Gone back to the dark side.

[avandonk]

No I have not become a planetary imager or bought an astro CCD!.

After many years of having AMD systems since after my first 486 I have just ordered an Itel i7 system with 12GB of ram and other goodies including Vista 64 bit. This will be used just for processing astro data ie no games.

I found with the 4GB of ram limit the number of frames I could stack with RegiStar was limited. ImagesPlus and Photo Shop were also slow with 150+ MB images.

I will let you all know how well or otherwise it goes. I hope it does what I want as I don't want to suffer from buyers remorse.

Have I done the correct thing? Has anyone any experience with these supposedly fast beasts?

Bert

[h0ughy]

well done - what a beast of a machine. will you suffer buyers remorse - no way enjoy the spoils:thumbsup:

[avandonk]

Thanks David I know you know a bit about computer systems. Here is the essential parts list.

Gigabyte GA-EX58-EXTREME Motherboard
1 Intel Core i7 920
1 Western Digital RE3 1TB WD1002FBYS
1 OCZ DDR3 PC3-10666 Platinum 6x2GB OCZ3P1333LV12GS



Bert

[h0ughy]

if you can afford it get another HDD - to keep the data on - process from the other

[leon]

Wow Bert, I have trouble with my Lap Top, sounds pretty awesome to me, have fun.

Leon

[Omaroo]

Welcome to 64-bit computing Bert. I, too, am an ex AMD-only guy.

I chose a Q9550 QuadCore over the i7, purely because it has established itself and is proving very reliable in the graphics trade - which I'm in. It also runs 12Mb of level 2 cache vs 8 I think for the i7, which people I know at Adobe have said lets InDesign and Photoshop perform a little faster in benchmarks.

Either way - you'll love the speed. Vista Ultimate 64 is a killer. It has been ROCK solid on this box. I also run 16Gb of RAM, so it isn't exactly starving...

Have fun with it.

[avandonk]

I have two 200Gb sata drives for the operating system in raid 1. The 1TB drive is enterprise quality. Eventually I will get more drives and may set them up as raid 5. I already have about 4TB of sata drives in my other computers. I am not counting the two laptops that run the observatory.

If it all works as planned I will be most pleased.

Bert

[avandonk]

Thanks for the info. Chris where did you get 4x4GB ram?

bert

[Omaroo]

Bert - T.I. Computers in Crows Nest, NSW. Talk to John.

http://www.ticomputers.com.au

Go to Product Group/Components/Memory: DDR2-1066

Oh - I run a GA-EP45-UD3L motherboard. Is yours OK with these?

[avandonk]

Low voltage DDR3 only? The i7 processors have three on board die memory processors (finally caught up with AMD). This almost doubles the apparent labelled speed of the memory. In fact if you increase the memory voltage above 1.65V you will fry your CPU. It is better to run the memory closer to 1.5V.

MMMM

[Omaroo]

KVR1333D3N9K2/4 4GB 1333MHZ DDR3 NON-ECC CL9 DIMM 1.5v - $198

Go to Product Group/Components/Memory/Kingston: #38

That's 800 smackers-worth of quick storage...

EDIT: Dang - these are double-ganged 2x2GB units. Sorry Bert - my mistake. Arghh

[avandonk]

I used to be infallible before I got conceited. Now I am almost perfect........NOT.

Thanks!

Bert

[dpastern]

I'm running an older Quadcore Q6600 at stock speeds, 8GB DDR 2 (800mhz, stock speeds) RAM and Vista 64 bit. Like Chris has said, this type of system rocks. Vista has been wonderful. My favourite Windows O/S yet, and since I'm really a UNIX guy, that's saying something. My only negative about Vista is that sometimes, copying files is well...bloody well slow, far slower than it should be. I remember copying a 20mb file from my desktop to a folder on my desktop took near a minute. No kidding. This slowness doesn't happen too often though. I'm running a stock Vista setup, so I haven't bothered to preen it and make it slim and speedy like I know I could if I wanted to.

