Happy with your Hardware?

[Jrobker]

Is this what i'm understanding?

[RobertB]

Is this what i'm understanding?

I think that sums it up!

[sgermano]

multi-core has not been written into the program as of yet, unfortunetely...

[gfiske]

jbroker,
They used to have a benchmarking folder in the revit hardware section, where people ran a program that scored their system to compare to other systems. I wonder why they got rid of it? That would have answered your question right away. From what I remember, a properly spec'd computer had scores that were twice as fast.

Aside from the amount of ram, how does the speed of ram affect performance? Here at work I would like to try i7, 64 bit, with 8gb of whatever the latest ram is available (1600?) for our next revit station. I have a i7 machine at home and personally think its worth the money ($1K for a system).

[Brian.Gemmell]

Clock speed and ram are key. We have some workstations with 3.16 GHz Core 2 Duo, XP32, 4GB ram, and they are faster than the 2.83 Ghz, XP64, 8GB ram machines we have. However when we Frankensteined the 3.16Ghz with XP64 and 8GB it blew away either machine in the benchmark.

Other System Info: 10k RPM SATA drives, all web updates, latest quadro drivers, Dual 19" LCDs, 3GB switch on XP32 machine

We also tested a Quadro FX1700 vs. a Quadro FX570 in the same machine and the benchmark was identical. Spend money on clock speed and ram, not the vid card.

We have a Xeon with the Nehalem core (basically an i7) coming next week. I'll try to remember to benchmark and post results.

[mlmiller1]

Revit needs CPU power. This is by far the most important.
Intel i7 is currently the fastest CPU. Over clocking the CPU is basically a necessity.
Big projects need memory and memory is cheap. get 8 or 12GB (use vista x64)
SSD for the hard drive. Use Intel, G.skill Falcon, or OCZ Vertex.
As long as shadows are off, the video card is still unimportant, even with 2010's DirectX.

I would recommend a custom build using an i7 920 with very good aftermarket cooling, 12GB 1333 DDR3, X58 motherboard, G.skill Falcon SSD, and a GTX275. Have the local shop build it and give it a conservative over clock, perhaps 3.5Ghz. If you want the very best, for an extra $1400 go with an i7 975 extreme edition for about 4.2GHz over clock and stripe another SSD in RAID-0.

Make sure your LAN is 1000Mbit or better back to the server.

That’s the best you can do right now. Revit will only use up to 4 cores when rendering; when modeling it is single threaded, so you are limited to the single core most of the time. Basically just get a single quad core.

[Jrobker]

Brian.Gemmell
mlmiller1
I was looking for that real world testing and know how. Excelent information. I will go with your recommendations.

[Brian.Gemmell]

We just finished benchmarking the Xeon W3540, and its fast but not ridiculous. It scored a 124 in AUBench (Revit 2009) where one of our E8500 machines scored a 133. Here are the specs for comparison:

W3540 - 6GB Ram - 80GB Velociraptor 10k RPM - XP64/Vista64 - Quadro FX580

E8500 - 8GB Ram - 80GB Raptor 10k RPM - XP64 - Quadro FX1700

Strangly enough, the xeon machine scored the same with XP64 and with Vista 64 on AUBench. It was faster with Vista in other benchmarking software but not in Revit.

We also tried the FX1700 in the Xeon machine and it didn't affect Revit at all. It was however great for 3DMark05.

[kllevalley]

Im looking for a benchmarking test that I can run on Revit MEP 2010, does anyone have one I could use?

[wboyanton]

Intel Quad-Core I7's @ 2.67mhz
8 gb ram
ATI 4850 graphics
7200 rpm HD
Vista-x64

I'd like to see what a true "CAD-type" graphics card would do, but from comments online I don't know it that would make a lot of zippyness more then what I've got.

I'd say 8gb is bare minimum, and would highly recommend much more, (12gb to start) wish my budget would have allowed 24gb , the motherboard would take it, but the budget didn't...

A 10k hard drive would be great too, but a solid-state hard drive would be the cats meow

If REVIT supported multipul cores with would be better too in our world...