Good APS hardware build?

[CovaH]

Hey, Is there anyone here who can give me some pointers on how to improve my PS performance? Currently I seem to be bottle necked at depth reconstruction and it's taking a really long time.

On medium settings with aggressive depth filtering for a 200 image project it can take up to 3 hrs just for the dense cloud step.

So, I'm thinking some new hardware might speed things up. Right now I have 32Gb DDR3 RAM, Intel Core i5 4690K and an AMD Radeon R9 200 Series Gfx card.

Where could I make the biggest gains from new hardware? I'm thinking I might have to get 2 gfx cards in sli, nvidia preferable? Perhaps invest in a slightly more powerful processor? I was considering xeons but from what I read here it doesn't seem to reduce the time of depth reconstruction all that much.

What I want to be able to do is run a project with 200 high resolution photos at high or preferably ultra high and perhaps moderate depth filtering, without running out of memory and not taking ages. A run like that might take 2-3days with my current speccs, not sure if I can even do it with my 32Gb RAM?

So, anyone can who can recommend a good set-up that is not insanely costly? I'm thinking I would prefer not to spend more than 1500-1800$

Right now my best guess would be, 2 new nvidia cards in sli with a lot of on board memory, upgrade processor to an i7 of some sort. That reasonable?

[awake]

I don't know if anandtech is anywhere near reliable but they benchmark various CPUs for every time consuming step on PhotoScan.

How many slots you have left for RAM? More is always better than less. I recently ran out of RAM while having almost 300GB. What exact GPU do you use? When it comes to CPU, I don't know how much to expect from a new and faster one. I would priorize GPU over CPU.

[CovaH]

Hey! Yeah I've been looking at some of their benchmarks but couldn't find any specifically for GPUs and photoscan? From the CPU benchmarks it looks like I could cut processing time for some steps by 30-40% by upgrading to one of the higher tier i-7 CPUs.

But as you say, I think I'd gain the most from more GPU power. My Catalyst Control Center only says R9-200 series, but I installed some third party program that says ASUS R9 280X which sounds reasonable.

So, a cheap alternative might be to get another of those cards and bridge them?

Think I filled all my ram slots wit 4 x 8Gb sticks so none are free...

Ideally I'd like to be able to process a scene of high resolution images in 3-4hrs at the most, don't know if that's realistic though without going for an extremely expensive rig.

[CovaH]

So, thought I'd make a reply to my own post rather than add everything in a single long post.

I have two more questions, where can I see the performance of my GPU and CPU in APS?

And, some people suggest that turning off all but one CPU during dense cloud calculations will improve performance, is this correct?

[CovaH]

Ok, I've been looking around now for some new hardware. And since I'm on 1150 socket now I have two options basically. Either I upgrade everything and get a new MB with new DDR4 ram and a new Xeon processor. This is a pretty pricey option.

Second option is to replace my 8GB x 4 ram sticks with 16x4 ddr3 ram sticks and replace my i5 4690K with a xeon processor that fits on a 1150 socket board. (They have a maximum of 4 cores). This would be the cheaper option.

So I'm torn between these two options, if I go for the cheaper one I'm afraid it wouldn't make that much of a difference. But the expensive option would be atleast 40% more expensive. It sucks I can't use DDR3 rams on 2011-3 socket MBs basically.

Any suggestions?

*Edit, I suppose the 2011 socket might be an option but it feels like it's quite old by now and about to be replaced entirely. Hard to find good parts for it.

*Edit2, There are older 2011 socket mainboards with 2 processor slots that could fit 2x4 core xeon processors slightly cheaper than a 2011-3 rig with a single 6core CPU, but it's a much older chipset and uses ddr 3 instead.