I don't know much about the i7 systems as I haven't bothered investigating as I'm happy with the current "beast". Oh, and for such a nice system, don't skimp on the case, get a nice Lian Li (I use a PC-V1010 tower case). They're cool, beautiful, and a delight to work with as well as very well made. Best cases imho.

I'd recommend getting a few drives - my approach is a WD raptor for the boot drive (80gb or thereabouts, gives plenty of room), and 2 x 500gb or 1tb drives in raid 1 for data storage/redundancy, and a single drive for data live data being worked on. With hdds being so cheap, it's a damn good idea imho. Oh, and I'd recommend a hardware RAID card over software/motherboard RAID.

Dave

[acropolite]

Ditto what the others said re Quadcore, I've got 8Gb Ram, vista ultimate 64bit, it's solid, as solid as any of my XP machines. The difference on Photoshop is incredible.

[avandonk]

Thanks for the encouragement and advice. I will have to upgrade to the 64 bit versions of RegiStar and ImagesPlus. There is now no practical image file size limitation on ImagesPlus on version 3.8. My current version (2.75) is limited to about 190MB tiffs.

I was forced into this hardware upgrade as I want to explore using upsized files and other methods to obtain real enhanced resolution in my wide fields. I could not use IP's many functions on large mosaics. The Vela SNR mosaic was in tiff form about 500MB.

Below is a crop of M7 taken with the 300mm lens. The resolution has been improved by dithering and stacking upsized frames. Richarson Lucy enhancement and other methodswould improve it far more.

Much more work ahead.

Bert

[avandonk]

All the bits arrived today and will be assembled tomorrow by someone far smarter than me. I do not want any mistakes!

Bert

[AlexN]

Good work Bert.. .

I too found 4gb of ram a little restrictive for many tasks... I now use 8gb and even still, sometimes think it might be time to move up to 12/16Gb...

I went for Quad core like Chris, although as im still an avid gamer, I went for the Q9650..

Its truly amazing the cost of building a real beast of a computer these days.. to build something considered top of the line would cost $4k + 5 or 6 years ago... these days, not including a top of the line graphics card you can build a really really serious system for under $1800.. add a graphics card (or 2) and you can see that $1800 system looking more like $3500...

Hope you enjoy your new system..

[avandonk]

A son of a mate of mine put the system together on Saturday afternoon. He has a degree in computer science and is also a hardware systems expert. All up and running Vista 64 bit with no fuss. I loaded in Registar and ImagesPlus and PhotoShop on Sunday.

Gave it the big test and had all three programs running at once all doing CPU and memory intensive tasks. Any one of them would have fully occupied the old system to the point of no response if you even tried to do anything else such as web browsing. It did all three at once with ease and I then proceeded to open a few web pages.

I then set ImagesPlus off to do a few more tasks at the same time. The 64 bit version of ImagesPlus can do many different things at once (it can use multicores) and what is even better for all practical purposes the image size is unlimited.

The intel i7 920 processor has hyperthreading which means you have effectively eight processors and with 12GB of memory will do anything you can throw at it.

Best of all it is very fast. Looks like it will do everything I want for image processing.

All round a good outcome. Again thanks all for the advice and encouragement.

Bert

[dpastern]

That is most excellent news Bert - I'm sure you'll love your new computer!!!

Dave

[Omaroo]

Enjoy Bert.

Hyperthreading is nothing even remotely new - it's been around since Pentium days... but applications that make effective use of it haven't.

[AlexN]

I remember having one of the Original hyperthreaded S478 P4 2.4C's back in the day... it was a good chip, but the only piece of software that even recognized it was windows task manager, it showed 2 cpu graphs in the performance monitor... That was the only use of the 2nd logical core... These days with 64bit OS's and many programs supporting multi-threading, a dual core/quad core processor is a really handy bit of gear...

I still think my next system is going to be a dual - quad core box... Pure processing power. 2x quad core Intel Xeon's with 32gb of ram should pump out the photoshop work without breaking a sweat!! :) Back in the day I had a dual Xeon 2 400Mhz server at home... it was the noisiest computer I've ever owned, but it was the coolest thing I have ever owned (Until the Astro-toys that is)

Ahh nostalgia..

