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?
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
well done - what a beast of a machine. will you suffer buyers remorse - no way enjoy the spoils
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...
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.
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.
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
Quote:
Originally Posted by 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...
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.
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.
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...
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.
