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.

[leowarren34]

@Mario-Villada That's a good point; I should really make an SSD library on my PC, I put my documents on my HDD as they don't benefit from speed, yet I still put all my IPT/IAM/IPN/DWG in my documents (Facepalm)

Although my part/assembly files are pretty small so limited benefit. 

[edarlak]

Looking to upgrade our Inventor & ACAD 2020 workstations.  I've been building them for years, last go around was a while ago (~2014).  Just want to list the major components here that I plan to go with to see if anyone has any better suggestions. We will not be going the Xeon/Quadro route, been there done that spent the money etc...

We have assemblies of upwards of 35,000-40,000 parts and will just now start generating control document drawings with Inventor as opposed to AutoCAD.  I did some testing and 6GB GPU's will likely work for many users, some will need 8GB.  I plan to just go with RTX 2070's on all machines for the 8GB unless someone has a better idea.

CPU: i9-9900K

GPU: GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 2070 Winforce 8GB (I would have went with a 1070 here but they cost more...) I prefer EVGA cards but can't find one as cheap as this GIGABYTE.

MB: ASUS Prime Z390-A

RAM: Kingston ValueRAM DDR4 2666 MHz 32 GB total (4 x 8 GB DIMM)

OS Drive: Samsung 970 Pro M.2 2280 1TB NVMe

Storage Drive: Repurpose our current OS Drive, Samsung 850 Pro 500GB

Again, the only thing on that list I am leery of is the GIGABYTE GPU, only because I have been buying EVGA for the past ~10 years.

If anyone has an Inventor Bench of a setup similar to that I'd appreciate taking a look.

[leowarren34]

@edarlak 

Don't worry about the GPU - Inventor isn't GPU Accelertated, it merely needs the VRAM, of which 8GB is plenty.

CPU- Fine choice, 5.0GHz is as fast as it gets at the moment. Just keep it cool so it can stretch its legs to 5GHz.

Motherboard: Doesn't affect performance apart from connectivity (Asus Prime should be fine)

Storage: Excellent, NVME is as good as it gets atm.

I currently run a i7-7800x with RTX 2070 with 16GB and score a 10.0 on Inventor bench so they should score much higher.

[RichM1]

I have that motherboard and processor and similar memory and hard drive but a 1070ti video card.

[cfagerst]

---

@edarlak wrote:

Looking to upgrade our Inventor & ACAD 2020 workstations.  I've been building them for years, last go around was a while ago (~2014).  Just want to list the major components here that I plan to go with to see if anyone has any better suggestions. We will not be going the Xeon/Quadro route, been there done that spent the money etc...

We have assemblies of upwards of 35,000-40,000 parts and will just now start generating control document drawings with Inventor as opposed to AutoCAD.  I did some testing and 6GB GPU's will likely work for many users, some will need 8GB.  I plan to just go with RTX 2070's on all machines for the 8GB unless someone has a better idea.

CPU: i9-9900K

GPU: GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 2070 Winforce 8GB (I would have went with a 1070 here but they cost more...) I prefer EVGA cards but can't find one as cheap as this GIGABYTE.

MB: ASUS Prime Z390-A

RAM: Kingston ValueRAM DDR4 2666 MHz 32 GB total (4 x 8 GB DIMM)

OS Drive: Samsung 970 Pro M.2 2280 1TB NVMe

Storage Drive: Repurpose our current OS Drive, Samsung 850 Pro 500GB

Again, the only thing on that list I am leery of is the GIGABYTE GPU, only because I have been buying EVGA for the past ~10 years.

If anyone has an Inventor Bench of a setup similar to that I'd appreciate taking a look.

---

i9-9900K is still the fastest cpu for single threaded use (Most of inventor except rendering and stress analysis). There's the 9900KS that's a slightly better binned 9900K with an 5GHz all core turbo, instead of 4.7, but runs hotter, and 5GHz all core should be achievable with any 9900K with some tweaking in the bios. There's also the 9900KF that lacks the iGPU, which you don't need if you have an ext. GPU. F model should be a bit cheaper than regular K.

If much rendering is done in inventor, or some other software that benefits from cores, one should consider the Ryzen 3900X, or 3950X, as they are almost as fast single core (Inventorbench 12.5-13) as 9900K, but significantly faster multicore.

My goto mobo for the 9900K(S/F) would be the Gigabyte Z390 Aorus Elite. This is similarly priced as the Asus Z390-A you considered, but has higher quality VRMs. https://www.overclock.net/forum/attachment.php?attachmentid=250662&d=1548963030 I use this mobo in my home gaming/inventor rig as in a few inventor rigs at work too.

For AMD Ryzen 3900X/3950X the MSI B450 Tomahawk is a solid budget alternative with ok VRMs, and any X570 board from ASUS will have good VRMs for the 12-16 core chips too. Here's a good list for those https://i.redd.it/v41vtfrvxkk31.png

Both 9900K(S/F) or Ryzen 39x0X are hot chips and need proper cooling. I'd recommend nothing less than a quality 240mm or larger AIO, or a high end air cooler in a well ventilated, preferably mesh front case that isn't too small.

For 32GB Ram, get 2x16GB instead of 4x8GB (The listed non HEDT (Z390,B450,X570) platforms only support Dual Channel. (4 sticks would be needed for quad channel on e.g X299, X399 or TRX40). Also get something faster than 2666 MHz (Only a very slight impact on the score of this test but price should be roughly the same). You should be able to get a 3200MHz, or even 3600MHz 2x16GB kit for roughly the same price as 4x2666 basic KVR DIMMs.

If you choose the intel platform (PCIe Gen 3), the Samsung 970Pro is a solid alternative. If on a budget, get the Adata SX8200 Pro with the same performance for half the price, if you can live with the slightly lower endurance.

