Any computer builders here?

[GH85Carrera]

I am looking to build a solid custom workhorse workstation. No games, not even solitaire. Just business software. No bloatware!

Win 10 Pro for Workstations ?
Right now I think the new i10 16 32 threads, or 18 core, 36 threads CPU. Those are supposed to be released soon.
256 Gig RAM, (and expandable to 512 would be nice)
I am thinking the GeForce RTX 2070 8GB video card
A big power supply, and lots of connectors.
I need a full size case, and room for lots of fans.
Fastest boot drive possible, SSD, maybe a pair of drives in a stripe.

A pair of spinning 4TB drives in a mirrored raid for the main work drive, and if there is room a 5 drive RAID for long term storage. I may have to do the RAID on a separate card running the RAID. I want it internal for speed. Network RAIDs are cheap, but slow as heck for huge files.

I need the power for some of the projects we fly. Right now my main computer is working on a project we flew yesterday. It is 4,572 individual images covering 36 square miles. After 20 hours my computer is getting close to the end of step 5 of 15. It will likely take until Friday to be done. And this is not a big project. It was just 2.5 hours over the site.

My computer here only has 32 Gig of ram, and it crashes on the really big projects. We own one computer with 128 Gig of ram, and it took a month to do one project. We keep getting large projects, which is wonderful, but we need to get them churned out faster.

So I am hoping one of you guys has a source for the components for me to build a dream machine. I prefer to build my own, same reason that I work on my own cars.

Any web sites you prefer for component shopping?

[flipper35]

Newegg really has the easiest for trying to find exactly what you need. Amazon is sometimes cheaper but the search is a mess for computer stuff.

I think nVidia is dropping the regular cards for the Super model.

Why does the boot drive have to be fast? Doesn't it stay on most of the time anyway?

[flipper35]

For a workload like that, liquid might be more efficient for cooling as well over air.

[nota]

the rtx 2070 is a gamers card

there are pure graphics cards that may work better and are cheaper for non video stills

this handles 8 screens NVIDIA NVS 810 graphics
there is also a fire ''something'' card series for non video stills by AMD

[GH85Carrera]

Yea, I thought about liquid cooling.

A lot of the work seems to get transferred to the boot drive for the program we run. Even though the main work folder is on a different drive, Windows and the programs like to use the boot drive for swap files. Lots of different modules load and unload from the drive the program is installed on. I like to have a clean drive for the data drive.

I have bought a lot of stuff from Newegg. I do like the wish list feature that lets me add the components and change them as I please.

[flipper35]

You can push the swap files to different drives as well. Well on most stuff like Windows and Photoshop and the like. Not sure on the mapping software.

[sugarwood]

Originally Posted by GH85Carrera

Any web sites you prefer for component shopping?

https://pcpartpicker.com/

[GH85Carrera]

Originally Posted by nota

the rtx 2070 is a gamers card

there are pure graphics cards that may work better and are cheaper for non video stills

this handles 8 screens NVIDIA NVS 810 graphics
there is also a fire ''something'' card series for non video stills by AMD

The program that we run is called Pix4D mapper with the large camera module. It is happy to use the "Cuda Cores" of fast video cards. The folks at Pix4D even recommend that card as a cheap card to use.

My current computer has a Nvidia GeForce GTX 1080 Ti 16 gig card.

CPU Cores and CPU speed are used in different parts of a project. RAM is really necessary on the really big projects.

[stomachmonkey]

Have you tried Reality Captured yet?

For the work we do it blows AGISoft, PIX, Zephyr out of the water.

It's so much faster and more accurate at aligning out of the box it's not even fair.

The developers are *******s, buncha Eastern European Academics so they have a strange way of addressing user feedback and their pricing is a little weird.

Next week I start building an automated pipeline that will probably use AliceVision to avoid the CLI costs and the plan right now is to run it all on google cloud GPU's.

You may want to at least cost out cloud gpu option, you pay pennies for compute and you can infinitely scale depending on the size and complexity of the project.

[stomachmonkey]

Originally Posted by nota

the rtx 2070 is a gamers card

there are pure graphics cards that may work better and are cheaper for non video stills

this handles 8 screens NVIDIA NVS 810 graphics
there is also a fire ''something'' card series for non video stills by AMD

Glen is doing photogrametry, it's all math.

I run dual RTX 2080's in my boxes and I'm not doing large image sets like he is.

AMD cards are a no go, all the suites he has available to use want a CUDA enabled GPU.

[Jims5543]

Originally Posted by GH85Carrera

Yea, I thought about liquid cooling.

A lot of the work seems to get transferred to the boot drive for the program we run. Even though the main work folder is on a different drive, Windows and the programs like to use the boot drive for swap files. Lots of different modules load and unload from the drive the program is installed on. I like to have a clean drive for the data drive.

I have bought a lot of stuff from Newegg. I do like the wish list feature that lets me add the components and change them as I please.

Email me. My user name at gmail

My older son builds insane rigs for his gamer friends. While you are not gaming what you are doing mirrors the demand of gaming.

I am on my phone but will be on a pc soon. I can on you then. He has a plethora if sites he shops for the best deals on components. I will be happy to put you in touch with him.

He recently helped a well healed friend build a $4k rig. He told me later he was so envious of the build.

He has researched the hell out of everything to the point of being obsessive. I am sure he would be happy to toss his resources your way.

Sent from my SM-G960U using Tapatalk

[GH85Carrera]

Originally Posted by Jims5543

Email me. My user name at gmail

My older son builds insane rigs for his gamer friends. While you are not gaming what you are doing mirrors the demand of gaming.

I am on my phone but will be on a pc soon. I can on you then. He has a plethora if sites he shops for the best deals on components. I will be happy to put you in touch with him.

