A better Workstation withou a better performance

Hey guys,

I'm Douglas From Rio de Janeiro Brazil.

My office have bought a new pc for working with revit structure, but I've not see much improve on my workflow. I have worked with AutoCad the last 3 years and now i'm missing the imediatelly response of autocad on my comands principally when I'm working on sheets with a few more viewports (about 7 ~ 8 viewports per sheet) we put some money on a new pc with better specs but principally on this point we have not take much improve on our workflow. The programs takes about 0.5 ~ 1 second on quiting/moving/entering at viewports on sheet, thats very annoying for someone that worked with cad.

Ok let's go to my specifications:

Project: 1 Tower with about 25 levels, with sheets for each one with 7~8 viewports per sheet, the file have 34.704MB, I try always work with only two views on my project (everytime I take a new view I give a CLOSE WINDOW).

PCS SPECS:
AMD PHENOM(TM) II X4 960T Processor 3.00GHZ
16,0GB of RAM
NVIDIA QUADRO 600
WINDOWS 7 64BITS

I'dont know the HD, but I think it is a Sata 2 or 3 with 500 GB

I have anothe pc in office with the same specs but instead of a Quadro 600 its have a GTX560 ti. I don't see much difference on the workflow of these machines. Does a Quadro makes all that difference?

Can anyone give me a hand? Principally explaning how I can improve my workflow with my viewports with sheets!

Quote:

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Originally Posted by eng.douglasbastos814858

Hey guys,

I'm Douglas From Rio de Janeiro Brazil.

My office have bought a new pc for working with revit structure, but I've not see much improve on my workflow. I have worked with AutoCad the last 3 years and now i'm missing the imediatelly response of autocad on my comands principally when I'm working on sheets with a few more viewports (about 7 ~ 8 viewports per sheet) we put some money on a new pc with better specs but principally on this point we have not take much improve on our workflow. The programs takes about 0.5 ~ 1 second on quiting/moving/entering at viewports on sheet, thats very annoying for someone that worked with cad.

Ok let's go to my specifications:

Project: 1 Tower with about 25 levels, with sheets for each one with 7~8 viewports per sheet, the file have 34.704MB, I try always work with only two views on my project (everytime I take a new view I give a CLOSE WINDOW).

PCS SPECS:
AMD PHENOM(TM) II X4 960T Processor 3.00GHZ
16,0GB of RAM
NVIDIA QUADRO 600
WINDOWS 7 64BITS

I'dont know the HD, but I think it is a Sata 2 or 3 with 500 GB

I have anothe pc in office with the same specs but instead of a Quadro 600 its have a GTX560 ti. I don't see much difference on the workflow of these machines. Does a Quadro makes all that difference?

Can anyone give me a hand? Principally explaning how I can improve my workflow with my viewports with sheets!

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Hello Douglas,

Are you working in a Work Sharing Enabled Model (one with worksets)? Is your model located on the workstation's hard drive, on a local server, or on a remote (Cloud) server? Do you have any linked files in this project model? AutoCad, SketchUp and other softwares don't play so well with Revit's performance. We have gotten away from loading (different then Linking) files into our projects & families. You're project model doesn't seem large enough to cause issues on it's own. Contact your AutoDesk reseller to see if they can offer assistance.

I hope this helps,
Jeff S.

"The programs takes about 0.5 ~ 1 second on quiting/moving/entering at viewports on sheet, thats very annoying for someone that worked with cad."

Welcome to 3d, this is normal.

I'd kill for that kinfd of response time in my AutoCAD Viewports. We upgraded our machines to help out Revit, and it did. It's twice as fast. What took a second now takes half a second. But somehow going from 32bit and 3 gig of Ram on XP OS to 64 bit 12 gig ram Win 7 has killed our performance on any viewports containing fields. I'd say 4 to 8 seconds on the "good" drag & drops and about 30 seconds on the problem drawings.

But really a 1/2 to 1 second second isn't that long. If you add all of those delays up during the course of the day, would that give you enough time to cross check all of your views and verify they are correct?

Dear Douglas,

I am only an AutoCAD 2010 user. I hope my experience could help u.

3 factors to consider, CPU calcuation, RAM and I/O access speed

I guess you are facing I/O access speed problem.

Consider to use a SSD drive as your primary HD.

I find there is a great improvement in speed in file access(open or save), switching among dwg files(almost instant swapping).

However my SSD is Corsair Force 3 60GB. I face 2 difficulies.

1. after installing windows 7 and autocad 2010, not much space left.

2. Corsair as primary drive in my system always crashes.

My solution for my system:

1. I found out my motherboard can support "Intel Rapid Storage Technology", so now the SSD is installed as Cache Volume in RAID. However, the performance drops but more stable.


Suggestion for you:

1. Consider to use Intel SSD w/ more capacity, say 200GB.

2. Cosider to use a SSD as cache disc in your system.

3. Check w/ motherboard manual to ensure compatibility -The Advanced Host Controller Interface (AHCI).


My system specification:

MS Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit
Intel Core i7 2600 @ 3.40GHz
16.0 GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 665MHz
Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd. Z68MA-D2H-B3 (Socket 1155) Motherboard
2048MB GeForce GT 430 Grapics
Dual Monitor (1600x900)
500GB Western Digital Caviar Blue SATA 6Gb/S, 3.5INCH 7200RPM 16MB CACHE
CORSAIR fORCE 3 60GB SSD
AUTOCAD 2010 (64BIT)

Your CPU is very slow. With a benchmark score of 3,759 vs 14,032 for the current top of the line i7 from Intel. (See http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html)

I just wrote an article on building a Revit workstation, its on my web site.
Mark Palacios
www.mark.palacios.com