunno if you're aware of it, but my AU class defines what the right workstation should be.  It's pinned to the front page of the Inventor forum, it's endorsed by the Inventor team, it's the gospel textbook on what should be purchased right now for a vendor/OEM unit.

Can you not just send that to your IT guys and if they choose to ignore the advice, then that's on them?

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@Neil_Cross I think I've shared it 50-60 times .... share it for all of the Autodesk software. Give people some insight.

Only thing I add is for those not watching ..the Power Supply.   I make sure they have 800-1000 watt 

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Thing is, you can't specify the power supply in a vendor/OEM unit, you get what you're given and they adjust the wattage to suit the spec, that's why I didn't go into depth on it.

I need to make a new version of the class and shorten it right down, it's bob on for the AU class but as a YouTube video it's too long.  I need to get it down to around 10 minutes and just go right to the point.  It's on the to-do list.