Advice on new computer spec for CUDA?

[MikeP]

Hello everyone, I'm currently evaluating PixInsight.  My PC is quite old and my monitor is not really good enough for editing images so I've ordered a nice new 24" monitor and I'm currently trying to decide what to build to connect it to.

I've not built a PC for 5 years or so and I've never had any interest in gaming or graphics (other than for astronomy).  I was looking at a motherboard with onboard ATI Radeon 4250 Graphics which I assumed was perfectly adequate but I was introduced to CUDA which I'd never heard of before yesterday. 

My question is ..... should I be buying a cheaper motherboard and a separate graphics card that supports CUDA?  I know version 1.6 is not CUDA enabled but I'll be keeping this PC for 5 or more years.  Also, what "flavour" of graphics card - Nvidia or ATI Radeon?

Thank you in advance for any advice

Mike

PS I really like PixInsight especially the fairly uniform user interface - much better than the weird and whacky Photoshop interface
PPS Thank God for the videos, especially Harry's

[Carlos Milovic]

Hi Mike

I'm far from an expert in hardware, but I recently builded a new PC, and I'm quite happy with it.
Since I didn't have games or other intensive graphics application on mind, I just bought a motherboard with everything integrated. It is the Asus AMD M4A89GTD PRO (with ATI Radeon HD 4290). It costed here around 200 dollars. Also, I bought ATI because it is better supported on Linux than Nvidia.

Now, from the performance point of view. I have lots of desktop effects enabled, and on Fedora 13 it worked quite well. On Fedora 14 the drivers had a regression, and it is a bit slower. Also it losses some frames when reproducing videos at full screen (anyway, the fps test shows consistant 29.9 values, if nothing else is eating resources).

So, for any normal use, i would say that it works great. For gaming or full hd videos it would be not enough. Oh, btw, I'm running two 19" lcd screens.

If you are going for CUDA, maybe you should wait a bit before buying a better graphics card. Since you'll not using it right now, it is better to wait and buy something better for the same price, at the propper time. Also, if I understood it right, the ASUS MB supports parallel processing between two graphic cards. So, if you add one in the future, it may use the integrated one to perform some tasks and speed up the performance a bit.

[MikeP]

Thank you for your response Carlos - amazingly, I've been looking at exactly the same motherboard with an AMD Quad Core Phenom II X4 965.  I can buy them as a pre-tested bundle bundle with 2 x 2GB of memory for £255.  Based on your experiences, it sounds perfectly OK for me.  Your point about waiting to buy a graphics card makes sense too - I'm convinced.

By the way, I intend to run Windows 7 rather than a Linux.  Once the new PC is up and running, I think I'll use the old one to teach myself about Fedora or Ubuntu or whatever seems best.  My experience with Unix is limited to AIX and that was a good few years ago.

Thank you again.

Mike

[Carlos Milovic]

Mike, it seems that the X6 1055T runs a bit faster than the X4, since it has 2 more cores... and it is quite easy to overclock (I've seen guys saying to run it close to 4GHz), and is just a bit more expensive. Another good thing about that MB is that it supports Sata3 drives...

If you want to try linux, since today's HDD are so large, just keep 100 or 200 Gb of unused space on the disk (a new partition, not formated), and install any of its flavours after windoze (not before, starting up issues...). If you want stability and keep things easy, go for Ubuntu on Gnome. If you want to be on top of the wave, Fedora and KDE

[MikeP]

You should be a salesman Carlos - I've now been seduced by the X6.  Perhaps I should just buy your PC. 

A bit off topic but .... I intend to use two disks in RAID1 configuration - would I need to partition the second one similarly?

Mike

[DaveS]

Hi Mike

I have built several PCs over the years, and until recently, found that I ended up with a 'machine' that would meet my requirements, more cost effectively.

However, more recently I have found that there is little or no cost advantage in building a PC, as opposed to buying one 'off the shelf'. In fact in many cases, you can now get a higher spec PC 'off the shelf' for less cost than you could build it yourself.

So, my latest PC was 'off the shelf', and does all I ask of it, including editing AVCHD video, which is quite demanding.

Decide what spec you want Mike, do the sums for both 'self build' and 'off the shelf', and you might be surprised at the result.

BTW, you do know which Dave this is 

Dave

[Juan Conejero]

Hi Mike and Carlos,

Just a few remarks. Whatever operating system you decide to install, it should be a 64-bit operating system. Any 32-bit OS is now obsolete and will impose severe limitations, especially with PixInsight and other memory and processor intensive applications.

