Hello,

I would like to ask some advice on the CPU. We are modelling production lines, currently with around 10-20k parts, but from now on we will fully design chains, so I think we will get around 40k parts in full assembly. I know all the utilization features (disable rebuilds, lightweight modes, large assembly review modes) and other, and it really helps. But sometimes we really need to work on full assembly, and the main problem is CPU (model rebuilds are slow, and drawings is a disaster). Currently we are using i4790@3.6 GHz., and it is way too slow. When working on full assembly, I often get stuck with CPU load at 29%, which is because SW can not split calculations to multiple cores. So now we need a new machine.

Mostly people say, that the speed of one core it the mose important. Here are the benchmarks:

PassMark CPU Benchmarks - Single Thread Performance

Intel Core i7-4790K @ 4.00GHz - is the first.

But with a turbo mode it can get to around 4.4 GHz, which is at maximum around 20% of performance increase when compared to my current machine, so it would probably still be pretty slow.

Another solution would be to get a Core i7-6700K, Quad Core, 4.00GHz, which has almost the same frequency (4 GHz, and 4.2 at Turbo), but it is a new genereation CPU working with DDR4 instead of DDR3, which is for 4790K. I think this CPU should be faster, although it has a little lower frequency (4.2 GHz at turbo instead of 4.4 GHz that i4790K works at).

On the other hand, fully assembled machines all come with Xeon processors:

www8.hp.com/us/en/campaigns/workstations/z840.html

Dell Precision Tower 5810 Media Workstation | Dell

and other... They should have a good reason to use Xeon. I had an experience with some older Xeon CPU, which beated i7  in times, not in percents (in rebuilds, rendering), though it was way older and way slower by the specs than that i7.But it was a while ago, and I don't' recall exact models of these processors.

I can not find a good source of information how Xeon would perform today with rebuilding a SW model. If we compare a frequency of the single core - Xeon has it lower than averate i7, but there are lots of other factors that come into place, like cash, memory type, instructions for CPU etc. Unfortunatelly I am really not competent to evaluate these numbers, therefore I come here for the advice.

We are now using SW 2015 SP4, but we will probably not be too slow to upgrade to 2016 when it will be launched.

What CPU today should we choose for the best rebuild times?