Recommended Video Card and Amount of Memory for PI

[GeneralT001]

Hi,

My current computer is getting a bit long in the tooth and I have started to put together a replacement system. Here is what I am building:

• CPU i7 8700k
• MB ASUS strix Z370

Understanding that PI is resource intensive what would be a good choice as a video card without breaking the bank - do I need one with lots of memory on it?

Also, I can have up to 64GBs of DDR4 for this MB but is there any noticeable advantage to having that much or is 32Gbs or 48GBs more than ample?

[pfile]

i will be building something similar soon.

i don't think the video card matters since PI does not use CUDA/OpenCL or any other compute-on-GPU stuff at this time.

i have 32GB in my current system and that's been fine for me, but as i will probably use this build for 5+ years i was going to go for 64GB. although it seems insane to have that much RAM with no ECC.

rob

[GeneralT001]

That's good to hear about the video card (kinda as I thought they were going to implement CUDA back in 2016?). I guess I'll add that money into DDR4 mem and aim for the 64GBs.

[RickS]

I just built a new system with an AMD Threadripper 1950X and 64GB RAM.  I don't expect to need 64GB (my old system worked perfectly well with 24GB) but I'll probably use 32GB as a RAM disk.  As Rob suggested, PI doesn't need, or take advantage of, a high-end graphics card.  It's worth thinking about some fast SSD storage if you haven't already.  I got a NVMe drive for the system files and PI swap.  I will probably end up with separate NVMe drives when I have some spare cash.

Cheers,
Rick.

[GeneralT001]

Yes,

I also went with an NVMe drive for the OS and an SSD for extra storage.

[GeneralT001]

I just built a new system with an AMD Threadripper 1950X and 64GB RAM.  I don't expect to need 64GB (my old system worked perfectly well with 24GB) but I'll probably use 32GB as a RAM disk.  As Rob suggested, PI doesn't need, or take advantage of, a high-end graphics card.  It's worth thinking about some fast SSD storage if you haven't already.  I got a NVMe drive for the system files and PI swap.  I will probably end up with separate NVMe drives when I have some spare cash.

Cheers,
Rick.

A little off topic but is there anyway to always have that RAM Disk present or do you have to allocate it each time you fire up PI?

[RickS]

A little off topic but is there anyway to always have that RAM Disk present or do you have to allocate it each time you fire up PI?

Sorry, not sure if you're asking about Windows.  It's easy on Linux.  I'm still deciding whether to process under Windows or Linux.  So far it looks like PI under Linux is significantly faster but I haven't tried much tuning on Windows yet (like setting up a RAM disk...)

Have you checked out the PI benchmark site?  There are not many results for the i7 8700k yet but you might find it interesting anyway. http://pixinsight.com/benchmark/

[pscammp]

Ow RickS,

THREADRIPPER ! ! !

Give me the Gen sir if you please

What's your first impressions on your Ripper system  ?

I'm seriously looking at the ThreadRipper for my future system, whats it like, not just with PI but everything else too

Many Thanks
Paul

[RickS]

Hi Paul,

First impression is that it's very fast.  Long calibration/registration runs, DrizzleIntegration, etc. are all much faster than my old system (i7-960.)  I expect to spend less time waiting and more time being productive.  I haven't had any issues with software (Windows 10 and Ubuntu Linux.)  Everything has just worked as expected so far.

Cheers,
Rick.