[Qgis-user] Fwd: QGIS hardware recommendations?

[Brent Wood]

Hi,

The general answer is as much and as fast as you can get - cpu, memory & disk. Depends as much on your expectations, patience & workload as anything :-)
If you are working with lots of data, memory & disk, anything analytical, cpu - and note that reprojecting on the fly counts as analytical :-)

I'm doing pretty well with ex-lease Dell E6420 laptops. They are now being sold cheaply - 3-4 years old but are well built & came with a 3 yr warranty when new so are not the cheaper 1 yr warranty home & student systems the big retailers sell.

Typically good I5 2.6Ghz cpu, 4gb ram, 500gb WD Black HDD (a faster model than most spindles drives - though slower than SSD).

Generally quite adequate for my use of QGIS but can be improved. I can use several Gb of data as shapefiles or Postgis tables, processing with R, reprojecting on the fly, surface modelling, etc, & I find it satisfactory - not blindingly fast, but not really waiting too long for anything.

For a fastish version, I add 4gb memory (8Gb total), get a modular HDD enclosure to fit the removable optical drive bay & add an SSD for boot & swap, install Linux & run Postgis on the spindle drive. 

Works out at <$300US for a pretty quick system for most things.
Also has pretty good battery life for the performance.

One point to note - be careful on your cpu choice. I7 does not mean faster than I5, but does generally mean more cores. Clock speed is also misleading, an I5 2.67 cpu can be substantially slower than an I5 2.6Ghz (I have one of each in front of me right now - with same memory & disk).

eg: from PassMark CPU Benchmarks - High Mid Range CPUs
Intel Core i7-2640M @ 2.80GHz      3,914 
Intel Core i7-4550U @ 1.50GHz       3,893 
Intel Core i3-4110M @ 2.60GHz      3,873 
Intel Core i3-2120 @ 3.30GHz         3,869 
 Intel Core i7-3537U @ 2.00GHz       3,857 
 Intel Core i5-5300U @ 2.30GHz       3,849 
  
While these don't tell the whole story (mix of laptop/desktop versions), it is likely that you would often not see much difference between these cpus in terms of performance - but simplistically, the more QGIS takes advantages of multiple cores, the more a FAST I7 is likely to work better. I would not go below I5 at 2.5Ghz for QGIS. 


Hope this helps... vague as it is, but performance is not a simple question...
Cheers,
  Brent Wood

________________________________
 From: Nicolas Cadieux <nicolas.cadieux at archeotec.ca>
To: Qgis Users List <qgis-user at lists.osgeo.org> 
Sent: Thursday, October 22, 2015 3:55 AM
Subject: [Qgis-user] Fwd: QGIS hardware recommendations?
 

Hi,
I think this message never made it to the server.  Apologies if it did.

Nicolas Cadieux M.Sc.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Nicolas Cadieux <nicolas.cadieux at archeotec.ca>
Date: Oct 19, 2015 14:57
Subject: QGIS hardware recommendations?
To: Qgis Users List <qgis-user at lists.osgeo.org>
Cc: 

> Hi,
>
> We are building new (Windows 10) computers for QGIS and I was wondering if there is any new hardware consideration to think of? I don't want a gamer style debate on Intel vs AMD or nvidia vs ATI but I am wondering if the QGIS CODE is evolving toward a better support of things like nvidia's Cuda support for calculations or rendering.
>
> First off for CPU we are considering the latest i7 on the z170 or X99 chipsets. (We are not looking at zeon's for now. These are desktop and not workstations.) I know the differences between both chipsets so no comments are needed here.
>
> Any reason we should go with AMD (apart from the fact that they have more core (currently slower) which could help in muti-threaded  rendering).  Is there an advantage, code wise, to using amd64 cpu's?
>
> Video cards: any nvidia Cuda support in the planning?  Has anything been optimized for AMD/ATI or NDVIA?  Should I be looking for a particular version of OpenGL or DirectX? (I guess QGIS uses OpenGL???) How about when we use GLobe or Qgis2threejs?  Any future consideration needed? 
>
> Memory wise, we will get as much as the budget allows...
>
> Thanks for any comments.  Again, I am looking for comments more from a QGIS CODE perspective and future orientations, not a gamer hardware perspective.
>
> Cheers!
>
> Nicolas
>
> Nicolas Cadieux M.Sc.
> Les Entreprises Archéotec inc. 
> 8548, rue Saint-Denis Montréal H2P 2H2
> Téléphone: 514.381.5112  Fax: 514.381.4995
> www.archeotec.ca
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