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Autocad slow system help

I have a Dell 690 with 2 x dual core Xeon`s @ 3.2Ghz, 2 SAS SATA drives Raided, 12GB DDR2, Nvidia Quadro 4000 on Windows 7 64Bit OS.

I have been benchmarking it against my i7 940 which is Raided with 12GB DDR3 and a Nvidia GX260 and Windows 7 64Bit.

The Dell 690 is twice as slow as the i7 system which I find strange because the Dell 960 has a Quadro 4000 in it. What am I doing wrong, why after spending £600 on the card is it not as fast as my i7 system with its std graphic card.

Do I need something else or is the 2 Xeons ( which register as 8 cores @3.2Ghz) too slow for it.

any advice please.
I thought the Quadro would zoom ahead

Oh, forgot to mention, the i7 is a quad core i7 940 2.9Ghz

silverkorn

when you say slow, are you talking about graphic performance or overall system speed when it comes to performing tasks.

also keep in mind that the Quadro graphic cards are not designed for overall speed and performance but follow a much higher standard of quality or hardware and software to ensure that little, or no, problems occur using the product. If these graphic cards were to be top of the line in performance you would see more gaming workstations utilizing them.

I also am not sure what version of AutoCAD you are currently using but the software itself does not work well with multiple CPU cores. With a total of 8 cores of processing power the most usage you will see is about 12.5% since it is only using one core. If you get into the graphic rendering software then you can get into multiple core performance.

If you want to try and compare apples to apples you can try this benchmarking file that will test different aspects of AutoCAD to give a more accurate representation of AutoCAD performance:
http://www.cadalyst.com/benchmark-test

tucup

ASKER

Thanks for the advice, I have tried that benchtest and it made me feel sick :)

I have Autocad 2011 and 3d Max. I downloaded Nvidias performance drivers too. I did the cadalyst benchtest for Autocad which the Dell 690 did half as well as the i7 system.

I also did a Cinebench test for Autodesks 3D Max and again, the i7 system was way ahead of the Dell 690 system.

While I understand what you are saying and I am not going to pit the Quadro 4000 soley against the i7 system, I feel that the OpenGL part or Hardware acceleration for the Quadro should shine somewhere in the tests.

Does this seem plausable, I fear I may be missing something, perhaps the Xeon architecture is holding it back enough to make the i7 system seem faster.

Any ideas?

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silverkorn

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jamietoner

Alot of this is going to be the difference in the cpu's as the Core i7 architecture is way superior to the older architure your Xeons are running. In passmark the i7 940 scores 6150 the xeon 5060(not listed in the link) should score ~1500 so will dual it would most likely be just south of 3000. If you want a good comparision between the video cards then test both in the I7 system, as the older xeons are going to bottleneck the performance of the quadro card.

tucup

ASKER

I guess I was looking for a race car instead of a workhorse. Race cars sure look nice but the work still needs to be done in a reliable and robust way.

Thanks for the philosophical approach.

tucup

ASKER

jamietonet, sorry I didnt get to read your reply before I awarded the mark for this as I would have given credit to your input. Sorry about that and thanks for the advice.