I have a budget of about $1,000 to upgrade my current workstation, and I would appreciate any input from the community on where my money will be best spent. I currently use ArcMap 10.6 to do all of my processing, however, I am planning to eventually migrate to using the 64-bit ArcPro (once I stop resisting change).
The majority of my work involves using the 3D Analyst and Spatial Analyst extensions. I do a lot of LiDAR processing, including ".lasd to raster", as well as using raster calculator expressions to generate subsequent products. These rasters are on the order of 10 GB in size, sometimes larger. Currently, my processing times seem long, i.e. ".lasd statistics to raster" might take 8 hours. Also, my drawing/rendering time is quite long. When I have a feature such as contours for a large area, it can take 30 seconds or so for the entire layer to render each time the frame is moved.
My Current Workstation:
Dell T5810
Xeon E5-1603 v3 @2.8 GHz
8.0 GB 2133 MHz DD4 RAM
NVIDIA Quadro K420
256 GB HD (connected to network with 20 TB)
My thoughts are to upgrade to 32 or 64 GB of RAM and update the graphics card. From what I understand, the NVIDIA quaddro line is well suited to Arc. I have been looking at the Quadro K2200, but I am open to suggestions if there are better ones out there.
Where would you spend the $1,000?
You can never go wrong with more RAM; that is a great place to consider. Also consider the HDD; since Arc using a fGDB for it's scratch space the more you have that is faster (SDD) gives you some good flexibility.
Don't waste the money! That E5-1603 belongs in a museum! I'm guessing your IT/chain of command is telling you that budget #. Point out to them if they want you to continue to be able to do your job....
Here's what I got recently for about 12 folks, there was a LOT of discussion with management and IT about the cost, and where we landed was an intelligent and meaningful conversation between management and GIS about what expectations management had about what GIS was going to do for them in the future, or not. What worked well for me was a detailed spreadsheet of Pro Performance on the current workstation, the rate at which Pro min hardware requirements increases (which is high), and a multiplier on top of that as Pro min requirement do not translate to a workstation that will actually do things like Lidar Processing, a return on investment calculation....I really put a lot of effort into convincing the chain of command what I thought we needed and in the end I got more than I asked for, and I've put a lot, lot of time into testing Pro and hardware in a realistic production environment that utilizes almost every Pro component. We set a target life span of these new workstation of 3 years, and in order to get them in service I actually had to volunteer at IT on my off days to get them imaged, as management thinks IT has nothing to do and cut one of their positions, the workstations would have sat there for a year otherwise. My hope is I might be able to get another "Pro" year or two on them with some small memory upgrades. I'm also having more frequent discussions with middle management to make sure they are programming GIS workstation budget into their 3 and 5 year budget plans for their employees that have GIS as assigned duties, where previously we programmed GIS workstations into the "If there's anything left at the end of the year" account.
For real, I wouldn't put money into your existing antique. You're not going to be happy with it and Pro in 18 months, and your boss (or you) is going to be wondering about the quality of your budget advice. Your problems are a direct result of the age of the motherboard, lack of physical/virtual cpu cores, slow memory and bus speed, and 5000$ in upgrades aren't going to make those things any better. That memory speed is pretty low, and I don't think you can go to a higher frequency on that motherboard, so even with 64 GB of ram, it's going to be bottlenecked at the CPU bus. That video card is a dinosaur too, it's a geriatric 5 years old in the Pro universe, I don't have that model but I have had ESRI tell me another NVIDIA model was on the rails of "not supported" and it was a high-end, 5 year old card. So that splits your budget, 200-ish for a new vid card, 2-400 for memory, and leftover for a SSD, which in the end will result in ".lasd statistics to raster" might take 8 hours" shortening to "".lasd statistics to raster" might take 7 hours 55 minutes."
My two cents: Beg for the money for a new workstation, and re image your current one. Re imaging might get you into ".lasd statistics to raster" might take 6 hours."
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And we got some laptops too:
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I am actually the one who came up with the budget. I work in a small geotechnical engineering firm and am a geologist by profession, but I happen to use Arc for the majority of my work. The owner of the company is my direct boss, so getting him to OK something that will help the company save time/money should not be an issue. I think that a system of ~$3k is something that I could easily propose without much resistance.
I am curious why you went with an i7 over a Xeon? Was this simply due to the budget you had to work with?
I am looking at a configuration of this system:
likely spending the $135 to upgrade to the Xeon X-W2135 for the 6 cores. The system comes standard with NVIDIA Quadro P4000.
Thoughts?
Working in a Engineering firm; you might be using more than just Arc on the machine; so going with the Xeon would be my recommendation (former Site/Civil Designer in AutoCAD & Microstation). There are plenty of places where the higher cache capacity and higher command-sets are used in software.
