Good Hardware Specs?

[JonathanMarsh]

Hi,

I am looking to propose the following system to our IT department:

I5-2500 3.3GHz Processor
8GB DDR3 RAM
nVidia GTX560Ti 2GB Graphics Card
OCZ Vertex3 120GB Solid State Drive

Would the above config be good for 3D Analysis and other more intense applications of ArcGIS 9.3 and ArcGIS 10. We are looking to upgrade to 10 over the next few months.

Should I rather be asking for a nVidia Quadro card for about the same price?

Thanks for any assistance.

Jonathan.

[JeffreySwain]

Here are the recommended minimum requirements and a page that lets you test your configuration against the recommendations for ArcGlobe.  There are the pages that link to both AMD and Nvidia and indicate the certified cards on the minimum requirements.

[JonathanMarsh]

Thanks for the links but they didn't help much. If you go to the Nvidia site you only get the Quadro cards.

So in the FAQ it says ... "A good OpenGL-compliant graphics card with at least 64 MB of texture memory is recommended" ... but even integrated graphics has better requirements than that.

Here is a quick comparison of the GTX560Ti and the Quadro 2000 (this is almost double the price of the GTX):

GTX560Ti:
CUDA Cores: 384
Memory Bandwidth (GB/sec): 128
Memory Interface: 256-bit
Standard Memory: 1GB
OpenGL: 4.1

Quadro 2000:
CUDA Cores: 192
Memory Bandwidth (GB/sec): 41.6
Memory Interface: 128-bit
Standard Memory: 1GB
OpenGL: 4.0

Now of course these are the high level specs and the way the GPUs work are different, but with statements like "the card should support OpenGL 2.0 or higher", and "Texture memory is particularly important for ArcGlobe, and 32 MB of texture memory is recommended as a minimum", I would say that the GTX would definitely work well.

If I could ask our IT department to get a machine for us to test then it wouldn't be a problem. Our budgets are minimal, but I rather have a hissy fit in front of my boss about needing the Workstation card if it is really going to make all of the my at least 50% faster.

So I guess basically the Desktop help says ... "go for the workstation card".

Thanks for pointing me to that help page, I have been looking for it, but always end up with the general specs page.

[JakubSisak]

I run it on nVidia Quadro. But it will also work fine with a cheap integrated card; pretty much on any computer you can buy today.  RAM would probably be most important but since ArcGIS is a 32 bit application even that is not really that important.  Still, ArcGIS does run faster and is more responsive on my office workstation with top notch specs then my 3 year old laptop. But there is nothing I cannot run on the old laptop. Things are just sluggish.  ArcGIS 10 is a pig tough. much slower overall then previous versions.