Regarding memory, I would seriously consider installing 8 GB of RAM at least. This is more important than the processor.

I fully agree with Carlos' suggestion regarding video hardware. Who knows where the market will go in a couple years. CUDA is nice but it is not a portable solution. OpenCL is the way to go and definitely where PixInsight will go during the next years, but this is just a project and PixInsight has many more priorities in the short and medium term.

If you want to try linux, since today's HDD are so large, just keep 100 or 200 Gb of unused space on the disk (a new partition, not formated)

Much better and cleaner if you install Linux on an independent hard disk. Install Windoze on the first physical disk unit and then Linux on the second disk. The Linux installer will install a boot manager that will allow you to choose which OS to boot from.

Unless you have a strong reason to use Linux, I recommend PC-BSD (a desktop-oriented version of FreeBSD) instead. Faster, more efficient and currently the best platform for PixInsight.

Also keep in mind that Linux support for nVidia cards is very problematic these days (search the web for "Nouveau Linux" and you'll know why), and in practice it is impossible to get (stable) hardware graphics acceleration under Linux if you have an nVidia graphics card. This is due to the extreme difficulty to remove the Nouveau driver that all major Linux distros install by default. FreeBSD has none of these absurd problems and installs the proprietary nVidia driver, which provides full OpenGL acceleration.

If you want stability and keep things easy, go for Ubuntu on Gnome. If you want to be on top of the wave, Fedora and KDE

Here I disagree. Fedora 14 with KDE 4.5 is very stable and IMO better for serious computing purposes. However as I've said PC-BSD (which also provides KDE as its default desktop environment) is better than Linux, IMO, especially if you want to work with PixInsight.

FWIW, the primary development platform for PixInsight (that is, the platform where PixInsight is being actively developed and tested before porting it to other platforms) is right now Fedora 13 with KDE.

A bit off topic but .... I intend to use two disks in RAID1 configuration - would I need to partition the second one similarly?

When you use a RAID configuration, you actually have no control on the way each individual disk in the array is partitioned. You (and your operating system, at a high level) see the entire array as a single logical disk. Normally after defining the RAID array, either using a hardware RAID controller or a software based RAID implementation, you partition it as if it were a single disk drive.

With a RAID1 configuration you have two or more disks mirrored with the same contents. It is not the best RAID configuration in terms of performance (although its read performance is very good), but it is the most secure. I use a RAID1 array of two server-class 750 GB Western Digital disks in my main UNIX workstation.

A last advice regarding RAID. Beware of "hardware" RAID support provided by many motherboards. In most cases they are really software RAID implementations using cheap dedicated hardware on the motherboard and a proprietary closed design that can cause a lot of problems. With modern processors, pure software RAID implementations are more efficient and you don't depend on a closed disk management system.

[MikeP]

BTW, you do know which Dave this is

Hi Dave, or should I say Centroid, yes I do.  I didn't know you were here till your post today re getting your licence details.  Good to hear from you.

I agree with what you say about pre-built versus DIY costs but TBH I prefer to have built my machines because I have everything required to fix / upgrade them.  Also, while off the shelf prices are keen, I'm not sure whether the same applies when you want a slightly different configuration but I'll be checking before I buy.

Say hi to Roger for me.

Mike

[MikeP]

Hi Juan,

Thank you for the excellent advice.  I'd decided to opt for 64 bit Windows 7 and 8GB memory from the outset so I could be sure to get matched RAM.

The Linux was just for interest really, by way of a change from Windows, so I'm happy to consider PC-BSD.

It is late here now, so I'll read your comments on RAID tomorrow and do some research.  The PC will also be keeping track of financial data that currently I periodically update through the day and automatically copy to a second drive.  I thought with a new machine I'd go for RAID from the outset - security rather than speed, hence RAID 1.  Clearly I've a bit of self education to do first.

Thanks again Juan, this forum is proving to be as good as the software.

Mike

[MikeP]

It looks like the easiest way for me to implement RAID 1 is to use the RAID capability built in to Windows 7 Professional and above.  I'm not interested in mirroring the system files, so I think I'll opt for three disks: one for the system and the other two as a mirrored pair for data.  I'll keep reading to see if there are problems with this approach or better solutions.

Mike

[DaveS]

Hi Dave, or should I say Centroid

Ah, that was in 'another life' Mike, and things have moved on a long way since then 

Good to see you on here, and trust that you are keeping well.

I will say Hi to Roger for you 

Dave