Let's Talk About Your Team's Computers

[AdamHeard]

Originally Posted by Zac

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While awesome, this is such absurd overkill pricewise for FRC.

Making sweeping generalizations, most users will be plenty happy with a $100 workstation card for FRC.

I'm a SW snob and have a pretty overkill setup at work and home, but have been CADing for the team primarily with a Lenovo w540 that has a quadro k1100m. While great for a laptop in that price range, it's performance is comparable with a budget desktop. I've been plenty happy with it for FRC however.

[Greg Woelki]

Originally Posted by AdamHeard

While awesome, this is such absurd overkill pricewise for FRC.

Having used the machines, for the most part I'd disagree with "absurd" - sure, we got nowhere near using 32GB of RAM, for instance, but the computers can still be made to stutter if one asks enough of them.

However, by design, they are indeed overkill. After spending years treading water with specs as both the requirements of our CAD software and the complexity of our models increased, our lead mentor decided that he wanted a "set it and forget it" CAD solution so that we wouldn't have to worry about computer hardware at all for the foreseeable future. I believe we succeeded in that regard.

The specs of our workstations are by no means a recommendation to all rookie teams as to what one needs in order to do CAD for FRC - given where we were resources wise, it was a good place to spend some money.

One could even say we got out of it cheap - the last major CAD computer Zac built for someone (not FRC related) cost $4000!

[MikLast]

Though the rest of the school has chromeboxes shudders the engineering/ag building lucked out with some 30ish laptops (HP Elitebooks, cant remember model # off the top of my head) 3 Brand new HP Elitebooks, and a computer lab with about 30 desktops that are overpriced and not too good (used for programming/school items) Until this year we have been using the older elitebook for our driving, but used one of the newer ones for this year.

Sorry i cant be more specific, Im unable to really go there and get the models for a while still.

[fargus111111111]

We have quite the assortment of laptops that the team owns and a lab of about 20 desktops at the school which are used during school hours for mechanical and architectural classes, thus they have all the Autodesk products on them and we use them for all our CADing, these computers also have access to a network drive which our lead educator, whose classroom we are working in, can also access, so if we want something 3d printed we can just put it in there and ask him to start the printer. The laptops include one ancient thing running Win XP that had been our programming laptop, we stopped using that after the 2013 season when we were donated 3 newer Dells. Those Dells also pushed our struggling Classmate out of service, needless to say no one was sad to see it go, but it still sits in the cabinet. The Dells were donated by one of our sponsors as they were upgrading many of their office computers. We use them for drive stations primarily, but also we keep one fully up to date with Labview for programming and the most powerful of the 3 has the Autodesk suite loaded on it so we have a portable CAD computer. They are all running Windows 7. We don't usually use personal computers at meetings, mostly because we have the lab. We do also have 1 Windows 8 Toshiba, but that has had its share of problems, the primary one being that we blew up the ethernet port on it because one of our long cords shocked it with static electricity while we were doing some testing on a carpet floor, fortunately the WiFi still works fine so we can use it as a demonstration driver station, that's about all it is. As far as computers are concerned I would say we are in the middle of the pack and we are happy right there.

[Anthony Galea]

Our team has used a 2013 Alienware 14 since the 2014 season to conduct all our team functions (CAD, programming, driver station), however, we need to find a new laptop as ours appears to have been stolen . We highly recommend the laptop, the only problem was the trackpad would act up from time to time, and Dell offers educational discounts.

[Munchskull]

My team uses both my personal and team computers to get done.
Team computers:-Old personal: - New Personal:
CPU- Some Xeon - i5-2400 - i5-6600k
Mobo-? - ? - MSI z-a170 pro carbon
RAM- 4GB DDR2 - 16GB DDR3. - 16GB DDR4
GPU- GTX 480 - GTX 660. - MSI GTX 1060

Current looking to rebuild the old personal in a new case to be an improvement over my teams cad set up. Sadly the CM CPU cooler I have had its back plate lost when I was rebuilding and I am out of money to buy a case.

Ps sorry for the bad format doing this from phone while camping.

[bobbysq]

8 old HP laptops donated by a sponsor. ~1-4 minute clean build time.

[Aeglos]

For Programming/ Doubles as a Driver's Station:

1 x HP ProBook 6550b
Features: WIN7 Enterprise, i5-520M, no dGPU, 2GB RAM, 250GB HDD, 1366x768 display, dead CMOS battery school will not replace, half- functional BIOS chip that makes the computer fail POST unless booted a certain way, non- functional laptop battery that will die in about 15 mins if unplugged from the wall, keys will occasionally not register, and the icing on the cake: sometimes it just won't charge, or accept any power from the wall outlet, so we have to bring another laptop computer along as a battery charger for the main one.


My Personal Rig, which I can use for programming at home (but mostly gaming and personal programming projects, let me be honest here):

Case: Fractal Design Define R4
Motherboard: MSI Z97S SLI Krait Edition
CPU: Intel i7-4790
CPU Cooler: Phanteks PH-TC12DX
GPU: Watercooled GTX 760
RAM: 16GB Samsung DDR3-1600
Storage: Seagate 2TB Hybrid Drive
PSU: EVGA 500B


For CAD:

1 x HP EliteBook 840
Features: WIN7 Enterprise, i7-4600U, I think no dGPU (but am uncertain), 8GB RAM, 500GB HDD, 1920x1080 display

20 x HP Compaq 8200 Elite All-In-One (In our CAD/ Technology Lab)
Features: WIN7 Enterprise, i5 2400S, no dGPU, 4GB RAM, 250GB HDD, 1920x1080 display

If you couldn't tell, as a programmer, I am not a huge fan of the programming laptop we are using currently. It has developed major stability issues over the years I have used it.

[Torvando]

My team has two laptops one really old hp and a not as old hp (i think) that we use for programming. Other than that we all have to use our personal laptops for cad and such. We sometimes have access to a mac lab that we can't install cad or anything on so its not really useful.

[gc_coxen]

My team has pretty low-end to moderate machines provided by the school, nothing fancy. The bulk of CAD is done outside of meetings on personal machines. I'm currently running:

CPU: i7 5820k
CPU Cooler: NZXT X61
Memory: HyperX Fury 32GB
Motherboard: MSI X99A SLI Plus
Storage: Samsung 840 evo 250GB
Seagate 2TB SSHD
GPU: Reference GTX 970
PSU: EVGA G2 600w
Case: NZXT H440