benchmark results

I just got in a new Xi AMD computer and ran benchmarks against a HP
dual zeon. The AMD 64 bit w/ better video beat the HP by 21% overall.
The test was the SPEC standard run on SW 2003 sp4

HP xw8000:
dual 3.06 zeon
2 GB ram
nvidia quadro 4 980 xgl
(1) 70GB SCSI hard drive
windows xp

results:
total = 133.25
graphics = 25
CPU = 73
I/O = 36.75


Xi MTower Opteron 64 Bit:
single AMD Athlon64 3400+
VIA K8T800 GAK8N DDR 400-1GB-SATA RAID-1394-AC97 6.1 motherboard upgrd
2 GB ram
nvidia quadro fx3000
(1) 80GB 7200rpm Ultra hard drive
windows xp

results:
total = 105
graphics = 18
CPU = 61
I/O = 26


I plan to do more testing, but the initial results look promising for
the Xi. Has anyone else run tests on similar systems? An earlier
posting from Eddy Hicks subject "Solidworks 2004 - confirming what
everyone knows" showed his benchmark results with a similar system but
the much cheaper FX1000 card and he got the same 18 seconds on
graphics. So, is there no speed increase between the FX1000 and
FX3000 or does the graphics card help the other numbers? (I'm not a
systems guy - just a user that wants the fastest machine possible
without going way overboard on cost) Has anyone compared the FX1000,
2000, 3000? I haven't loaded any of my assemblies yet or played
around with it to see if I can tell a difference.

 

Damn man, how'd you get the IO number so low... That's a real time sucking
battle on my benchmarks. I know that these tests aren't the end all but
they're a lot of fun. And they are honestly revealing.

As for the 1000 vs the 3000... I suspect that the benchmark assys just
aren't enough to challenge the 3000. I went with 1000 because I felt it was
the price/performance sweet spot. And the benchmark reveals that anything
more might be overkill at this moment. Next year, I'll buy the 3000 for the
same money as the 1000 today and still be way ahead.

Thanks for the post! AMD all the way bro!

- Eddy

 

I just happened to think.... could it be the 2Gb ram vs 1Gb in my setups? I
believe that would adjust the IO number accordingly. Would you be willing
to pull a gig out and rerun the benchmarks to confirm? That way, we would
all know the exact effect of 1Gb vs 2Gb.

Thanks again!

- Eddy

 

Those numbers really look good - here are mine.

Dell Precision 350
2.8 mHz P4
1 GB ram
nVidia Quadro 900XGL
Win XP
Seagate SCSI drive

Total = 164
Graphics = 27
CPU = 86
I/O = 51

WT

 

Sounds Good, but I would like to see more info on the hardware used.
IE: make and model of the hard drives, do they have cache built in?
Scsi drive speed, wide, U-wide, U-wide2..?
Is the ram the same speed?
Have you tried exchanging the graphic cards ect..?
All these have a bearing on the results, what I am trying to see is what
causes the speed increase, or is it a little bit of each new component.
Many thanks
Pete

There is life on Mars, but it is a little confused at the moment!

 

I won't be able to change the ram because we haven't confirmed that we
are keeping the system yet. We have to convince our systems guy
and/or owner to go away from the HP that they have been standardizing
on. These numbers should help with that. I don't know if I trust
myself pulling ram out either. I will post again though with whatever
additional test results I come up with.

Thanks for your posts,
Bob

 

Damn,. you're making some of us salivate!!

Alright AMD!!

... ;^)

 

Has anyone run this test using 2004? If so, what are your results, please.

Best Regards,
Devon T. Sowell
www.3-ddesignsolutions.com

 

Look back to ~1-9-04 for my thread "Solidworks 2004 - confirming what
everyone knows"

I explain what I did and how...

- Eddy

 

Thanks, Eddy
Devon

 

No trouble. Interestingly, I went back after SP2.1 came out and I ran 2.0
and 2.1 benches again from the same machine. This time they took almost
twenty more seconds to run. I can't figure out why. Since I'm still
testing anyway I think I'll start over. The good news is that despite both
versions taking longer than the last time, 2.1 *is* faster than 2.0. I
haven't looked into it yet but I suspect the files are marginally smaller.
I also can't figure out how Bszotko got his similar machine to bench twenty
seconds faster than mine from 1-9-04, even with more memory and upgraded
graphics. I'm running Raid-0 and supposedly one of the fastest Athlon64
motherboards you can buy and it takes very little time to load the files,
etc. and his benchmarks absolutely smoke. Well, I'll pursue the differences
as time permits. For now, the short story is that 2.1 seems better

- Eddy

 

Eddy,

The benchmark doesn't need 1GB to run in. In fact it would probably give the
same numbers with 256MB.

The SpecAPC benchmark on which the SW benchmark was based was highly biased
toward video card testing. For those of us who are regeneration time bound
it is the cpu and i/o numbers that are important. The fact that the Opteron
is 17% faster than the Xeon in cpu and almost 30% faster on i/o suggests
that large assembly performance is going to be greatly helped. The ship in
a bottle benchmark which is almost purely regeneration time based also
shows this kind of improvement.

