Bill, I would recommend that you go Intel i7. The main reasons are speed and economy of power, that is rapidly becoming the benchmark. My laptop now runs with 1 battery as long and much faster than my old machine (Dell 830) ran with two batteries having 1.6 times the Ah of the present battery. However, there are some complexities with running the GPU on an i7 machine because the i7 CPU has both lo-res and hi-res modes and you need to tell the OS whether an application should be launched in lo-res or hi-res mode. I do not have experience of other hardware, but I have a NVIDIA Optimus grahics card that is used in hi-res mode, versus the built-in Intel GPU that is used in lo-res mode. In Linux, support for i7 graphics is provided by the Bumblebee project (Bumblebee-project.org). For NVIDIA, the Optimus card provides significant acceleration above the default Intel lo-res GPU. See that you GPU card has sufficient RAM, more than 1 Gb.
These are some of the things I would consider if I was buying new hardware now. Kind regards, Willem Ferguson On 14/02/2013 12:46, [email protected] wrote: > Bill Yiannakos<[email protected]> I had a system breakdown recently and now, after 5 years (!!) of owning my present PC, I am considering a system update... Maybe the most demanding software I am now running, is darktable (I'm not much of a gamer). My current system is: AMD Athlon 64x2 @ 5200+, 3GB DDR2 @ 667 RAM, ASUS M2N3 SLI m/b, nVidia 8600GT 512MB DDR2 I am currently running Ubuntu 13.04, and I am planning on sticking to this distro. What you you suggest, so as to see an improvement in the general experience of darktable? (export time is not very big now, but when editing a raw, each filter manipulation takes some time). I assume that the VGA doesn't affect at any way darktable, right? How much memory would make a difference? What cpu would you recomend? Finally, if I choose more than 4GB of ram, will I need an 64bit system to use is in darktable? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Free Next-Gen Firewall Hardware Offer Buy your Sophos next-gen firewall before the end March 2013 and get the hardware for free! Learn more. http://p.sf.net/sfu/sophos-d2d-feb _______________________________________________ Darktable-users mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/darktable-users
