Workstation configuration for Inventor Stress Analysis
You might find @Neil_Cross's Invmark benchmark site useful.
Part of the benchmark score is based on FEA performance. Click on a result and select the "complete report" to see the score breakdown by category.
To the best of my knowledge, Inventor FEA wants high clock speed and lots of cores. Most of the machines at the top of the leaderboard are Core i9s, not Xeons. I don't believe that Inventor FEA or Inventor Nastran use GPU acceleration. I'd look into a 3rd party code for that feature.
Autodesk seems to be focusing their FEA development effort on the cloud tools in Fusion 360. Have you looked into the Inventor->Fusion workflows for FEA? If they work for you, you might not need to purchase a FEA workstation at all.
Steve Walton
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Inventor 2025
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InvMark is exclusive to Inventors integrated simulation, if you're using Nastran then I've no idea what that wants tbh.
The InvMark FEA test will test both the meshing time and solver time, along with a parametric table analysis. So the results on the leaderboard are pretty representative of what's good, and frankly the FEA scores tend to follow the same trend as everything else in Inventor... the ADL 12th Gen i9's are currently the best at everything. There's a 64 Core Threadripper on the board which you can compare against, it's scores are terrible across the board including FEA.
Stay well clear of that Xeon Gold, you're not gaining anything in the way of clock speed as that's based on a really old architecture. If you bought that you'd be devastated with how it performed and it'd cost a liver and kidney.
The new Xeon platforms should be hitting the market soon but if you can't wait, I'd suggest either:
- Go for a mobile workstation with Core HX in
- Opt for the 11th Gen based Xeon workstations if you can find any
- Or spec in a 12900K, I don't know how good or bad Dell will cool that in the Precision towers... I'd suggest going for a tower on the larger size as I've seen (and heard) some horrific examples of OEMs trying to wedge high end i9's into mini towers, and the result is intolerable amounts of noise as they can't put a reasonable cooling solution in them.
The Core HX mobile workstations will hopefully be in the configurators and available for order within weeks, and they're outstanding. But obviously if you need a tower then you need a tower. But definitely absolutely stay clear of Xeons with Gold/Silver/Bronze in the name, they're just not suitable for Autodesk products.
Other than ray tracing, Inventor shouldn't really ever cause a CPU to reach anywhere near the TJunction max temperature regardless of the dataset size. Generally it's sustained multi-threaded operations that cause this and ray tracing is the only sustained CPU load case that Inventor has. The proof is on the InvMark board, 12th gen mobile workstations are as good as 12th gen desktops (stock). If your current laptop is having thermal issues then I would suspect this isn't a software issue, I've tested Inventor enough times with thousands of different datasets and throttling is never an issue, in fact quite the opposite, there's generally always performance headroom not being utilised.
That Lenovo does look impressive on paper and in marketting, but the points I raised earlier apply to this, potential noise etc I'm going to try and pull some strings and see if I can get my hands on one.
Which is your laptop/desktop motherboard model?
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