Let's Talk About Your Team's Computers

[marshall]

Originally Posted by Cory

You'll get a vastly bigger performance boost by upgrading to a ssd (if you're somehow still using a mechanical drive) than you would by upgrading from a base model quadro to a mid tier one.

This. So much this. No one seems to understand this in the educational world. So many systems purchased without SSDs these days.

The one big thing to take note of is that testing has shown the cheapest $200 quadro card will outperform the Titan in Solidworks performance.

It pains me to agree to this but it is completely true and has everything to do with driver optimizations: https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/ar...orks-2016-751/

Honestly the Titan cards work best for training neural networks and CUDA intensive tasks given the number of cores available and the memory size. We definitely use ours for this.

[sanddrag]

Originally Posted by marshall

This. So much this. No one seems to understand this in the educational world. So many systems purchased without SSDs these days.

For our school district, SSD's, 8GB RAM, and Skylake i5 is the minimum standard for all new desktop purchases going forward, as of June, 2016. But I agree, most of education has no clue what they're buying beyond "computers" and quite frequently those dollars go to Apple computers because "Macs are better."