System Specifications & Recommendations

[Jaxilon]

Ok, all this talk about notebooks and 64 bit operating systems got me to wondering what if anything I should be thinking of for my upgrade path. First off, I'm pretty much planning on getting a tablet before I start rebuilding but if there is something I can do that isn't going to cost me an arm or a leg I might do that sooner. So, for those of you who know and are willing please offer up your advice. For the rest, maybe you can share your system specifications for bragging purposes or so the rest of us can see how we match up with the big boys. I know I'm way overdue for an upgrade I just haven't needed one yet.

The thing that bothers me most is when my machine is chugging over simple things like turning on/off a layer. That and the limit on how large an image I can create (although I think this will always be the case).

I used Speccy to create this report and just published the results to share here (In case you didn't know how to do this):

Speccy system report

Hehe, I just know some of you guys are going to make me so jealous!

Edit: Oh, and for the record I built this system quite a few years ago for playing games.

[Gidde]

That's not that bad. I rebuilt mine about 15 months ago and all I really have you on is CPU and RAM. I'll edit with detailed secs tonight, but I've got a 4-core AMD cpu and 6Gb of ddr3 (i believe).

Edit: Nope, it was ddr2. Wasn't sure on that bit.


Here's specs: http://speccy.piriform.com/results/g...fMOLxWXJj0qKBU

[Clercon]

I must agree with Gidde, it's not too bad. My system is nearly the same, My CPU is 2,6 Ghz and I have a newer graphics card with 1 GB of VRAM. But apart from that no big differences. So far I haven't experienced any slowdowns while drawing maps. Sometimes a reinstallation of your system might do wonders :-)

[Midgardsormr]

I used to build my own PCs, but recently I've decided that my time is valuable enough not to spend it on research and assembly, so I went with a box from HP.
http://speccy.piriform.com/results/X...VKZ2voKSe4icxL

In brief, it's an i7 920 with 12 MB of RAM running Vista64. It's a lot of computer, but I do a lot of work in Maya and other visual effects software, so I needed something quite powerful. And the removable drive bay is very handy since I create insane quantities of data.

[professorthunder]

Get yourself the most RAM you can cram in there, and the absolute fastest harddrive you can afford. Those are the big bottlenecks on most computers. Running filters or rendering are number-crunch-tastic, but most of my problems seem to come from having too slow of a harddrive or not enough memory.

[Hai-Etlik]

Well, I have an i7 930 (4 cores, 2 way SMT, 2.8 GHz core clock.) with 6 GiB of DDR3-1333 7-7-7-20. It's running Ubuntu 10.10 and is named Smaug.

[Redrobes]

I'm on some kind of intel quaddie with 4GB of DDR2. I run XP x64 which is kinda unusual but I like it a lot. I have a pretty good nVidia graphics card but nothing silly. I turn off my swap file now so its 4Gb or bust but its faster that way. I think that if I were building it again I would add a solid state drive to it and put some of the more frequently changing files on that. To be honest, if I were doing this all again I would go with Ubuntu 10.10 instead now as well. I have a somewhat old 4Gb dual core ubuntu 10.10 machine too with a silly graphics card which someone sold me for a song which I use as a test machine for some stuff I do but not generally mapping. I would urge all people putting together a major machine to go x64 now even if you don't have 4Gb+ of ram.

A removable drive bay is a kind of luxury but you can do just as good with external USB hard drives for backup. They are not quite as fast but I like the fact that for almost all of the time they are not connected to the main box and therefore unaffected by a terminal power spike.

I also have a UPS on my main machine too which I think is a bonus if you have moderately dodgy power. Its prevented a few hard stops in the past so it might have paid for itself by now.

[waldronate]

In your case, Jaxilon, I'd recommend upgrading first to a 64-bit OS like Windows 7 in order to take advantage of the full 4 GB of memory at the same time as the memory on the video card. I would hazard a guess that you currently have around 3GB free under XP; the OS upgrade would give you 1GB extra available plus a full-sized video aperture.

The next upgrade would probably be memory because it's relatively cheap ($75 or so would give you 8GB). If you really want to keep the old system limping along, you might want to upgrade to a 4-core or 6-core processor (which may or may not require an upgrade, depending on your motherboard).

I'm running a Q6600 with 8GB running a dual-boot XP32/Win7x64 configuration (I have 2.5 GB available under XP and 8GB available under Win7). My upgrade options are somewhat limited because I'll have to upgrade the motherboard, processor, and memory all at once - $700+ for the combo I want. Probably a new power supply, too... I'll probably just end up buying a whole new box early next year when the Ivy Bridge processors come out, but that sort of thing usually ends up being $2500+.