On 17/02/2015 03:03, Robert William Hutton wrote: > I just built a computer specifically for darktable use. It is: > > Intel Core i5-4690 3.5GHz Socket 1150 > ASUS H97-Pro Gamer LGA1150 ATX Motherboard > Gigabyte Radeon R9 280 OC 3GB > Corsair Vengeance LP 16GB (2 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM 1600 (PC3 12800) > Desktop Memory > Samsung 840 EVO Series 250GB SSD > Seagate 3TB 7200RPM SATA3 Internal Hard Drive ST3000DM001 > Antec True Power Classic Series 650W 80Plus Gold Power Supply > Antec P100 Professional Silver Mid Tower Case > A wireless PCI-X card and a DVD drive > > This cost me less than AUD $1500 from a local parts supplier. > > I designed this machine to be in a sweet spot between price, power > consumption and performance. I > specifically bought an AMD video card as OpenCL performance is reputed to be > better on AMD cards > than nVidia ones for a given price/power point. The Core i5 is the > second-top of the line, just > below the overclockable "K" version. The RAM is medium speed (i.e. one step > up from the basic one > in terms of latency). > > Subjectively, it's the fastest performance I've seen for dt of any computer > I've used, which isn't > surprising seeing as it was specifically designed for the purpose. I'd say > the quality of the AMD > proprietary drivers is below that of the nVidia ones (I'm using the ones that > come with Ubuntu > 14.10, and I've heard the new ones that ATI released recently are > significantly better, so I'm > hoping for an improvement when I upgrade to 15.04). I see some visual > glitches with the chromium > browser and get occasional funkiness in dt where the occasional image > thumbnail will come up black > (opening the image in the darkroom then switching back to lighttable fixes > that) and I've seen one > image export almost completely black). These are minor, and I'm hoping will > improve with the > drivers, but are something to consider as I've never seen any equivalent > glitches with my previous > machines running nVidia cards. > > The case is actually really nice, plenty of ventilation, but padded on the > inside to reduce noise, > and with nice conduits to allow routing of cables on either side of the > motherboard mount plate so > you can keep the upper surface relatively free of cables. > > The one thing I'd do differently next time is not buying that 3TB HDD, check > it out on here: > > https://www.backblaze.com/blog/best-hard-drive/ > > Otherwise it's a good machine, with the SSD and USB3 particularly making a > huge difference to > subjective performance (I have my images on external USB drives). If I can > make the time I'll do > some dt benchmarks and report back. > > Cheers, > > Rob >
Yeah, I would have kept away from Seagate too, these days. They seem to have a reliability problem. Personnally, I had 4 of them that have broken in the last 6 months (out of 4), all bought in 2012. And 2 more on one of the servers I manage (the only one that has SATA drives), out of 4… (for now, the last incident was last week :) ). My sample is much smaller that that of backblaze, but I usually lose one drive a year at home, at most. Here, I lost all those 6 drives them in 6 months. Regards ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download BIRT iHub F-Type - The Free Enterprise-Grade BIRT Server from Actuate! Instantly Supercharge Your Business Reports and Dashboards with Interactivity, Sharing, Native Excel Exports, App Integration & more Get technology previously reserved for billion-dollar corporations, FREE http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=190641631&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Darktable-users mailing list Darktable-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/darktable-users