He recently helped a well healed friend build a $4k rig. He told me later he was so envious of the build.

He has researched the hell out of everything to the point of being obsessive. I am sure he would be happy to toss his resources your way.

Sent from my SM-G960U using Tapatalk

Thanks, I will contact you tomorrow.

[GH85Carrera]

Jim suggested I update my thread with what I built. It is a monster. I bet it weighs 40 pounds or maybe more. It is heavy!



We (my company) do aerial photography and mapping for a living. We work with crazy big files. All the clients want a super high resolution, and larger and larger areas.



This the system: It is a Core i9 99609960X @ 3.10 GHz. 256 Gig of RAM. the boot drive is a 2TB M.2 drive and there is a second M.2 drive that is also a 2TB drive that is the "work" drive. It has a RAID5 system of five 4 TB drives and it formats out to 16,003,193,464 bytes or 14.5 TB. That is drive R.

It has two expensive video cards. This is a "image size" from Photoshop. The really annoying thing is Photoshop will happily load the image but refuses to save it in a TIFF format. Every imaged needs a bit of color or contrast tweaking, and we have to jump through hoops to edit monster images. The mapping programs will read and write large tif files happily.



This is just a tiny little bit of an entire city we are doing for the city. This junk yard is pretty much in the middle of town.

The ultimate reason I built this computer was for processing the raw imagery into the final photo-mosaic. The city project is comprised of almost 5,000 individual images, and each image 8688x5792. Previously our fastest computer was an i8 with only 64 gig of RAM. It took it 29 hours to do just one step of 15 steps of the processing. This new monster did the same thing in 11 hours, so less than 1/2 the time. On big projects like the city project the old system ran for two weeks. To do the same thing in less than a week is fantastic.

[Jims5543]

I do remember speaking with my son and he did mention you were really set on Intel processors vs. AMD, his opinion is AMD has dethroned Intel in processing speed.

He feels Intel is riding on the past reputation and AMD is busting ass to kick Intel's.

I cannot remember what processor he was mentioning to you now, I do remember my mouth hanging open when he told me how many core processors it id, I want to say 32?

He was stumped by your ram demands, how did you end up managing it?

He seemed to think that much ram have to be managed in order to be utilized and could not remain static.

I know just enough about this crap to be dangerous so excuse me if I have wrong terminology of if I misspoke here and have my head up my arse.

[john70t]

Just a thought. All that power is sitting in one single box.
One MB. One PSU(which must be in the kilowatts). One wall plug.
One thing to lose a lot of expensive data.

Any future RAID or parallel plans or whatever would cut down processing times?
29 or even 11 hours x 15 steps seems to be a lot of time depending.

[GH85Carrera]

The software program we use to compile the programs is happy to use as much RAM as available as needed.

There are computers with lots more cores, and the CPU did peg out at 100% usage when I ran that test, but not for long according to the log file.

The old computer is mostly gutted, and I added the 5 - 10 TB drives to build a RAID 5 box that will go to my business partners house. We usually keep a clients project a few years, then hit delete. No one else needs it, and the client is responsible for their own data storage. We had a few RAIDs now that once sounded huge, but a 5 TB RAID is not that big today.

[john70t]

For my old FSX game photo-scenery, I've filled up a 8T drive with a couple backup drives also.
I'm sure your data storage needs are infinitely more.

Those drives do fail eventually. Cost of redundancy vs. Going up and starting all over..

[stomachmonkey]

Originally Posted by Jims5543

I do remember speaking with my son and he did mention you were really set on Intel processors vs. AMD, his opinion is AMD has dethroned Intel in processing speed.

He feels Intel is riding on the past reputation and AMD is busting ass to kick Intel's.

I cannot remember what processor he was mentioning to you now, I do remember my mouth hanging open when he told me how many core processors it id, I want to say 32?

He was stumped by your ram demands, how did you end up managing it?

He seemed to think that much ram have to be managed in order to be utilized and could not remain static.

I know just enough about this crap to be dangerous so excuse me if I have wrong terminology of if I misspoke here and have my head up my arse.

What Glen is doing is very specialized.

AMD chips, I don't care which they are, do not work as well.

The best CPU for this kind of work is actually an i7 8700.

This is not the type of stuff where raw performance numbers translate to actual real world performance.

nVIdia CUDA 2 GPUS are a must and one would think a $4,000 Tesla V100 would blow away the GTX 1080's he has in there and in nearly every function required it does, exxxcccceeeeptttt for one. The Tesla is a pig at depth map calculations and it's poor performance on that more than erases any gains in the other nodes of the processing pipe. It ends up being slower at 4x's the price.

Like a Top Fuel Rail it will beat everything to the other end of the track, but take it to a track with turns, not gonna do very well.

Thats a very capable rig he has there for what he needs to do.

[stomachmonkey]

Originally Posted by GH85Carrera

...and the CPU did peg out at 100% usage when I ran that test....

The suites you are using, will peg every processor at 100% every time depending on which part of the process you are in.

It'll use 100% no matter how much CPU you give it.

Thats a very capable box you built there.

You are about at the threshold of bang for buck.

Any additional money you toss at it won't necessarily return an increase in processing that makes ROI sense.

If you really need to get more performance down the road you'd be better served building smaller (cheaper) i7 single GPU boxes and doing distributed rendering, basically build a render farm.

[stomachmonkey]

Originally Posted by GH85Carrera

It has two expensive video cards. This is a "image size" from Photoshop. The really annoying thing is Photoshop will happily load the image but refuses to save it in a TIFF format.

It refuses to save it because the specification for the standard TIFF file format is max size of 4 GB.

Your pixel dimensions exceed the limit of the file format by 81 GB's.