Eurocom laptop build

[ThomasVD]

Hi everyone!

I'm looking to buy a very powerful laptop for fieldwork photogrammetry using PhotoScan. After some online research Eurocom http://www.eurocom.com/ec/main()ec seems to provide some of the most powerful/configurable laptops on the market. One great advantage is that they can use desktop CPUs (the laptop's battery life or noise are not an issue), and that the BIOS appears to be very configurable (I want to be able to experiment with various CPU hyperthreading setttings). Of their different models I think the Panther 5 is the most appropriate for PhotoScan work.

Since I don't have extensive experience configuring computers I was wondering if any of you would like to have a go at (virtually) assembling an awesome PhotoScan-cruncher laptop: http://www.eurocom.com/ec/configure(1,224,0)ec for between €3500 and 4000? Any advice would be very much appreciated.

The most important bottleneck for the work we are carrying out is the CPU (initial photo align phase), so I was looking at the Intel Core i7-4960X, but if someone has convincing arguments for using a (much more expensive) XEON processor I'd be happy to hear them!

Thanks in advance for any input from the community

Tom

[dtmcnamara]

i7-4960X CPU
32GB RAM
2x 970M GPU
Windows 7 Pro-64bit
480GB SSD Boot Drive
1TB Spinning Drive for storage

[ThomasVD]

i7-4960X CPU
32GB RAM
2x 970M GPU
Windows 7 Pro-64bit
480GB SSD Boot Drive
1TB Spinning Drive for storage

Thanks a lot Dtmcnamara! Just out of curiosity:

Any suggestions as to which RAM / SSD / Spinning drive to choose? There's some big price differences but I'm not sure what the hardware differences actually are? Is it just the brand name?

Would 2x 970M have major advantages over 1x 980M? I guess it would mainly be useful on projects where you want to use "high" or "ultra high" dense point reconstruction settings?

Is there a specific reason to prefer Windows 7 over 8.1? I guess there's going to be a free upgrade to Windows 10 soon anyway so maybe not too important?