Upgrading Workstation

[JamesStewart-Moore1]

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?

[JamesStewart-Moore1]

Do you find the processing to be quick?

[DEWright_CA]

Yes, but for me a lot of my jobs & processes we have updated to be multi-threaded or concurrently processing. So the newer machines which are not a huge upgrade from the ones I had bought 5 years about (shift from Dual 8 Cores with hyper-threading) just allows me to spin up more blocks of processing. So a job that would run in 30 hours is running in just under 20; so that is a improvement but with each annual & quarter process I run my data increases by 10%-15%.

So in the end its just having good consistent expectations; and the Xeons give that; versus say the I7 or I9 which can do great stuff but aren't designed for workstation class processing.

[JamesStewart-Moore1]

I have had the new setup now for about a week. The only remark that I can make is, "WOW!". What an improvement over my last workstation. It feels so snappy and light.

I am now working almost exclusively on Pro. I thought that the transition would me much more painful, but it turns out that the resistance to the transition was the painful part.... as per usual.