The type of hard drive in the system will probably have little to do with
benchmark i/o times because after the first iteration most of the disk
access is covered by cached files. You have to look at the difference
between the first iteration i/o and the subsequent iteration i/o to see any
difference hard drive i/o makes.

I think i/o to memory is going to be the big benefit of the 64 bit machines.
If I don't miss my guess the Xeon has a bigger on chip cache and it still
can't beat the Opteron on i/o.

Another thing that is amazing about this comparison is that a dual machine
was supposed to help graphics because the graphics threads could run on a
second processor. It would be interesting to see the benchmark run with the
SW affinity set to single processor.

 

I would have agreed before now but a faster video card shouldn't account for
nearly twenty seconds. His IO numbers account for most of it while his
video numbers were the same as mine. I'm having a hard time understanding
exactly what would help the IO. 'Cause is it's possible to that extent, I
want to do it too? Does the graphics card help the IO, independent of the
graphics card performance number? (which was also his original question)

As for the Xeon, yes, it has more on chip cache. Unless a test depends
greatly on core cpu frequency, the 64bit AMD chips run circles around them.
Take a look at server comparisons and you'll see the same results. The
tests that aren't biased toward clock speed just smoke on the AMD chips.
AMD is doing Solidworks, or rather their users, a huge favor

And we all should know by now that Intel is working on their next generation
to compete with AMD, just as they did with P4 vs AthlonXP. And they will
likely have the ability to scale clock speed ahead of AMD. My analogy
between AMD and Intel is that Intel has slightly higher water pressure but
AMD has bigger pipes It's going to be an interesting year chip fans!

- Eddy

 

Dale, maybe I misunderstood your intent but I think you might be missing the
bigger picture. If a system takes 100 seconds, it's twice as fast at
completing a given set of "average" tasks than a machine that scores 200
seconds. That part's obvious. You have the option of running the more
exhaustive APC series if you wish but the base test is an excellent tool for
timing how long it takes to open and manipulate real SW files. The fact
that Spec runs *your* Solidworks installation using real SW models, assy's
and drawings makes it a fair comparison as far as benchmarks go. It's about
as non-synthetic as you can get (compared to something like SiSoft Sandra).
Obviously you have to see how an installation performs with your real files
but, like 0-60 times for a car, less is more.

My only interest in defending the benchmark is to throw perspective at how
it works and that the results are revealing. Look at the comparisons on
Spec's site and see how the various P4, P4 Extreme, Xeon, and Opteron
systems pan out. The time it takes to complete tasks in Solidworks gets
better as you move up the food chain. And *that* is what we need to know.

Everyone's mileage varies but it's as close as we're gonna get to a fair
comparison tool. Mike's ship is the other fair comparison but doesn't tell
us much about spinning a loaded assy around. Our bottlenecks are (were)
shading and spinning, file IO, and regen times. The spec test is the only
benchmark that glimpses each of those categories. And I have never found
their results falling short, when comparing one machine to another. In
other words, I've tried to find reason to disagree with it and I can't.
When I run the spec bench on two different machines and it says one is
"twice" as fast as the other; I try it myself using my files and it's always
true.

- Eddy

 

I agree completely. The benchmark can't tell us how much faster lofting, or
drafting, etc. will be. So I see your point. It's good as a non-synthetic
aggregate. Maybe we can get Mike to volunteer more time Come on Mike,
get to it. We need more, we need more!? Haha.

- Eddy

 

Eddy,

Could you clue me in to what I might be doing wrong in trying to run
the 2003 benchmark on 2004? You said you did it by batch converting &
fixing what files had errors. I did that, but some part files said
they were from sw97plus and they wouldn't open. I got all the
assemblies to open up ok, so I think the test would run, but when I
try to run it I get:
Run-time error '713'
Class not registered.
You need the following file to be installed on your machine.
MSSTDFMT.DLL

I found that file in my Windows\system32 directory and even copied it
to the sw2003 benchmark directory so maybe it could find it, but that
didn't help.

Any ideas?

Thanks,
Bob

 

Yep, been there done that. For some reason, SW2004 (or the '03 benchmark
trying to run '04) breaks the registration of that file. Open up a command
prompt and do the following...

- open a command prompt window
- change directory to "c:\windows\system32"
- type the following (without quotes) and hit enter:
"regsvr32.exe c:\windows\system32\MSSTDFMT.DLL"

That should do it!

 

Eddy,

Thanks for the help.
Did you get my email?

Bob

 

Yep. Check your inbox for a reply.

- Eddy

 

Everything interacts with everything. If you run the benchmark on a couple
of processors and a couple of graphics cards, you'll find that a faster
processor will improve all of the scores. A faster graphics card will also
increase all the scores, though usually not as much. I never ran it with
different disc drives or faster RAM, so I'm only guessing that any effect
would also show up on all three scores.

As I recall, the way they get the three subsystem scores is by checking the
time for actions that lean particularly heavy on that subsystem. So how fast
a part spins shows up in the graphics score, how fast a part regenerates
shows up in the CPU score, and how fast a file loads shows up in the I/O
score.

Jerry Steiger
Tripod Data Systems