I have an engineer who uses AutoCAD 2009 on Win XP 64-bit. The system is a Dell Precision T5500 with E5540 Xeon 8-core CPU, 16 GB of DDR2 RAM, nVidia Quadro FX 1800, and a 300GB SAS drive, no RAID. The system was freshly configured back in July.
Support for AutoCAD 2009 is ending, so starting the process of migrating to 2012. We checked with AutoDesk about having two versions of AutoCAD installed concurrently to allow him some time to transition. We were told that there are no technical problems with this and since we have subscription licensing it's perfectly legal. But, just one version can be running at any given time.
The performance of 2009 was never quite as good as we believed it should be given the specs of the system. We hoped that moving to 2012 might result in an improvement, but just the opposite is true. While 2009 still runs about as good as it did before, trying to work in 2012 is just totally miserable. The system will slow to a crawl between mouse clicks when doing even the most mundane tasks. It can take about 10 - 20 seconds before he can move the cursor at times. I am not sure if other applications are affected when 2012 is running.
So, I'm hoping that someone can give advice on how to troubleshoot and do some performance tuning, perhaps even down to BIOS settings for CPU, memory and controller bus, etc.
I also wanted to provided more detailed information about the hardware & configuration. I took a close look at all the BIOS settings.
These are all enabled:
-Multicore
-Hyperthread
-Turbo Boost
-Speed Step
-C-States Control (this could be an issue http://backroom.bostonproductions.com/?p=788)
-Hardware Prefetch
-Adjacent Cache Line Prefetch
These are disabled:
-CPUID Limit
-HDD Accoustic Mode
-Virtualization
-SERR
Depending on whether anything had improved with the video driver update, next I may try disabling C-States and/or Speedstep. But, I'm also wondering about the two Prefetch settings.