Sponsor Spotlight: HP Performance Advisor
HP Performance Advisor is an ultra-savvy application that monitors and helps increase the performance of your workstation. With its automated management features, it helps keep your workstation up-to-date and tuned for your critical applications.
HP Performance Advisor is a multi-functional freely available tool for HP Workstations and HP Elite Mobile Workstations that helps you in three fundamental ways. It allows you to monitor the performance of your applications in a more visually rich manner than Windows Task Manager. It allows you to update system settings and certified graphics drivers for NVIDIA and AMD professional graphics cards for all Performance Advisor supported Autodesk applications. Finally it provides an audit of hardware, software, and operating system at user-selectable levels of detail.
Performance Advisor is supported on all currently shipping versions of Microsoft Windows, including Windows8 64 bit. It installs in a convenient and Windows compliant location.
Performance Advisor is capable of monitoring a number of Windows system resourcesincluding CPU, memory, disk I/O and network. With simple identifiable clicks, information can be graphed and logged for evaluation of professional applications and memory usage as shown in the figure below. Additionally it will visibly generate an alert if the resource is low.
Another important workstation resource is the graphics card and how well it performs under the pressure of therunning applications. In the example belowthe graphics card’s temperature and GPU resources are monitored.
When Performance Advisor is executed it performs an evaluation of all the hardware and software installed in the workstation. If a misconfiguration is detected, an alert is visible on the Performance Advisor home page. Configuration information at user selectable levels of detail is available under “Your Computer.” An example below shows a block diagram of an HP Z820 Workstation where individual components can be clicked to give additional detail.
A file containing the system configuration can be generated and shared with various interested parties including your IT support.
Performance Advisor has a well-maintained data base of certified and supported graphics drivers for NVIDIA and AMD professional graphics cards indexed by all Performance Advisor supported Autodesk applications. Information is provided so you can select an appropriate driver for your favorite application or if you work with a number of applications a range of drivers will be presented so you can select the appropriate one.
To learn more about HP Performance Advisor, visit http://www.hp.com/go/hpperformanceadvisor .