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Forester, not a geospatial or IT professional, currently using QGIS and SAGA for generally county level geoprocessing of multipspectral imagery and DEM's (cluster analysis, zonal statistics, stream channel modeling).

Currently exceeding practical processing limits for laptop/windows configuration using HP EliteBook w/4GB Ram, Intel Core i5, 32 bit Win7 OS. Need advice on logical next step in hardware/OS/software.

Future ambitions include deployment of PostGIS and derivation of canopy height models from stereo matched imagery. Thinking low end workstation and Ubuntu OS.

I'm a one man shop trying to operate a bit beyond my capabilities. I do not speak fluent IT or GIS, need a balance of horsepower, idiot proof, moderate learning curve and intermediate support. Cost is important but functionality, flexibility and capability are primary.

PolyGeo
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L Fuller
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    closely related to http://gis.stackexchange.com/questions/22371/looking-for-system-specifications-for-a-modern-gis-workstation – underdark Dec 21 '12 at 17:21

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On the hardware side, I'd recommend staying with something in the i5 line, as that gets you the best bang for your buck, and any extra money might be better spent on improving other hardware.

Your best bet to get the most out of your hardware is to look at what components are limiting you now. When you're running an process and look at task manager, what is slowing you down? Are you running out of ram? Are you 100% on all cores, or only just one or two? Are you limited on disk i/o?

Where the bottleneck is should determine where you should focus your efforts. I would recommend upgrading to an hybrid SSD/HDD drive in your new machine, because for a lot of GIS work they are very effective, due to the way data is used (the drive caches data to the SSD that is used frequently, so if you're working on the same project data all week long, it'll cache the data early on, and then you'll have some of the speed of a SSD without the cost of a full SSD drive). On the other hand, if you've got the money, just grab a large SSD drive and run everything off of there.

Hardware GPU acceleration can be few and far between, but if you have aspirations of running CUDA enabled models it could be a good investment. I would recommend some kind of discrete graphics card to take that load off of the CPU and RAM, but don't throw money at it thinking that your rendering times are going to be amazing.

DPierce
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  • Many thanks. Familiar with SSD for hardened field hardware but hadn't considered it for desktop application. – L Fuller Dec 21 '12 at 18:23
  • +1 Good advice all around, although a machine running a 3rd gen i7 possessor and 16GB of RAM can be purchased relatively cheap (~$1000) these days. I would also add that for any image analysis or large-scale canopy modelling, an i5 processor and it's associated RAM limitations do not cut it anymore. – Aaron Dec 21 '12 at 19:04
  • That's a great point. The main reason I wouldn't say to go straight for an i7 is because often times the money spent on that can be better spent elsewhere, but it really depends on the application. Applications that remain single-threaded (such as ArcGIS and AutoCAD) won't benefit significantly from the additional cores, and you get a much greater benefit from a 100$ SSD than putting 100$ going from an i5 to an i7 (but that all depends on how strict your budget is). However, imagery software that is well threaded would benefit from the additional cores and ram if that is your main purpose. – DPierce Dec 21 '12 at 20:12
  • I wouldn't buy ANY SSD just like that, recent research of mine to build a postgis database on top of that shows that not any SSD is good for that. It's my conclusion that if you really want to keep your data for years on an SSD and want to do DB crunching, there is almost no other alternative that the Intel DC series – Glenn Plas Dec 28 '12 at 16:39