Intel i7 920 feedback

[Anonymous]

Hi folks,

I'm planning to upgrade my pc and would like some feedback of the new Intel i7 920 CPU within ArchiCAD...
It would be great if you indicate the previous and new CPU+RAM and the percentage of general speed improvement.

Thanks in advance.

[Arcadia]

I have an i7 920 now (from core 2 duo 3ghz)and to be honest the difference was not as startling for general usage (although generating sections and 3D docs seems to take roughly half as long) as I had hoped but I think I may be having graphics card issues as well which might not help. The biggest thing I noticed was going to 64bit system and having stacks of RAM. I can run 2 or three instances of archicad at the same time stably and export to VBE without having to close down all my apps. The time it takes to number crunch stuff - like exporting to VBE is dramatically quicker though.

[owen]

Arcadia wrote:
I have an i7 920 now (from core 2 duo 3ghz)and to be honest the difference was not as startling for general usage (although generating sections and 3D docs seems to take roughly half as long) as I had hoped but I think I may be having graphics card issues as well which might not help.

Thats about right ... if you look at the Toms Hardware benchmarks earlier the i7 920 is about 2x the speed of a ~3Ghz Core2 - which makes sense, slightly slower clock speed offset by better core architecture and it has double the number of cores.

On small projects a 100% speed up might not seem to make much difference, but if you are doing visualization cutting a render down from 2hrs to 1hr starts to make sense. Also rebuilding a section of a large project in ArchiCAD in 5mins vs 10mins is also handy ... its a good 'take a break and walk around' time 😉

[Stephen Dolbee]

I went from a 6 year old 2.4 xeon to my current Imac i7. I find it considerably faster for section/elevation generation-even for smaller jobs. Now, if I only had some work.

[Arcadia]

On small projects a 100% speed up might not seem to make much difference, but if you are doing visualization cutting a render down from 2hrs to 1hr starts to make sense. Also rebuilding a section of a large project in ArchiCAD in 5mins vs 10mins is also handy ... its a good 'take a break and walk around' time

Yes I suppose thats right. I guess waiting any time at all is too long but then that would be having unreasonable expectations. I haven't done any renders with the new system yet but I will be very interested to see how this goes.

Why is it that even when doing CPU intestive tasks the cores never seem to run at full capacity (except for maybe one or 2 of them at a time for brief seconds)?

[Anonymous]

Stephen wrote:
Now, if I only had some work.

Same here. It's slow as molasses. In western Carolina.

[vistasp]

Bump!

Would like to hear more user experiences who those who have worked on i7 machines.

[Anonymous]

Hi Vistasp
Hope your doing well!
This probably wont help much, but for what it's worth.
Was running a single core 2.4 with xp(sp3) recognizing 3.3 gigs, a medium vidcard with 256k, 7200 hard drive.
Compared to a new i7 as profile says, (see below).

Opening a 25 meg file seems like roughly 5 times faster.

Rendering the same 25 meg file with default Lightworks settings, 150 seconds to render on old 2.4 (as above) and 25 seconds on new i7.
Rendering with same Lightworks settings with a 7meg file was 60 seconds
on 2.4 and 6 seconds on i7.
Not very scientific but it's all I can do to estimate relative speed.
5 to 6 times faster maybe?
Maybe I'll cross-time section cuts and saving if I get time.
I was focusing on a HP of roughly the same specs but ran into this Dell
Studio XPS at San Jose Best Buy for 1100 on close out, so I grabbed it.
So far seems like all is fine.
Time will tell.
Take care.
Be safe out there.
lec

[vistasp]

Thanks Lec, always good to hear from you. Like Paulo's post earlier in the thread, it gives a pretty good idea of the improvement to be had. Reviews using benchmarking tools etc. go right over my head - and don't necessarily reflect how the hardware will perform with AC anyway. Will probably keep the video card though...

My PC has lately been showing signs of age so I've been seriously toying with an upgrade of the hardware and the OS (not of AC though - v.14 doesn't do much for me).

Now if I can only get all my clients to settle their bills... 😉

[vistasp]

Finally got the new i7 I had been aiming for. Man, it's so much faster in all ways!

AC startup time is down by huge margin and a few test photo-renderings that I'd benchmarked with the old machine got completed in just one-third the time.

Overall, the only pain was getting AC9 to install (as per this wiki page) and the fact remains that both v9 & v10 don't work properly in OpenGL mode. Still, have XP running on VMWare and only need to figure out how the heck to get the Wibu drivers to work properly there.

I'm keeping the earlier versions mainly for working on GDL objects, so the OpenGL problem isn't the worst thing that could happen...

Overall, it's a resounding yay!

[Anonymous]

VistaSP, congrats!

Owen,
You mention 5-10 minute regen time for sections, AND you have a lovely 16GB sitting on your machine.
Lazlo and other GS'ers mention that section rebuild is tightly related to hard drive speed due to
AC's use of temporary and cache files during the regen process.
Your 16Gb of mem, leads me to suggest a ramdrive, you would see a startling improvement. Look here.

Snap
PS sorry for the late response, haven't looked here in a while