Inventor is an Autodesk computer-aided design (CAD) program that includes comprehensive tools for designing, simulating, and visualizing 2D and 3D models. The application is extremely popular in the engineering and product design fields, and it is used by everyone from individuals working on little projects to big teams working on complex ideas.
To operate efficiently, a sophisticated application like Autodesk Inventor requires dedicated and highly optimized Workstation hardware. This article is for Autodesk Inventor users who wish to discover what computer Workstation setup they require to streamline their productivity.
The general criteria for producing a highly optimized Workstation solution to expedite Autodesk Inventor workflows are outlined below.
High-Frequency Processor:
When choosing a CPU for your next Workstation, there are two key factors to consider. To begin, a processor’s cores and threads are counted. The number of cores and threads indicates how many jobs a processor can do at the same time.
The frequency of the processor cores is the second thing to consider. The frequency of a processor (also known as the clock speed) indicates how quickly work on each core is completed.
Autodesk Inventor is primarily a single-threaded program, which means it cannot take advantage of many cores and threads. As a result, selecting a processor with a low core count and rapid clock rates is crucial. By doing so, you can get the most out of the few available cores and, as a result, get the most out of Autodesk Inventor.
We advise our customers to select a Workstation with a CPU clock speed of roughly 5GHz. These criteria are completely met by our AMD Ryzen Workstations.
Professional Graphics Cards:
In Autodesk Inventor, the Graphics Card is responsible for producing and presenting your 2D and 3D models. For this purpose, the professional NVIDIA Quadro or AMD Radeon Pro graphics card series are strongly recommended. A graphics card with 5GB VRAM might be appropriate if you work on tiny assemblies. Larger projects will require 8GB VRAM, and if you’re working on a project that requires a lot of processing power, 16GB VRAM will suffice.
Customers frequently think about NVIDIA GeForce and AMD Radeon graphics cards, which are natural. Consumer graphics will function and may give greater performance for a lower price; nevertheless, they are not recommended for Inventor Workstations.
Autodesk puts the professional graphics card ranges through rigorous testing to ensure that your Inventor program will be rock solid and incredibly reliable. If you have a problem with Inventor while using a consumer graphics card, you will not be able to get help from Autodesk or the graphics card’s vendor. Additionally, throughout the Independent System Vendor (ISV) testing phase, Autodesk collaborates closely with graphics card manufacturers to assist in the development of highly optimized drivers to improve the application’s performance.
System Memory:
For your programs and projects to work well, you’ll need enough system memory (RAM). If you don’t have enough, your Workstation will fall back on your considerably slower hard drives, which will drastically degrade performance.
However, RAM is costly, and purchasing too much may soon deplete your budget while giving no performance gains. Autodesk Inventor, fortunately, does not consume a lot of system memory. As a result, depending on the magnitude of their projects, we usually only propose 16-32GB of RAM to our customers. If you often use other apps on this machine, you may need more. While working on your existing system and Inventor projects, keeping an eye on Windows Task Manager will help you figure out how much RAM you’ll need.
Storage Drives:
Solid State Drives (SSDs) are far quicker than traditional hard drives, hence they should be used as your primary storage device. On this disc, we recommend installing your operating system, and applications, and saving your current project files.
There are two types of SSDs that are routinely utilized in workstations right now. SATA-based SSDs and NVMe SSDs are both available. Both are adequate for Autodesk Inventor performance, and your budget should determine which is best for you. NVMe SSDs are somewhat more expensive than SATA drives, but they provide superior performance.
For long-term storage, we also recommend a supplementary conventional Hard Disk Drive (HDD). Although they are slower than SSDs, they provide substantially greater storage capacity at a lower cost per GB.
The recommended components and settings on this page are specific to this application. If you want to run more applications, please see our recommendations here and choose the configuration that best meets all of the application requirements.