In that case:
List Price$5,227.29
Total Savings$1,576.59
Option | Selection | SKU / Product Code | Quantity |
---|---|---|---|
Processor | Intel Xeon W-2133 (3.6GHz, 3.9GHz Turbo, 6C, 8.25MB Cache, HT, (140W)) DDR4-2666 | [338-BNBN][412-AALF] / W2133 | 1 |
Operating System | Windows 10 Pro for Workstation (4 Cores Plus) Multi - English, French, Spanish | [619-AMSU] / 10P6T2M | 1 |
Microsoft Office 365 (Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook & more) | None | 1 | |
Microsoft Office | Microsoft Office 30 Day Trial | [658-BCSB] / 16MUI | 1 |
Chassis Options | Precision 5820 Tower 950W PCIe FlexBay Chassis | [321-BDWC] / G5879SN | 1 |
Graphics Card | NVIDIA® Quadro® P4000, 8GB, 4 DP (5820T) | [490-BEBH] / P4000 | 1 |
Memoryi | 32GB 2x16GB DDR4 2666MHz RDIMM ECC | [370-ADVE] / 32G216 | 1 |
Systems Management | No Out-of-Band Systems Management | [631-ABML] / NOVPRO | 1 |
Wireless | No Wireless LAN | [555-BBNI] / GW1SM6D | 1 |
Operating System (Boot) Drive | Intel NVMe PCIe SSD (Front PCIe FlexBay) | [414-BBBV] / FFPCIE | 1 |
Hard Drive Controllers | Intel Integrated controller (RST-e) with 1-2 Front FlexBay NVMe PCIe Drives,v2 | [321-BDWI] / GCDH8PJ | 1 |
Hard Drive | M.2 512GB PCIe NVMe Class 50 Solid State Drive | [400-AVDR][401-ABGX] / 512C5ME | 1 |
2nd Hard Drive | No Hard Drive | [400-AKZR] / NOHDD | 1 |
Lockable HDD/SSD Sleds | None | 1 | |
3rd Hard Drive | No Hard Drive | [400-AKZR] / NOHDD | 1 |
4th Hard Drive | No Hard Drive | [400-AKZR] / NOHDD | 1 |
Slimline Bay Options | Slim filler panel (no opt.) | [429-ABEP] / NOSLODD | 1 |
Optical Drive | No Optical | [429-ABER] / NOODD | 1 |
5th Hard Drive | No Hard Drive | [400-AKZR] / NOHDD | 1 |
6th Hard Drive | No Hard Drive | [400-AKZR] / NOHDD | 1 |
RAID for HDD/SSD & Front PCIe NVMe SSDs | No RAID | [780-BBCJ] / NORAID | 1 |
Dell Ultra-Speed Drives (PCIe SSDs) | None | 1 | |
RAID Configurations for Dell Ultra-Speed Drives | None | 1 | |
Keyboard | No Keyboard | [580-ABIS] / NKB | 1 |
Mouse | No Mouse | [570-AADK] / NMSE | 1 |
Teradici Remote Workstation Access Host Card | No Remote Access Host Card | [340-ADBJ] / NHSTCRD | 1 |
Network Cards | No Add-In Network Card (Integrated NIC only) | [555-BBJO] / NONIC | 1 |
PCIe I/O Cards | Not Selected in this Configuration | [817-BBBC] / NOTHB | 1 |
Serial Port/PS2 Adapter | Full Height Serial Card | [492-BCGW] / SERCDFH | 1 |
Power Cords | US 125V Power Cord | [470-AAKG] / USPWR | 1 |
Resource DVD | Resource DVD not Included | [430-XXYU] / NORDVD | 1 |
Operating System Recovery Options | OS-Windows Media Not Included | [620-AALW] / NOMEDIA | 1 |
E-Star | No Energy Star | [387-BBBE] / NOESTAR | 1 |
Optimizer | Dell Precision Optimizer | [640-BBRC] / OPTMZR | 1 |
Optical Software | No Optical Software | [817-BBBC] / NOSWODD | 1 |
Dell Endpoint Security | None | 1 | |
Absolute Security - Standard | None | 1 | |
Cables and Dongles | No Accessories | [461-AABV] / NOACCES | 1 |
Security Software | No Security Software | [650-AAAM] / NOSS | 1 |
Driver | No Wireless LAN | [555-BBNI] / GW1SM6D | 1 |
UPC Label | No UPC Label | [389-BCGW] / G8WGTYN | 1 |
Option | Selection | SKU / Product Code | Quantity |
---|---|---|---|
Warrantyi | 3 Years ProSupport Plus with Next Business Day Onsite Service | [997-7163][997-7232][997-7242][997-7252][997-7272] / PPN3 | 1 |
Accidental Damage | None | 1 | |
Keep Your Hard Drive | None | 1 | |
ProDeploy Client Suite | None | 1 | |
HDD Partition - Standard | None | 1 | |
Drop in Box Accessories - Standard | None | 1 | |
Airwatch Application - Standard | None | 1 |
I really appreciate all the feedback. I went with this exact configuration except I went with the Xeon W-2145 for the 8 core upgrade. I was not aware that both ArcPro and Desktop versions 10 and later were true multi-core.
So that's actually going to give you 16 virtual cores. I got dual 12 core xeons on my last workstation, having all those cores IMHO does more for Pro performance than memory.
Pro is fully multi-threaded and 64bit aware; ArcGIS Desktop (ArcCatalog/ArcMap) is 32bit and not multi-threaded aware; but you are able to fake it really well using python/georprocessing tools.
This is actually the config I have right now; but with Dual-Xeons as a cluster of 3 machines. Very nice platform.