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?