Super PI: Useful as a single-threaded CPU benchmark and stress test, with props to Japan and everyone's favorite irrational number.HDTune: Synthetic benchmark to characterize your hard disk / SSD drives.3DMark: A synthetic benchmark focused on gaming, but relevant to general Direct3D performance.FurMark: An OpenGL graphics stress test.SiSoft Sandra: A robust set of synthetic benchmarks for CPU, GPU, and memory performance including power management and multi-core processor tests, also useful for interrogating your hardware.A more generic benchmark is available as SPECwpc. Designed specifically to represent the behavior of typical CAD workloads through applet viewsets, and it even works on virtualized workstations. SPECviewperf: If you use one benchmark for your CAD workstation, this is the gold standard for both OpenGL and DirectX GPU pipelines.Some useful synthetic benchmarks relevant for CAD workstations: After all, if your synthetic benchmarks are way off the mark for a known CPU/GPU combination, something may be seriously wrong with your hardware installation or driver configuration.īest to resolve that before you start testing how you do with your favorite CAD software, if only to avoid embarrassment when your uber rig gets crushed by some five year old beige box and a hamster wheel just because you forgot to drop in the latest drivers. They are probably the most commonly used benchmark, best suited to validate whether your particular workstation configuration is reliably operating. Synthetic benchmarks are custom code designed to tax your hardware in specific ways and generate results that can both be easily replicated and compared, often by generating a composite score. Again, you're really evaluating potential here so this only helps with your component selection, not benching an already built configuration.īy the way, CPU-Z is a great program to interrogate your system just to make sure you're really running what you think your running, and that some Jawa didn't try to push something with a bad motivator on you. Similarly for the graphics subsystem, keep tabs on GPU microarchitecture, texel fill rates, core count and clock rate, dedicated memory type, memory bandwidth, and memory size. available memory (including cache sizes).There are myriad specifications to keep an eye out on, but especially relative to CAD you need to pay special attention to: Hardware specs are an indication of potential, nothing more. Will the fill rate be necessarily indicative of your installed performance in AutoCAD or Solidworks? Absolutely not. The aforementioned texel fill rate might be relevant in differentiating between two microarchitectures, say perhaps the GK104 in the Nvidia Quadro K4200 and the GM200-310 in a Geforce GTX 980 Ti. Hardware specs can indeed be useful as a normalized measure of hardware architecture. If it's so obvious that hardware specifications don't always translate to real-world performance why do they exist at all? Some of them are sadly just marketing ploys to create some imagined differentiation in a crowded market for example whenever you see a display boasting a kajillion-to-one contrast ratio that uses an entirely unique -and therefore irrelevant- measurement methodology.īut not all hardware specifications arise from the seventh level of marketing hell. Unless, of course, you want to play Crysis. And no, checking to see if your workstation will run Crysis is not a relevant benchmark. Understandably, there's no one benchmark that does all these things perfectly. For a benchmark to have value however, it must be representative of real-world experience, be repeatable, and must account for the interaction between hardware and software. We could subjectively argue ad infinitum about specific graphics card choices, API dependencies, and esoteric software limitations, but all truths are revealed by the right benchmark. Who cares that your workstation leverages a tetra-bat of graphics to muster 70 billion more gigaflop-joules-per-fortnight-squared or that it might do the Kessel run in less than 14 – or perhaps 12 – parsecs? Before someone furrows their brow and disapprovingly folds their arms at your outlandish claims of CAD performance, it's high time to remove all doubt. Spec dropping can quickly escalate out of hand, thanks to the internet. A righteous sounding number, if you were paid by the texel that is. The day of reckoning is at hand - the money and toil poured into your CAD workstation must now face judgment. Sure, you might be sporting 2688 CUDA cores that can pump out 187 billion texels per second. Now is the time to put your customized CAD workstation to the test and see what it can really do! We showed you in an earlier post how to build your own customized CAD workstation from the ground up at an affordable cost, but even the best tool is only as good as what it is used for.
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