Brian1965,
I agree competely with the concept of "bewildering". And in two aspects >
Disk: The SM951 in the z420 has a Passmark disk score of 11559 and the difference to your 7891 is too great to be a variation. This I think warrnats some study. What are your storage and power option settings?
One thing though is that every time Passmark runs, the disk score drops. The first test of the ancient Seagate that arrived in the z620, the disk score was 594, and the third time it scored 495. I decided to make a small improvement and an hour ago bought a Z Turbo 256GB AHCI, that will go into the z420. With the Samsung SM951/ Lycom DT-120 moved to the z620, that should add about 11,000 points to the 495 mark.
I was interested to see that the Z Turbo has a higher average performance than the SM951 and that must be due to the quality of the board design and refinement for use with an HP z.
Tesla M2090: The situation with the M2090 is very strange. My local wind tunnel uses Teslas for Matlab flight dynamics simulations and they have staff that work out bespoke multi-thread / parallelization algorithms. It occurred to me that the problem might be in the parallization stream synch, but Solidworks is said to have the best, fully scalar, rendering of any programme. Only to eliminate it as a possibility, are the z620 BIOS settings to enable all processors? Also, are there similar settings in creating the Maximus (Quadro +Tesla) configuration?
Your Solidworks model and rendering are a work of art- well done and a half. I've been trying to learn Solidworks for awhile for my industrial design projects, but never have large blocks of time. I end up doing them in AuoCad. I have a book,"The Solidworks Bible" but it's more than 600 pages and I'm only on Genesis. How did you learn? Do you give lessons?
Here is a work in progress, a Sketchup test image of a 380m long, five story office / library / laboratory building. It's not much smaller than the island it's on. This is the most complex single drawing I've ever done, in AutoCad to Sketchup on the z420 and will be translated into Revit on the z620:
Quadro M2000, M4000's, and Proposed Sysem:
I have high hopes for the Quadro M2000 as it's a bit more than half the cost of a Quadro K4200 and yet:
Highest Passmark 3D ratings:
Quadro K4200 (317 tested): 4895
Quadro M2000 (12 tested) : 4671
The Quadro "P4000": Thinking of your consideration for the zz620, the first two Pascal GPU Quadros , the P6000 24GB- said to cost $12,000, and the P5000 have been released and these are going to be specular perofrmers. What i'm waiting for however is the "P4000" ( or whatever it will be called) which, if true to form- that is performing as well as the next model up from the model it replaces and costing a bit more means it should perform at near K6000 levels but cost only $100 more than an M4000.
M4000: However, the M4000 is a strong contender to replace a K4200.
Highest Passmark 3D ratings:
Quadro M4000 (8GB) (264 tested): 7234 with i7-6700K / ASUS Z170-A
___________________________ 6934 with Xeon E5-1660 v3 / Dell Precision T5810
____________________________ 6112 with 2X E5-2670 in HP z620
As usual, the GPU performance will be linked to the single-thread performance.
Average for the M4000 ($820 US) is 6402. For comparison a $3,000 Firepro W9100 is 6570, Quadro K5200 is 6155. a GTX 770 averages 6149, and GTX 960 5916. So, the M4000 is actually in the upper end of the mid-level gaming GPU's. certainly, topping the $1,800 Quadro K5200 is good enough for as terrible draughtsman as I.
When the time comes, sell the K2200 in the z620, buy a used M4000, for the z420, and place the K4200 in that spot. When the "P4000" arrives, the price of used M4000 will drop- as will K4200's even more precipitously. In the US already, they have sold for as little as $600. I've had perfect reliability with the eight or so used Quadros I've had- I still use a 2004 FX 580 as the GPU in my server. About three months after the introduction of the "P4000", might be a good time to change.
Proposed System: If you're interested, I've made some suggested workstation build lists on Tom's Hardware. They have a semi-competition every year for the best build list by cost. As 99% are gaming systems, I add a couple of workstation ideas. See and scroll down to : Workstation: Visualization 2D-3D CAD / Graphic Design / Simulation / Animation > $2,000
, which uses a Xeon E5 / Quadro M2000 or GTX 1070. I also added lists in the $1,500 and $1,000 categories. The $1,500 version uses an Xeon E3 / M2000: The no forum handle in the name of your build, and avoiding odd capitalizations & symbols $1,500 Workstation. The title is due to the rules of the competition rule that were added because of the names I typically use. e.g.: " BambiBoom PixelCannon Cadamodarendergrapharific iWork? TurboBlast ExtremeSignature SuperModel 8000®©$$™®£™©™_ 6.14.16 " = forum handle+ "odd capitalizations and symbols". It's pleasant to know one's efforts are specially noticed.
If you'd like any other suggestions for the proposed system, I'd be pleased to discuss it. If you think it's not of general insterest, send a PM.
Where is your son studying?
Cheers,
BambiBoomZ
My motto: "Why use just one work when twenty will do just as well."