On Sat, Jul 15, 2017 at 08:34:26PM -0500, Mike Miller wrote: > > I don't mind at all! I want one machine to do all of my work which > includes writing/reading, statistical analysis of fairly large data > files, video and image processing, web server and file server, so it > helps to have plenty of cores, lots of memory and speed. What do you > think? Does that system seem to fit the bill? I just thought a > better video card woudn't help me. I am doing DVI at 1920x1080 and it > seems adequate. > Sounds reasonable, and probably adequate, for what you are doing. Large files and statistical analysis using that "large" data is subjective, and it largely depends on the application. But I would say that most people who do things like this on a workstation are probably easily satisfied with a bunch of memory (and possibly fast drives). Nothing beats Linux in memory management right now; this coming anecdotally from me, but most likely true. Video editing is demanding. My cousin used to have special hardware to do all of his editing back in the day. Today, it is not graphics cards that are pin-pointed bottlenecks as much as it is drives and memory bandwidth. I envy the patience of those who do video editing. My "control-freak" character when it comes to manipulating video-data rests on scriptable and/or interactive use o MPlayer (through a unix pipe). If you are not doing anything with that piece of magnificent software, certainly invest some time learning about it. It may change your life. For serving files I'd ask my trusted expert "rhayman" to point to solutions. (The person who opened up for sale two of his 4U rack-mountable units.) The key is to have robust recovery, in my opinion, but for scratch space for data manipulation, say large resolution video, you may need SSD or fast RAID or both. (Alternatively, get a self-improvement book on patience!) In full disclosure, my high computational demands are not easily satisfied with 1000 cores and 1000 x 1GB of RAM, and I compete for such resources with others. Bottlenecks for us are large data visualization and what is called "mesh generation" in engineering and simulation. In both cases graphics hardware and generous amounts of RAM help. But some of us rest on clever coding and some quite sophisticated distributed-parallel software packages (HDF5). My 1GHz Pentium still satisfies all of my coding and writing/reading needs and other essential network services! I could probably do all that on a Ras-Pi.