[Omaroo]

Nostalgia! LOL! :lol:

Alex - I worked for IBM as a mainframe systems engineer in 1982, when I opened a box in our Kent St. Sydney Head Office, containing the very, very first IBM PC that had ever landed in the country.

I looked at it, and at a fellow engineer looking at it, and we both turned to each other and said... "what a silly little machine - it'll never catch on".

Now that's nostalgia! :lol:

[avandonk]

As far as I can work out for sheer grunt you cannot beat an i7. The on board die memory controller is the clincher for me. IP 64 bit is multithreaded and or uses multicores. Registar is still 32 bit but is very memory intensive.

I have not been able to make it swap ram to disk or saturate the processors yet. Give me some time. This CPU also overclocks well but I wont bother yet.

As a small example a Richardson Lucy enhancement that took 1.5 hrs on my old machine with a 6.5k (170MB) pixels wide image only took 12 minutes with a 9k (250MB) pixels wide image!

If you want to go down memory lane my first computer was a PDP8 with 2k of memory.in 1968.

In the past at CSIRO we had many very expensive super computers. My desktop now leaves them all for dead. They will not let me play with the current real super computers.

I ran all my lab (6) computers in command code unix. What power hey! Three or four keystrokes would set off a major chain reaction!

Bert

[Omaroo]

Set up a RAM disk Bert - and then watch it freaking fly.

[AlexN]

Yeah... RAM disks are awesome! :) I've got my OS on a ram disk... Unfortunately its bottlenecked by the SATA bus... They really need to start producing motherboards with a few DIMM slots for RAM disk, and the usual 4/6 for RAM...

My RAM disk is a PCIe board with 4 DIMMs on it, its got 8gb of RAM in it.. Its then got a lead that goes from the PCIe card to the SATA controller on the motherboard... The SATA bus is still a fair bit slower than the DDR2 modules, and therfore, bottlenecks the RAM disks potential performance. however it still destroyes the performance I achieved with 2x73gb SCSI HDD's in RAID 0...

[avandonk]

My last computer had a ram (4GB ) disk otherwise it was very slow for memory intensive tasks.

If my memory at 12GB has not swapped yet I cannot see the point.

I may get a SSD for just for the swap file and wait until it fails and then just replace it.

Bert

[Omaroo]

In reality you're correct here Bert. The limiting factor of Photoshop performance these days is DRAM bus bandwidth, not CPU. Allocating RAM to a separately-managed pool such as a RAM disk merely steals it from what's available directly to Photoshop to fool around in at lightning speed.

With 12Gb you'll probably never hit any paging limit thresholds in real life - unless you try to stack a couple of thousand 12Mp images at once. Just remember - 12Gb is NOT a lot of RAM when you consider Photoshops buffers. Rule of thumb is to have 4-5 times the amount of physical RAM you think you need to open a file and perform tasks on it. You need to cater for undo history, snapshot, pattern buffers, not to mention room for the file itself.

Go to your Info pallette options and turn on "efficiency". This will display how Photoshop is coping given its available resources. You want to see it read "100%" constantly. If it ever dips below 90% you're running out of RAM and are starting to page to disk. More RAM required!

[avandonk]

Chris I only use PS for a small final tweak or putting Starship Enterprise or the Moon into a widefield. I had noticed though that after a few major manipulations in PS that I could no longer even save what I had done as there was not enough memory left.

At the moment Registar is a bottleneck as I can only stack ten 190MB images at a time. When a 64 bit version becomes available the 32 bit memory address limit should disappear.

The 64 bit version of ImagesPlus is on it's way as we speak. I have played with the demo and it is no longer limited by image size. It also makes full use of multiple processors. It will do many sets of operations running concurrently. No longer will I have to wait for any process to finish before starting the next.

The only limit I can see is my necktop processor!

Bert

[AlexN]

Funny way of putting it... I feel the same way about mine! :)