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]

Overall looks solid, the CPU Turbos to 5.0 GHz so Inventor should be able to stretch it's legs. Performance could be higher as we've had a 16 using a 9900K and the 9900KF is the same processor without an iGPU. Main differences between your system and the 16 was in Storage (as they were using Optane) and they had a Vega GPU. However I doubt the Vega made any significant difference as Inventor isn't GPU accelerated instead more reliant on VRAM as assemblies get bigger. My final observation is RAM speed as 2133 is slow for DDR4 but I don't have any data or research on how RAM speed can affect Inventor.

[cfagerst]

Had some spare time and put the all new Inventor 2021 in my home gaming rig. Here's what happened:

I dare say the IVBench score seems quite promising.

The 9700K was running 5.2GHz on the first 2 cores.

[doug.johnston]

Just an update to my score.

I added another 8 GB of RAM, changed multi-thread setting to 0,  turned off 2 of my 3 montiors and ran Inventor Bench on (1) monitor only and got an IPI increase.

Now I want to get over the 13.00 score and hopefully that should happen when I upgrade with more and faster RAM.

[joshv_marcrest]

In case someone finds this helpful, we built a new CAD workstation, no overclocking (yet!), benchmark results:

14.75 IPI

(Admittedly the 1660Ti isn't necessary.)

[leowarren34]

Geez @cfagerst Looks like you've won the Silicon Lottery!

[bwatson1967]

@Neil_Cross  can you send me a link to the HP desktop systems you recommend a while back. I cannot remember the name of them. We would like to just buy a complete system as inexpensive as possible.

[Mario-Villada]

I asked a similar question a while back. you can see Neils response here : Re: How fast is your Inventor PC really?

My issue was the recommended specs are outdated But Neil gave us some good advise in getting a new one.

Have look.

[cfagerst]

The optimal Inventor build from HP, that I myself would get today, would be this:

You could save a couple of hundred bucks, and go for the P2200 as GPU also, and still pull pretty much the same score on this test, but for the price difference the RTX would get you more VRAM, much more processing power for maybe something else that can use it (vray gpu rendering or such), and of course it supports RTX. The P2200 is still based on the more aged Pascal architechture.

Tou could also consider the 9900 non K for some more saving, and the tradeoff would be only slightly less performance and less cooling on the cpu most likely (K model had option for the "Z-Cooler" which sounds fancy, as these things get hotter than hell). Also the Xeon E-2278G would be the Xeon equivalent of the 9900 non K, if you want you sticker to say Xeon instead of i9, or need ECC ram.

I used this configurator:

https://store.hp.com/us/en/ConfigureView?catalogId=10051&langId=-1&storeId=10151&urlLangId=&catEntry...

There you select the amount of RAM, storage etc. to suit your needs..

Dell also has a similar offering and configurator with their Precision 3630, most likely Lenovo and Fujitsu has too.

[Neil_Cross]

Laptops are getting crazy... Dell Precision 7540

[Neil_Cross]

So I'm just gonna drop the highest ever score here and leave it there, this it totally stock/Intel factory settings, and then work on hitting a 20 with an overclock.

[mdavis22569]

nice ...looking at a 10 gen now.  My older PC is about to get retired that I got the one high score with. 

[mluterman]

boom!...and that's all she wrote...(for now, natch).

[brunnic]

HP zbook 15v G5 

[RNDinov8r]

Curios, Niclas... HP touts that as a CAD workstation...their web page even shows it running solid works in the marketing pics, and it is certified by AutoDESK and SolidWorks, but with a score under 10, I am curious as to your thoughts on how it truly performs as a work station?

[Neil_Cross]

@brunnic your save time of 8+ seconds suggests that something is wrong.  On that laptop, it should be between 3-4 seconds, which means that something is interfering with the test, and it will be adding time to the rest of the tests.  That laptop should be in the region of 13-14 easily.

As you're on Inventor 2019, start by closing Inventor and the test, lowering your display resolution to 1920x1080, open them again and re-running the test.  That'll be a good baseline to start from.

If it's still way less than 13, investigate whether you've got other things open or running that might interfere.  Security programs which perform threat defence scanning of applications can do this too.

[Anonymous]

@Neil_Cross  Posted the print with the wrong account.. 

Will have a look on the save time. We have a few Zbook G5 and zbook 14u and they also have higher save time..

The laptop was connected to a docking station and HP Z27n high res. Will do the test without dock next time..

Will be interesting if it can hit 13 with the Nvidia P620 GPU..

[Anonymous]

@RNDinov8r 

Our users have not complained so far 🙂 For our purpose it works fine. Using it for Inventor and Vault only. Don't know if it's good enough for other cad software with Quadro P620 GPU..

but for ~$1600 with the extra 16gb ram stick it's a good deal.. 

[Anonymous]

@Anonymous_Cros

Just a quick update, have not found anything wrong with the laptop.. Need to continue investigate but so far put a lot of hours into it.. 

But you should try it and to review. Half price against the Dell and what does that give you..

//Andreas

[Anonymous]

Hello everyone, I'm on a very tight budget so I'm working Ryzen builds unless someone can give
a solid reason to switch back to Intel (my fav personally).

I'm building 2 PCs - one that will run Inventor 95% of the time and the other will run Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator 75% of the time / Inventor 25%. I'm making this note because I may invest more in a solid graphics card for Adobe Creative Suite.

Might go with 3800x due to core 3.9 GHz though YT reviews say 3700x is plenty. That being said, they aren't running Inventor which this forum is suggesting operates on higher core speed.

I also chose DDR4 3600 because I'm learning that higher speed utilizes the Ryzen 7 CPU better.

I've attached 2 screenshots of builds.  First one is for the PC mostly using Inventor (thus the cheaper graphics card), and the second PC is mostly Adobe. 

Is my overall thinking way off or do you have recommendations? Neil, I watched your video regarding Intel vs AMD so I'm a bit torn and indecisive.

Final note: Our current PC is i7-4790 with GTX 745 @ IPI of 8.04 (ouch)

Thank you! ~ Eric

[Anonymous]

If anyone has advice on my list please let me know. I replied to Neil but I'm not certain he visits this forum as often anymore. I'm working on a build under $1500 and hoping I'm on the right track. Having a bit of a time deciding on a motherboard as well.

Thank you all!