If you choose the AM4 platform with X570 chipset (PCIe Gen 4), you could consider waiting for the Samsung 980 Pro or get some of the already available PCIe 4.0 NVME SSDs. https://www.anandtech.com/show/15352/ces-2020-samsung-980-pro-pcie-40-ssd-makes-an-appearance

The Gigabyte GPU is fine. Windforce cooler is beefy and efficient. As said here before, the GPU power of such a card for the non GPU accelerated inventor, is more than enogh, and the 8GB VRAM is good. If you can get a RTX 2060 Super 8GB for cheaper, then that should be good too and basicly as fast as a 2070 (non Super) in GPU intensive applications too. (This would be the cheapest 8GB nvidia card now when 1070 is EOL). If on a budget an AMD RX 570/580 8GB or a 5500XT 8GB is fine for inventor too (At least RX570/580 is, 5500XT haven't tested yet but should be fine as the 5700 I tested was fine).

[jschmidtPHDZ9]

MSI WS75 Notebook.  Way slimmer than my previous HP Zbook and Dell Precision 7740, but hindsight not sure the premium was worth it (was running SW, so didn't benchmark those).  I think for the size of assemblies, I won't run into any speed issues until its time for a new unit anyway.  Also note, I didn't kill many background services.

MSI WS75

[bwatson1967]

I'm not sure why they tell you to kill your background services anyhow, you are always going to be running those services when your designing. To me its not a true test unless those services are running unless your just trying to get the highest score possible, which again you will not achieve when designing with those services running .

[leowarren34]

@bwatson1967 

Definitely, the only time I close my services is if I'm trying to do an absolute best case, but most of the time I do it with stuff in the background. For users on here it's useful to do a clean benchmark as it's easier to do an apples to apples comparison of hardware which becomes more fuzzy with additional factors such as background activities.

[mluterman]

I don't know if anyone is noticing, but there is zero improvement in having an Nvme drive for your OS & programs.  Yes, that's correct, zero.  I should know, I run Inventor 2020 at work on one (EVO 970), and at home on an EVO 860, std SSD.  So don't waste your money.  Nvme is only good (read: great) for sequential reads/writes, like for video editing.  Who cares if boot time is a bit faster, does anyone spend the whole day rebooting?  How did that become a benchmark?...

[Neil_Cross]

Samsung 970 Pro NVMe

Samsung 860 Evo SATA SSD

So there are a stack of examples which will utilise the benefits of NVMe, but here's not really the place to argue that.

Either way, not sure you can say its a waste of money now that NVMe drives are pretty much the same price as SATA SSDs.  The two drives above at 512GB are within the price of a dominos pizza apart from one another.  

[tom_vierling]

To be fair, there are NVME drives that are nearly equivalent in price to their SATA counterparts (usually under the 1TB mark) So the "wasting your money" is less valid than it used to be when NVME were 2-3x the cost of Sata SSD's. To you point however, very few programs benefit from these very high speed drives (Especially these upcoming PCI-E Gen 4 drives) so getting an NVME drive should not be a high priority, especially as a Storage drive outside very high resolution video editing. 

*Edit* Neil Beat me to it!

[leowarren34]

Hehe, for the first time you could run a pc with no data wires, they'd all be for power, at the really low end maybe one 24pin connector + CPU header + fans as not as many people have disc drives.

I love my NVME drive, I have both an 970 Evo and 860 Pro in my system. Why? Because my 860 was only 256gb and was practically full. The NVME drive was so easy to install and no wires although Samsung magician likes to tell you it's not genuine if you have an older version of magician 😂.

[tgregory3G7FA]

I just bought a WD Black 1TB NVMe (5ry warranty) for $149.99.   A Samsung SSD 860 EVO 1TB (5yr warranty) costs exactly the same... $149.99.

Thus I wasted no money and got a faster drive. Technically... it's cheaper as I don't need a cable for it.

What was your method to determine it's not faster for Inventor.  Gut feeling?  Did you time it in any way?  What size files?

[mluterman]

If you look at the numbers you posted, you can see the random reads and writes are close (certainly not off by an order of magnitude).  Also, you posted the 970 PRO, not the PLUS (or std version; and the PLUS only recently became common).  But when my home computer can get an 11.8 IV Bench score on an 860EVO (i7-6700k/Quadro K2000/16GB RAM) and my work computer gets a 15.09 IV Bench score (specs already posted on this thread; highest here on an 8th-gen) on a 970EVO (not PLUS or PRO), something is wrong here, and to make it seem like you will get 5X the performance is wrong; you simply won't (for CAD or otherwise).

[phlyx]

@leowarren34  Finally got a chance to run extensive tests (10) and also the XTU app.  Even running that many passes my score was still 9.99 and model save time was terrible at 10.53s.  Ran the XTU benchmark and scored 2714 Marks which comparing online is also terrible.  With XTU, CPU stayed under 20% but occasionally bumped to 50%.  Memory Utilization stayed below 7000MB.  Active cores sat at 1 but a couple times blipped to 8.  Below are the results but just not totally sure where to go from here.

[bwatson1967]

Mine shows HDD1 as a memory card for some reason and its really a 970 pro and I get this.

[RichM1]

Did you turn off the Update physical properties on save?

[phlyx]

Still not clear at all on why almost everyone has Model Save Time test results around 3s or 4s, yet we have screaming fast SDD's and ours are +10s.  The SDD benchmarks great when we run a disk benchmark but Inventor saves are creepingly slow.  Any suggestions?

[RichM1]

Do you have that box checked or unchecked?

[leowarren34]

@bwatson1967 That's an SD card not system memory.