Agisoft Metashape

Agisoft Metashape => General => Topic started by: Super_Saffer on July 18, 2015, 06:06:52 PM

Title: $600 upgrade for Photoscan Pro machine.
Post by: Super_Saffer on July 18, 2015, 06:06:52 PM
Hi All!

My university department has a brand new HP Z440 tower. We would like to start doing small to medium scale processing of UAV images.  Typically what we can get from a 3DR Iris+ mission.  I have a budget of about $600 to upgrade the machine. Here's what I'm thinking....  ::)

Current specs are:

W7 64bit pro
Intel® Xeon® E5-1620 v3 (3.5 GHz, 10 MB cache, 4 cores, Intel® vPro™)
8 GB 2133 MHz DDR4 ECC Registered RAM (1 x 8 GB)
Nvidia Quatro NVS 925 Graphics
700w PSU
1 tb 7200 rpm HDD

I would like to add:

Nvidia 970 GPU $350 ish from Newegg.com
1 x 16bg ram + 1 x 8gb ram = 24 gigs ram (bring the total to 32GB) $250 ish from Newegg.com

Any thoughts or suggestions would be highly appreciated!  :D

http://www8.hp.com/us/en/products/monitors/product-detail.html?oid=7488466#!tab=specs

EDIT: Typo fixed.

Title: Re: $600 upgrade for Photoscan Pro machine.
Post by: tutoss on July 20, 2015, 11:31:11 PM
hi saffer,
by the Budget, is the best.
a question: how many photos you want process? Photoscan is very hungry of ram haha
Title: Re: $600 upgrade for Photoscan Pro machine.
Post by: brownish on July 22, 2015, 01:33:00 AM
You can't go wrong with a new graphics card but I think in your case you may possibly benefit more from buying additional RAM. It really depends on how many photos you're actually going to be using. If you're using a few hundred photos you might want to spend more on 3 more sticks of the same 8GB sticks you already have. Remember, the graphics card is only used during dense point cloud generation.

I guess it really depends on when you're going to get some more funding.  ;D
Title: Re: $600 upgrade for Photoscan Pro machine.
Post by: stihl on July 22, 2015, 12:34:29 PM
It's unfortunate that the machine has such an expensive but yet not so strong Xeon processor. Only four phyiscal cores..
Photoscan really benefits from having six phyiscal cores. But upgrading the CPU would mean a new motherboard etc etc.. Not worth the costs.

The GPU upgrade is a good one. I'd only suggest upping the RAM to 64GB if possible. But as it's DDR4 that alone will cost you around 800 dollars so that won't work. So as for your budget this is probably the best set up.
Title: Re: $600 upgrade for Photoscan Pro machine.
Post by: Marcel on July 22, 2015, 02:21:04 PM
It's unfortunate that the machine has such an expensive but yet not so strong Xeon processor. Only four phyiscal cores..
Photoscan really benefits from having six phyiscal cores. But upgrading the CPU would mean a new motherboard etc etc.. Not worth the costs.

A 4 core CPU with a high clock speed can be faster than a 6 core CPU with a lower clock speed in some cases. This is because some parts of the processing (for example meshing, texture generation) are not multi threaded very well, so your extra cores are not used. For those processes that run on a single thread, the CPU with a high clock speed will have the benefit.