Video Card for Creo 2.0

[psobejko]

Hi all,

Any advice about upgrading my CAD workstation?  I have a ~3 year old computer: 8GB of RAM, intel core i7-3770 8 core cpu at 3.4GHz, and AMD V3800 FirePro with 512MB.

It seems that the system has a hard time with assemblies of ~4500 components : sloooow loading, and spinning the model around is painfully choppy.

Question : should I switch to a brand new system with latest processor, more memory and better graphics card?

Or should I simply increase the RAM and upgrade the video card and pretty much be at the same place for fraction of the cost?

What about a SSD?  Not sure about the advantages of this one since I think the loading time is mainly governed by the network speed as the models are downloaded from the Windchill server...

PS: Company policy means HP computers only, but please share relevant experiences...

Thanks,

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[BenLoosli]

At 3 years old, get a new computer. When we leased computers, we had them on a 3 year refresh cycle.

Nvidia Graphics card, Xeon or i7 quad core chip, 16GB memory minimum, 1256GB SSD.

PTC Creo does not take advantage of multi-core processors so why buy them. Turn off hyper-threading as that adds nothing to your performance.

While the initial load to your workspace is from the network Windchill drive, subsequent loading of your CAD files will be from the local workspace which would be on the SSD.

My $0.02 worth, YMMV.

[JonathanHodgson]

I would start by running some monitors on your existing system while manipulating one of these big assemblies.

Use Windows Task Manager to check the memory use of xtop.exe (Pro/E / Creo) - is it getting close to (or exceeding) your 8 GB installed? 8 GB sounds a bit low in general these days - my home rig has 8; my workstation here has 32 (although I never really use all of that).  If it's hitting virtual memory it will cripple performance.

Your CPU is pretty reasonable; there's about a 25% speed improvement to be had by going right up to an i7-4790K (and possibly a little more if you overclock it, but headroom appears to be limited - you might get 4.3 or 4.4 GHz, up from the base 4.0).  However, if Task Manager shows a steady 12-13% (assuming 4 cores and hyperthreading) then the CPU is probably what's limiting the performance.

PassMark CPU Benchmarks - Single Thread Performance

(For reference / info, the i7-3770 is indeed really a quad-core processor, with hyperthreading which makes it look like an 8-core - but in practice will only give about an extra 20% for a fully multi-threaded application.  Which, as Ben said, Creo isn't.)

PassMark - Intel Core i7-4770 @ 3.40GHz - Price performance comparison

Use GPU-Z, Nvidia Inspector, EVGA Precision X or similar to look at what the graphics card is doing.  Is the GPU usage close to 100%?  Your V3800 looks slow to me (from a gaming perspective), but on my workstation I've rarely seen Creo properly load up the GPU so it may not matter.  Is it running out of memory? 512 MB doesn't sound much these days, but I'm not sure how much Creo really uses compared to a modern game.

PassMark Software - Video Card (GPU) Benchmark Charts - Video Card Model List

Base your upgrade decisions on these.