Quote:
Originally Posted by g__day
If you want real speed - confirm whether your processing software can either use multiple cores or Direct Compute.
If the answer to multiple cores is yes - well the 10 core I7-6950X isn't cheap but will be unbeatable. I would go 64 GB of RAM and add two of the latest PCI Express SSDs - costly but with 3GB/sec throughput vs 500 MB/sec of a SATA3 SSD - that is six times the speed.
If your software can use Direct Compute - well a uber powerful NVidia GTX 1080 gaming video card makes huge sense - having 2,560 processing cores will lift your imaging processing beyond belief (I have seen video of 4 GPU monsters doing real time x-ray tomography - using specialised software to handling the 10 TB/sec processing load across the 10,000 ALU cores).
I would expect most image processing software doesn't yet take significant advantage of the huge parallelism inherent in modern 3d accelerators - writting decent shader programs still isn't all that simple - give it 3 - 5 years.
I would add get a great - high quality power supply, case and motherboard - and the 30" Kogan monitor is a decent thing to initially pair it with!
You could probably build or buy a rig that for $2K - $3K could do most of what you want - but you could double or triple this spend easily depending on how much headroom you need in your processing capacity, how important your time is to you, your budget and where you need to spend $ to get real world returns.
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A PC of that caliper is way overkill for astrophotography software!
Anything over 32GB RAM and I dont think it will be used, and most software wont even make use of the 10 cores, however that is a nice CPU, and if it was to be a purely AP processing system, and not used for 'gaming', then a 1080 would be a waste, better just to get either a good CPU or good GPU, and I would put money on the CPU every day of the week. Also I think the 2,560 processors is CUDA cores or Stream predecessors, and not individual cores like a CPU, and are often not much faster than CPU based rendering in the limited software that it supports. And as for the PCI SSD's, sure, they are quick, but SATA3 is already very very fast, M.2 even more so, which would be a more suitable option, cheaper as well, a 500gb M.2 SSD with a few 2-4TB HDD's in the rig would work really nicely. I dont store any of my AP RAW data on SSD's as the space is simply to expensive for such little gain in processing, HDD's dont bottleneck the processing of the image at all. (I mean, it makes it only very very slightly slower, an SSD in this application is nothing to write home about.)
I have a i7 4770k currently not overclocked, but for certain pieces of software like Star Tools, I have noticed a huge difference from the i5 4590. 4-> 8 cores. That being said, I only have 8GB of ram at the moment and it just sucks, I had 24Gb recently, and it was awesome for memory hungry software, but I had to take it out!
But it really depends on his budget, but an expensive system isnt always a better one. Price to performance on a graph is not linear. Spending 300$ will just get you a crappy pc, $800-$1200 in my experience is the best bang for your buck, anything over $2k, I rarely find people with reasons to justify spending over double for a minor performance upgrade. I have built PC's for kids for $500 that can run games like battlefield on high, and $2.5k just to get to ultra!
With websites like OCAU (An ozzy Pc forum) and their for sale classifieds, it is possible to build a really powerful PC used, from gear that is only about 1-2 years old for a fraction of the price. I have built 4 PC's in the last 6 months this way and have only once had a semi faulty product, which was refunded immediately. I find 40% cheaper is average. However you do need to be a member of the forum for 90 days in order to gain access.
Cheers
Dan