new computers

[Chrisjan B]

IanF - did you measure the power usage with PC under load? Will be interesting to see the difference between idle and load....

[IanF]

Yup was under load opening big files over the network and send them for printing.

[bones]

Hi Bones
We use coreldraw as our main design programme and acrobat professional as our customer support programme. We have quad core i5 processors 3.1 GHZ and 8GB of RAM.
I was also looking at replacing our desktop with the Intel Nuc because of power. I then did a meter reading and instead of 400 watts (the PSU size) the computer the draw was 220w with 2 screens a router and adsl modem. So check your actual power usage before buying a new computer. I bought this monitor.
For speed I bought hybrid drives and they did not make a difference, so the next step is SSD drives and more RAM.

i like that "Efergy monitoring socket" i think i saw something
like that at our local builders

waiting for a quote on a amd system with water cooling
also 8gb of ram and all the rest it is a apu system they
are really inexpensive and house a hell of a lot of
processing power i was told it will work with a 350watt
psu and i use samsung monitors with the power brick

but i do need a single intel system for special software
that has no amd driver support for some stupid reason
it is the only reason why i need intel and because it
will only do the 1 process it doesnt need to be big
i3 will work but 8gb ram is a must i have written to
the software suppler about amd support or any other
alternative all i got was thank you for your e-mail bs

thanks for the tip will get myself this monitor device
knowing true power use for us is a must

[bones]

ok more on the intel driver this software actually use the
cpu directly so it needs a driver downloadable from intel
that will allow almost direct access to the cpu dont ask
me why i cannot tell you but that is what the software
wants that is what i need and no there is no alternative
software available and the older version is no longer
supported so i am forced to look at a i3 system and it
sucks also there is no amd alternative why i dont know
but i need what i need or my ship sinks

[IanF]

Bones
If you want top of the range computers look at the supernova If you have to ask the price you can't afford it. The guys who do the truck wraps use these.
If the software works and needs Intel then you have your answer.

[bones]

Bones
If you want top of the range computers look at the supernova If you have to ask the price you can't afford it. The guys who do the truck wraps use these.
If the software works and needs Intel then you have your answer.

that supernova is just total power would love to own one

here is what my budged allows for at the moment
home & office PCs have a look at the amd quad Core pc

only other extra is win 8.1 i need 2 win 8.1

[IanF]

This is like buying a car we always want what we can't afford.

[irneb]

Those NUCs do seem "decent" ... until you see what you need to add to them to make them work. Then the cost is very close to a normal PC, if not more. If you're worried about the power consumption, have a test on a normal PC - you'd be surprised by how little the PC itself actually uses. It's only when you add something like a high performance graphics card or overclocked an i7 (together with the added cooling needed) that you see high power consumption on the PC itself.

The other issue is that they may have a decent CPU and moderate graphics (i.e. the built-in Intel graphics), but you don't have lots of space for any sort of HDD. So you're stuck with a 2.5" disc, which means it's very difficult (or expensive) to get something faster than a 5400RPM. Either that or you need to go with an SSD, again a lot more expensive size-for-size.

All that said, you mention Corel Draw and Photo Shop ... it should work decently on 8GB. Depending on the size of the documents you're working on, PS (especially) uses lots of hard disc swapping - so if going that route a SSD would be highly recommended. To me however, an absolute minimum of 16GB is required (the file I've just opened in Revit is using 12GB before I've even started editing it) - so that puts those NUCs basically below par for me.

[bones]

Those NUCs do seem "decent" ... until you see what you need to add to them to make them work. Then the cost is very close to a normal PC, if not more. If you're worried about the power consumption, have a test on a normal PC - you'd be surprised by how little the PC itself actually uses. It's only when you add something like a high performance graphics card or overclocked an i7 (together with the added cooling needed) that you see high power consumption on the PC itself.

The other issue is that they may have a decent CPU and moderate graphics (i.e. the built-in Intel graphics), but you don't have lots of space for any sort of HDD. So you're stuck with a 2.5" disc, which means it's very difficult (or expensive) to get something faster than a 5400RPM. Either that or you need to go with an SSD, again a lot more expensive size-for-size.

All that said, you mention Corel Draw and Photo Shop ... it should work decently on 8GB. Depending on the size of the documents you're working on, PS (especially) uses lots of hard disc swapping - so if going that route a SSD would be highly recommended. To me however, an absolute minimum of 16GB is required (the file I've just opened in Revit is using 12GB before I've even started editing it) - so that puts those NUCs basically below par for me.

what supper weapon do you use?

[irneb]

what supper weapon do you use?

In the office I'm given an old Dell Pressision T5500 (32GB 1600GHz RAM, 2 off Xeon X5650 CPUs making 2x6 core = 12 cores hyperthreaded = 24 effective cores, 1TB 7500 RPM hdd, Geforce GTX 560 Ti). Still plenty good enough, especially on 3d rendering due to the CPU. Though I don't agree with their choices here - too expensive for too little performance.

At home I've not spent that R40k+ on a PC. Rather I went with something in the range of R12k to R14k a few years ago (around 3): i7-2600, 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD, 2TB HDD, Geforce (something or other). On editing the home PC is faster than the office PC due mostly because of the CPU's GHz being 3.8 GHz there while the office's only does 2.67GHz. But anything where multi-threading is used the office one outperforms it around twice. Though open/close and any sort of disc access makes my home's SSD show its stuff. And anything which uses more than the 16GB RAM means my home PC slows to a crawl, even with the SSD.

For Revit the GPU isn't much used, though still not so as you can do away with it. The built-in Intel Graphics is a bit too slow, but the speed increase between a mid-range Geforce and a top-of-the-line Quadro isn't easy to see. On something like 3d Studio though that changes quite a bit, but for those we have 3d presentation workstations instead.

At the moment our office is attempting to reduce some costs on new workstations, not to mention allowing "work" from outside over PCoIP. They're actually going the other route: One humongous VM "server" with multiple concurrent users on old / cheap as ground / 2nd hand PCs/Laptops (i.e. a real "cloud" instead of the BS where it's just remote storage like Dropbox, actually showing how "cloud" is just a marketing term - this is much the same setup as those dumb-terminals linking to mainframes in the 50s and 60s). We're using a VMWare Horizon View server on a machine like the following: 4x Xeon E5-2687W CPUs, 128GB RAM, 2TB worth of SSD RAID, nVidia Grid K220Q graphics. Since around the end of last year we've been testing this with about 8 concurrent users, each getting a Win7-64bit pro in a remote VM with resources shared equally. Performs around the same as my home PC, though if any sort of internet connection you do see some lag between moving a mouse and the cursor updating (fractions of seconds though), over the LAN there's no perception of lag. We've had lots of teething issues like connection dropping and freezing, but for the past month it's been about on par with a normal workstation's robustness.