performance???

[dyanosik]

Hello everyone this is my first post here and its a dusey!

At my company we have just been given new inventor machines, zenon quadcore 3 gig, 6 gig ram, nvidia quadro fx 3700 512mb vid cards, dual 24" widescreen monitors, vista buisness 64 bit. plus we are all on a 1 gig network connection.

These sound like awsome machines but they are running very slow. if i have two windows on top of each other and drag one aroung i get the windo leaving tails behind like it cannot handle the grafix. I had the former cadsupport tech in the otherday and he was appaled at how slow these machines are running, he mentioned that his inventor pro has a program to determin how well the machine is performing and what it recomends to fix any issues.

Does anyone know about this? I need some proof that these machines are running slow as my it department tells me there is nothing wrong with the system. I am a new inventer user and am still not very familliar with it.

Any help would be greatly appeciated! thanks.

[jonathan.landeros]

It sounds like something in the video card (although NVIDIA is usually pretty solid).

One thought is the video card driver. Is the driver the one certified by Autodesk? I've have seen good cards drag with a video card driver that isn't cooperating with Inventor.

[dyanosik]

yes we have made sure we are running the best driver, even tried a few to compare but still no help.

[jguest82179]

Hi Dyanosik, welcome to the forums.

What version of Inventor are you using?

Are these problems occuring only while using Inventor, or all of the time? (e.g., Will two explorer windows, one atop the other, cause the same problem? Or do you have to have inventor going before this happens?)

Jon.

[dyanosik]

inventor 09

yes this happens all the time and since posting i have found out our IT department bought the cheapest 667 mhz ram they could find. i am currently trying to ger some ddr3 ram approved for us and am hoping this is going to go a long way to solving our problem.

[jguest82179]

.....i have found out our IT department bought the cheapest 667 mhz ram they could find. i am currently trying to ger some ddr3 ram approved for us and am hoping this is going to go a long way to solving our problem.

I may be wrong, but I think that 667MHz is a DDR2 frequency, in which case you should cancel your order for DDR3 RAM ASAP - they are not cross compatible. They are both 240-pin, but the key is in a different place between DDR2 and DDR3. See here for further info.

If it's happening all of the time, even outside of Inventor before you have run Inventor (so the Inventor Quick Launch is not loaded as a TSR), then it's a Windows or hardware problem and not an Autodesk one. I'm not saying that we won't try to help you, just making sure we're looking in the right place for the problem.

I have built a number of systems on 64-bit Vista, with varying degrees of success. Most of them have been highly sucessful, but the one system that gave trouble was a draughting workstation (all of the others were home/personal PC's) and we went through a lot of things to get it to work. On the bright side though, it does work well now!

I know that this might seem basic, but please bear with me and go through these recommendations. They are written for the novice (which I assume you're not) but they are clear and often us experienced users can tend to forget the basics when fault finding and head straight for the complex problems when all along it may have been something basic staring us in the face. (Believe me, I've done this more than once and I've been building systems for well over ten years! )

Just a few more questions for now:

i) Can you please tell us exactly what version of the video driver you are using?

I have been using the Quadro cards for about 4 years now, so I've been through a LOT of different drivers during that time.

ii) Who built the systems? Are they custom built, or are they brand name systems? (Dell, HP, Lenovo, etc...)

Again, I've had mixed experiences with various brand name systems.

iii) What is your HDD configuration? (Speed, Size, RAID?)

Cheers,...Jon.

[dyanosik]

the video driver we are using is 7.15.11.6996. this is the one that worked best for us.

the systems are hp 8600 workstations but i think the vid cards were installed by our IT department.

our hdd config is raid with 10,000 spin drives but most of our information comes over the 1 gig network connection.

i am still having problems getting our IT department to even acnowledge that these computers are running very slow, i have done a 3dmark 06 benchmark (i realise that this is more for gaming, but it also gives me a score to compare to other systems with) this machine only scored 8000. they also will not accept that the vista index score is a accurate representation of the computers speed.


i build all my own computers and personally i am leaning towards a hardware issue, as these motherbords from hp are the cheapest they could buy. for instance we requested 6 gigs of ram, the motherbord cannot accept 3 dims but can accept 4 or 6 dims so they got 2 dims of 2 gig and matched them with 2 gigs of 1 gig. one thing i have learned from building my own systems is that this cannot be done, all of your ram should match for best performance, so to get us 6 gigs they could have got 6 1 gig dims.

[jguest82179]

.....i am still having problems getting our IT department to even acnowledge that these computers are running very slow.....

That sounds fairly typical of most IT departments, unfortunately. They tend to think that if the software that you need will open then they've done their job that's the last they want to hear of it!

The driver that you're using should be fine, but it might be a worthwhile experiment to go to the NVIDIA website and get the very latest (be it certified or not) driver ive that a go. I think it's labelled version 180.20 at the moment. Might not work, but it's worth a try - I've had it work before today.

How does that 3Dmark score of 8000 comare to other systems. (You'll need to let the software go to the web to compare it, I think.) Often that can be a good indicator, if it tells you your machine is running between the performance of, say, a PIII 800 and an Athlon 1000 then you know you've got real problems!!

.....so they got 2 dims of 2 gig and matched them with 2 gigs of 1 gig. one thing i have learned from building my own systems is that this cannot be done

Strictly speaking, this is not quite true. It's certainly less than ideal, but you can get away with it if you have to by balancing your RAM across the channels of the controller as best you can and detuning your RAM settings to match the lowest common denominator in the set. Not ideal, but it makes the best of a bad situation.

.....all of your ram should match for best performance, so to get us 6 gigs they could have got 6 1 gig dims.

Of course, that would have been better. Or even better still, just get 4 x 2gig sticks.

One more thought - have you been dealing with just another IT body, or do you have access to your IT manager's ear? It might be possible that he or she isn't aware of the problem. I have found that it's a good idea to cultivate a good working relationship with your IT manager and to keep them on side. Even if it's in an informal conversation, a mention of the frustration you're experiencing with the issue can often get results - even if it's just more IT resources allocated to helping you out.

I'm lucky in that our newIT manager is very hardware savvy, and almost as much of a geek as me! (He has a USB missile launcher on his desk, aimed at the doorway!!)