I’ve seen the computer topic discussed in the past but it looks like its been a few years so I wanted to see if there are any new recommendations. Over the past year or so I’ve started working with point clouds more frequently, some being large aerial scans covering hundreds or thousands of acres. I don’t have issues with any other work flow in TBC but some of these large point clouds cause the software to completely freeze/crash. I’ve been wanting to upgrade my computer and I’m wondering what I need to be looking for in order to handle this workload. I’d love to find an ‘out of the box’ option as I have very little knowledge when it comes to computer specs/performance. Any help or recommendations would be greatly appreciated!
I use MSI gaming laptops for all of our staff and never have issues. Are you wanting desktop or laptop?
Thanks for your response Shawn. Honestly whatever will get me the most bang for my buck and as I understand it I can stretch my dollar further with a desktop setup…
Hundreds to thousands of acres can require a big window of different hardware. But a couple of key points that I look for initially;
- Enough solid state hard drive on board to handle the operating system, software and file size your working with. If you work on the items locally (don’t load them from a server, or in a tbc file saved to a server), you will see a drastic improvement in performance.
- Cost doesn’t seem to break the bank for a higher end processor; I would stick with ultra 7 or 9.
- Ram will be a big player with those point cloud files, I would start at 64 minimum, the “out of the box” setups tend to limit the starting amount, you may benefit bumping up to 128+.
- Graphics Card is the other major player. There are all sorts of studies based on point cloud (or photogrammetry image data) that show returns per how many GBs on board of the GPU as well as the number of GPUs. The cost definitely increases substantially at a certain point, though performance gains is minimal. Aim for as much as you can reasonable afford… You will start to spend thousands more for gains for 5-10%. Do some research.
If you watch both Dell and HP, their business workstation lines (laptop and desktop), tend to go on crazy sale between December and February. They must be moving out year-end stock for new models. A high-end workstation that typically goes for 7-8k, will be on sale for +/-3,500. I have followed this approach for my last two work computers and got a powerhouse for 3-4k. I stick with the workstations primarily for support as well as making sure the case was designed for the hardware and cooling. Consumer units will spec all of the hardware, but not always be setup for cooling and burn out when you really start to stress it.
That’s my take. I’m a cad guy, there may be the IT type who knows specs better but this setup has worked very well for me. No fancy tuning, overclocking, etc.) Just a computer out of the box that works hard. Big modeling jobs, pix4d/metashape processing, and plenty of point clouds.
A reasonable cost base setup: I7 + 500 GB solid state, 32 GB ram, 6+GB Graphics card. Used to be able to find for 2-3k.
My current setup: I9 + 1TB Solid State, 64 GB ram (need to up to 128 at some point, but the shortage has made this difficult/unreasonable), and 20 GB Graphics Card. I got this for 3500-4k during last sale period.
Anything beyond this tends to jump crazy amounts in price (10K+), this tends to be what I see the most bang for my buck.
Happy hunting!
Joe
Thank you for your response. I’ll definitely use your recommendations.
Absolutely, there is definitely a financial benefit when processing time adds up across the year and possibly more when dealing with crashes and lost work. But you also have to weigh how your managing data. Many times, you can increase the efficiency of your data handling and still operate with a standard base level pc. Work with tiled point clouds, check size efficiency of different file types, take a look into what specifically is causing bottlenecks, etc.. I got chills when I read “thousands of acres” ha ha. I expect there may be some limited GIS uses for files that large, but I bet with a little bit of tweaking workflow, operations could be drastically improved. Though I don’t have a lot of experience with it, I expect Global Mapper Pro could chop data up into a far more manageable size relatively easy.