Anyone using Revit, if so , what CPU you have?

Anyone using Revit? IF so what CPU are you using? I'm using it more and more, and I"m a little annoyed by the rendering time. I have an X99 i7 3.3Ghz along with 32GB ram and a 1080 GTX Nvidia Video card. I believe Revit uses the CPU for rendering and I"d like to up my speed for the process. Any recommendations? 

Intel Xeon CPU e5-2623 v3 @ 3.00GHz

32GB ram

64 bit windows 7

Use revit lots, and many other analysis programs. no high rises but decent size models being run. I've not had a problem or lag. But I don't render any graphics. Sorry I can't be more help!

Hemi79 said:

Anyone using Revit? IF so what CPU are you using? I'm using it more and more, and I"m a little annoyed by the rendering time. I have an X99 i7 3.3Ghz along with 32GB ram and a 1080 GTX Nvidia Video card. I believe Revit uses the CPU for rendering and I"d like to up my speed for the process. Any recommendations? 

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The 1080 GTX video card you have is not going to do you any favors in terms of rendering in a 3D design environment. Yes it's a top of the line video card, but it is designed specifically for gaming and associated OpenGL type architectures. For design and development software (i.e. CAD, Pro-E, Revit, etc.) that rely heavily on rendering processes, you want something that is more geared towards Direct3D processing. For that NVidia offers their Quadro line-up of video cards. These cards are designed specifically for enterprise design applications and are multi-threaded accordingly to take advantage of the hardware architecture. AMD offers a similar line of video cards called Fire-Pro.

What generation i7 CPU do you have? That will also make some difference. But I think your bottleneck is more likely with your available GPU processing power. The Intel Xeon line of CPUs might handle higher-end design software a little more efficiently due to the architecture and how it utilizes memory resources. In addition, another element that will greatly improve processing performance is the main operating system drive. A solid state drive (SSD) or even better, an M.2 drive will vastly improve data exchange rates on exponential scale. The conventional spindle type drives cannot contend on the same level.

@knight1fox3 thanks for the reply! I have a haswell generation of i7. In christmas I got an 1151 motherboard and ever since I've been thinking about getting another CPU and switching out both MB and CPU. So how does the VideoCard process renderings? I thought Revit only used CPU power for rendering. I do have an SSD drive running my operating system. I never considered an M.2 because the motherboard I have I believe drops the 16x to 8x if using the M.2 slot, or disables it. Not sure at this moment which. Could be wrong. Which Nvidia Quadro would you recommend? Quadro K? Quadro M? I used to have a Quadro Kxx , don't remember the model, but took it out when I got the 980ti a few years back. 

Looking at Newegg, would an M4000 be a good choice? Theyre out of stock, but that price range is doable for me right now. 

Looking forward to your response... 

tj_PE said:

Intel Xeon CPU e5-2623 v3 @ 3.00GHz

32GB ram

64 bit windows 7

Use revit lots, and many other analysis programs. no high rises but decent size models being run. I've not had a problem or lag. But I don't render any graphics. Sorry I can't be more help!

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Thanks for reply @tj_PE

Hemi79 said:

@knight1fox3 thanks for the reply! I have a haswell generation of i7. In christmas I got an 1151 motherboard and ever since I've been thinking about getting another CPU and switching out both MB and CPU. So how does the VideoCard process renderings? I thought Revit only used CPU power for rendering. I do have an SSD drive running my operating system. I never considered an M.2 because the motherboard I have I believe drops the 16x to 8x if using the M.2 slot, or disables it. Not sure at this moment which. Could be wrong. Which Nvidia Quadro would you recommend? Quadro K? Quadro M? I used to have a Quadro Kxx , don't remember the model, but took it out when I got the 980ti a few years back. 

Looking at Newegg, would an M4000 be a good choice? Theyre out of stock, but that price range is doable for me right now. 

Looking forward to your response...

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No problem, happy to help (in addition to being a PE, I also run my own computer business). While the Haswell line of CPU's was pretty great, that is quickly becoming an aging CPU (circa 2011) at being almost 7 years old now. The new Kaby Lake (and newer) line of processors will run circles around Haswell all day long. Intel also recently introduced a new high-end line of CPUs, the i9-79xx. They are expensive, but for good reason as it will destroy just about any workload thrown at it. :thumbs:

As to your other question about video rendering, I would find it pretty difficult to believe that an enterprise design software package (such as Revit or equivalent) would rely solely upon CPU processing power alone without any acceleration help from a discrete video card. If you look up the recommended video hardware for your platform, you'll see that Autodesk recommends the Quadro/Fire-Pro line of video cards (see image below). That should help provide some guidance on what is recommended.

As for the main OS/program drive, an SSD should be sufficient. But if it were my choice, I'd go with an M.2 drive as that will likely triple data throughput rates. And I believe some of the newer motherboard chipsets now no longer sacrifice PCI bus speeds by using 1 or more M.2 slots.

knight1fox3 said:

No problem, happy to help (in addition to being a PE, I also run my own computer business). While the Haswell line of CPU's was pretty great, that is quickly becoming an aging CPU (circa 2011) at being almost 7 years old now. The new Kaby Lake (and newer) line of processors will run circles around Haswell all day long. Intel also recently introduced a new high-end line of CPUs, the i9-79xx. They are expensive, but for good reason as it will destroy just about any workload thrown at it. :thumbs:

As to your other question about video rendering, I would find it pretty difficult to believe that an enterprise design software package (such as Revit or equivalent) would rely solely upon CPU processing power alone without any acceleration help from a discrete video card. If you look up the recommended video hardware for your platform, you'll see that Autodesk recommends the Quadro/Fire-Pro line of video cards (see image below). That should help provide some guidance on what is recommended.

As for the main OS/program drive, an SSD should be sufficient. But if it were my choice, I'd go with an M.2 drive as that will likely triple data throughput rates. And I believe some of the newer motherboard chipsets now no longer sacrifice PCI bus speeds by using 1 or more M.2 slots.

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Thanks for the recommendations! That P4000 looks like a winner. This way I will keep my gaming rig seperately.  The motherboard I got was GIGABYTE GA-B150N PHOENIX-WIFI, my brother had heard me mention about wanting to build a MINI unit and knew I was a Gigabyte fan so he got it for me. IT HAS M.2....  :laugh: . So being my 512 Samsung SSD is around 5% storage capacity, I think I will go with the M.2 drive first. There is nothing on the specs that states a restriction on the PCI 16x, plus its the only PCI slot. lol. You know, I had seen some benchmarks comparing the Skylake (or Kabylake) to the Haswell and the results were comparable with Haswell being 8% behind the new CPU's. Thanks for clarifying bout the new generation Intel Processors.