What's your computer setup, ram, rom, processors, cores?

Author

10-Marble

This is what we were thinking too. Gonna have to fight for a while to get computers that are more directed towards Creo than overall performance machines. Thanks for your reply.

24-Ruby III

Hi,

just FYI.

Launch Task Manager, select xtop.exe process, press right mouse button and click Set Affinity... command.

Uncheck all processor cores, but one.

In Task Manager, watch graph of selected core. If it is running on the top of the area, then you know that mostly single-threaded Creo gets all processor power - this means that processor is bottleneck for current operation.

MH

Author

10-Marble

Is this a bypass for having 8 processors? Can I use this option every time I run Creo? Thank you very much for the info!

24-Ruby III

Hi,

Info no.1:

You have to set affinity for xtop.exe process every time you launch Creo. When the setting is finished, operating system stops switching xtop.exe execution between processor cores. This means that xtop.exe is executing on single core and you can see if this core is 100% busy (i.e. fully loaded).

Creo is mostly single-threaded, this means its xtop.exe process is not able to use all processor cores simultaneously.

Info no.2:

In BIOS hyper-threading is set to ON, by default. I prefer to toggle it to OFF. Then you can see real number of processor cores in Task Manager. Hyper-threading is software trick that doubles number of cores.

Info no.3:

If someone is selecting processor for Creo, then frequency height is important. Unfortunately processor makers are not able to enhance frequency dramatically. I think that all Creo user are looking forward to 10GHz processor at least ...

Info no.4:

I do not understand your question "Is this a bypass for having 8 processors?"

MH

StephenW

23-Emerald III

And large assembly drawings are notoriously slow. Our models sometimes get up to 16gig+ of ram used and perform reasonably well but the drawing are a real pain.

Adding more RAM only helps if you are running out of RAM.

24-Ruby III

When working with large drawing, it is helpful to set selection filter properly to tell Creo, what entity you want to select. Also it is useful to erase views which are not needed at the moment. To prevent repeated manual view erasing, drawing representation can be created, saved and opened.

MH

StephenW

23-Emerald III

I definitely agree that using the selection filter is a must when working on large assembly drawings. It makes a huge difference in the selection time and if you have prehighlight turned on, it saves the delays in trying to highlight all the geometry and detail items as you mouse moves over them. I personally dislike erasing/resuming views but it is a valid technique and drawing reps are helpful along the way.

R

RonGrabau

1-Visitor

I had an odd experience that maybe someone can shed light on as well. I was testing a new computer a few years back and wanted to see how each component added value. I had ordered a basic computer but then also ordered a better CPU, RAM and Graphics card.

All went as expected for CPU and RAM but I ran into problems with the Graphics card. After going from an NVidia 2000 to a NVidia 4000 my performance went into the toilet. I was surprised by this change. I could see that the card was showing up in the devices and working. I upgraded the driver as I normally would but no matter what I did, I could not get my graphics performance to work. I had worse performance with the 4000 than the 2000.

After a while I gave up. I needed the computer so I did a complete rebuild by wiping the drive and then installing all over again. I had the 4000 card in the computer during the rebuild. When I was done, I thought that I would run the benchmark one more time and to my surprise I got wonderful performance. The best I have ever seen. I have had a few users who have added very expensive graphic cards but never saw any real increase in performance.

I have wondered if this is a Microsoft issue. Even though the cards are installed and have the proper drivers, it seems that it is never really integrated. I have not tested this theory on other computers but was wondering if anyone else has seen this.

I mention this since you are having issues and it may be related.

Author

10-Marble

Ron, hopefully someone replies to you! That definitely sounds like Microsoft was just having a brain fart and it didn't pick it up.. I know when installing the ram the tech guy mentioned we might have to turn the computer off a couple times to get it to register the change.

Author

10-Marble

Thought I would give a quick update. As several members stated the graphics card could have been the issue. My IT guy said it's probably not the answer but he still put on the latest graphics card driver onto my computer. It helped slightly but Creo is still crawling at a snails pace. We're narrowing it down and it's starting to look like it's not a hardware issue. Several of the Creo guys here have found out that someone decided it was a good idea to scan every part going in and out with McAfee I believe.. This could be a main driving factor. Also a majority of our work is done out of the same online EPDM working directory. This could also play a factor, as many of you know working on a local working directory doesn't affect speed much but working with a large WD online can slow results. I will post more updates as I discover them so people searching in the future with similar problems can have possible answers!

24-Ruby III

Hi,

if I understand you well, you are going to copy data to your local disk, turn off McAfee and run a test. It's easy test, if your IT is not blocking it.

MH