29 replies to this topic

[MapMedia]

What hardware set-ups do people have?

- I have a Dell Workstation 380 and Dell 21" LCD.
- What I can not live without is my 15,000 rpm hard drive.
- Graphics card is decend Geoforce 4000 (I think! lol)

Am considering an HP 800s plotter too, but will wait for demand to kick up and force me to spend the fat purse.

MM

[Martin Gamache]

On wednesday I am taking posession of a new workstation with two AMD Opteron 270 dual core processors, 4Gb of RAM, three 10k Raptor drives with an additional 2TB of RAID 5 storage and a nice Matrox parhelia graphics card....

I didn't even consider the 15k disks because of the low storage capacity, The jump to 10k will have to do.


Sticking with Win XP for now but will probably move to win 64 in the next 12 months or so or upgrade the MAC to a 64 bit intel machine, still not sure on the path to 64 bit yet... .



Can't wait.

[Hans van der Maarel]

Hmm...

There was a thread on this that got lost in the attack, although I assume it'll be resurrected soon. I'll merge this one in there when it gets back up.

As for my setup:
Dualcore AMD 3800+
2 Gb RAM
250 GB harddisk, plus an external 250 Gb for storage.
256 Mb Nvidia GeForce 6800 GS graphics card
Philips Brilliance 200W 20" widescreen

I've been tempted to replace the external drive with a 1 TB Raid 0/1 model (it'd be mirroring, so effectively I'd have 512 GB)

I'm currently Mac-less, but I've been drooling over the Intel Macbook specs and if my laptop were to croak, I'd get me one of those...

[frax]

wow, I feel so underpowered compared to you guys, with a 3 ghz intel workstation (1 gb ram, ordinary disks). I just upgraded my 1ghz tablet pc/notebook by adding 1 gb RAM and a faster hard-drive, and it suddenly became usable again. I don't do much image processing though, and I also have access to some heavy iron Solaris machines for ArcInfo workstation processing (but they are not necessarily faster, and I am not to keen on transferring huge amounts of data back and forth).

Oh, and I do have access to an ArcSDE server for data as well.

[Martin Gamache]

Storage has really become my achilles heal over the last year. My new system has 4 500Gb disks but with the RAID 5 setup it cuts that by about half, but I will always be able to swap a disk out in case of failure. so that is pretty useful. I've been debating this approach over having a seperate stand alone storage machine but I am not quite ready for that.

I've been working with dual 19" monitors for a while now and that is not changing although I really like some of the wide screens that can be rotated to a portrait orientation. Down the roads I'll gte two of the smae monitors to facilitate color calibration which is near impossible with my current dual setup.

[frax]

So, Martin, do you back that up, or do you live it being RAID 5?

I actually have an old machine that is my "backup" file server, standing in a closet. I copy things to it now and then and i then do off-line backups using an old tape-drive (discarded from some server). Quite a hassle, so I don't do it that often.

[Martin Gamache]

I'll be backing up less often and use the RAID5 for long term storage. A stand alone 250Gb disk will still be used to backup current projects. Long term this new machine has 8 drive bays and will likely transition to a storage server in a 3 or 4 years time.

[Rob]

I just spec'd a new machine for myself and was pleasently surprised how much prices have come down:

AMD X2 3800+ dual core
3 GB ram
256 MbGForce 7800 GT
Two 10k rpm 150 Gb raptors and a 250 Gb @7.2k
Asus A8N board
plus all the other usuals

use my old dual 19" crts.

kinda like Han's machine, actually...

about double the amount of computer for about the same cost two years ago.
wonderful.

[rmcculley]

At work:

P4-3.0 / 1024MB Ram / 250GB Hard drive / Geforce 6800GT running 2x19" LCD's

At home:

Athlon64 3700+ / 1024MB Ram / 500GB of hard drive space / Radeon 9600XT running 2x21" CRT's

My work system is a little short on hard drive space, but we have a 2TB server there as well. The only thing I am not willing to give up is my dual-monitor setups.

[paul]

ASUS A8N-SLI mobo -- Athlon X2 3800 -- 250gb SATA II -- 2 gb RAM -- GeForce 6600GT

I've been thinking about adding a 2nd graphics card so that it will run in SLI mode (my first graphics card and mobo support SLI). Any big advantages to running ESRI or Adobe products in SLI mode?

[Hans van der Maarel]

Paul,

That's pretty much the same setup as I have, right down to the motherboard. I specifically chose an SLI one just to make sure I was 'prepared for the future' (i.e. 2 graphics cards), but so far I haven't found a real need for that.

Here's that 1 TB external drive I was talking about:
Maxtor OneTouch 1TB

[mike]

Dell M70 Precision laptop
2.0ghz, 2GB ram, 80GB hdd, QuadroFX Go1400
Attached to 21" Sony Trinitron

Apple PowerMac Dual G5 2.5ghz
2GB ram, 160gb hdd, ATI 9600XT 128mb
20" Apple widescreen LCD, 17" Apple LCD

[frax]

what about pointing devices? I just had to retire my old Logitech Marble FX trackball after some 5 years, and it is now replaced by a newer Logitech Trackball (cordless trackman optical). And I have a tablet next to it (don't use it that much).

I miss my old trackball, the new one doesn't feel the same! and the 125 Hz sampling rate over USB feels much jerkier than the smooth 200 Hz over the old ps/2 trackball (cranked up through a hack)

[Martin Gamache]

what about pointing devices?

I like the Wacom mouse when the drivers behave.

mg

[Hans van der Maarel]

Right hand: standard Microsoft wheel mouse, nothing special.
Left hand: Wacom Graphire A5-sized drawing pad, great for Photoshop work.

I'm left-handed but use a mouse right-handed, so this setup works pretty well for me.