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.

[DarrenP]

thats pretty neat

here is my results

this is on dell 6700m precison no SSD

[mcgyvr]

[Curtis_Waguespack]

Hi Raider_007,

I tried this 3 times (once after a clean reboot of my system) and hit an error each time. Here's the exception test in case it helps you debug. It could just be something on my system, but thought it might help. No need to follow up with me, as I don't really need a to use this tool at the moment.

And thanks for sharing this with the community,

Curtis

See the end of this message for details on invoking 
just-in-time (JIT) debugging instead of this dialog box.

************** Exception Text **************
System.ArgumentException: The parameter is incorrect. (Exception from HRESULT: 0x80070057 (E_INVALIDARG))
   at System.RuntimeType.ForwardCallToInvokeMember(String memberName, BindingFlags flags, Object target, Int32[] aWrapperTypes, MessageData& msgData)
   at Inventor.DisplayOptions.set_MinimumFrameRate(Double Param)
   at Inventor_Bench.frmMain.subDoGraphicsTest()

[mcgyvr]

Now if the benchmark tool could just tell me.. "If you bought "X" then the "Y" test would be "Z%" faster 

Or.. This tool suggests you replace your "X" first as that would be the best bang for the buck.. 

Or even.. "During the test your maximum RAM usage was X"

I've only got 16G of RAM.. It would be cool if it let me know how much of an improvement I would see from upgrading to 32G

[blair]

Nice,my results for my 3year old system. I was also downloading the three files for Enzo from the Beta site.

[Curtis_Waguespack]

My results after skipping the Graphic Test (due to the error mentioned previously):

Dell Precision M4800 laptop

[Raider_71]

Hi guys,

Wow it certainly looks lik its time for an upgrade for my old notebook if I look at some of the results on here!

Curtis, I will look into that issue and fix it. Thanks for the feedback!

Pieter

[-niels-]

Here's the result on my Alienware 17 R3 laptop:

Nice benchmark, i'm happy with the result. 🙂

Are you going to use the data we post here to make some sort of comparison?

I think that would be nice, it's hard to judge how a system ranks just by these numbers...

[Raider_71]

Hi Niels,

Yes I was thinking of doing that as it would make a bit more sense. Especially because of the difference in Inventor 2015 and 2016. One would want to compare apples to apples and including looking at the different categories.

But I will see if I get time for that... 🙂

[-niels-]

Nice!
I did notice that most of the test posted are at wildly different screen resolutions... you might want to make your benchmark set that to a default value i think.
(or at least to a fixed aspect ratio)
But then again, i might be nitpicking (is that the word...yeah, has to be the word 😛 )

[blair]

Probably why my GTX-980 is showing slow, having to push around almost double the pixels.

They can pry my HP ZR30w 30" monitor from my cold dead hands.

[Anonymous]

I also had to skip the graphics test on an Unhandled Exception...

[Anonymous]

As a short answer to the question about RAM, and the CPU differences in the comparison list. Please correct me if I am wrong in my suppositions.

1) I believe AutoCAD uses only 2 cores maximum at the moment. Multi-core(s) beyond that should have no bearing on results.

2) Having 16Gb RAM on my system at home and having a usage guage running constantly, I have never seen AutoCAD pull more than 6Gb. i.e. I have never seen my available RAM get below 10Gb.

*Note: The type and version of OS being used will bog down your CPU processes. This will effect warm start times only I would think. I will post my results as possible...having a 19 month old boy tends to keep my time sitting at my computer to a minimum.

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)

[Anonymous]

BTW for more reading material, I thought this was an excellent article on this same subject.

http://autodesk.typepad.com/bimagination/2014/12/update-recommended-graphics-cards-for-autodesk-infr...

[gavbath]

Wow! Good on you! Thanks for making this available to the community. I imagine many people will find this very useful.

[AlexFielder]

Aaaaand, I couldn't help myself (Thanks @PaulMunford !):

I did only build this system as a gaming machine about two months ago but it goes to illustrate just how important a fast CPU is I think - As I was posting this I noticed that the HDD1 value is incorrect- I am actually running a Samsung 850 Pro 512GB- not a 1TB as illustrated above.

🙂

[AlexFielder]

This is the result on a 3 year old system:

This time the Samsung 850 Pro SSD was correctly Identified. The OS on this machine is also Windows 10.

An interesting comparison I think you'll agree.

One thing that would aid in the "Upgrade X to achieve better Y" comparisons is to add the Cache values available for each CPU since that may have an effect.

Nite folks!

[rhasell]

Cool.

5 year old system. I see I have a bottleneck with my RAM, and a pretty slow HDD. Graphics still the business.

[Paul-Mason]

Don't know why but this tool is reporting my "E" drive as HDD1, when it's NOT used by inventor or any other that windows file backup, it is merely storage of & backups, and HDD2 is my MIRROR drive but NOT my main working drive "C"

However from the results I seem to have quite a good machine, a HP Z420 etc. see the spoiler below.