Should I get a new CPU for PixInsight?

[Icesheet]

You could always leave the stacking to run overnight then it’s ready for you whenever. Sounds like you’ve made your mind up to upgrade though and it wouldn’t be a bad investment anyway. 

[msacco]

24 minutes ago, Icesheet said:

You could always leave the stacking to run overnight then it’s ready for you whenever. Sounds like you’ve made your mind up to upgrade though and it wouldn’t be a bad investment anyway. 

That's the point, I wouldn't mind if I could, but I can't as I need to debayer, align, integrate, calibrate etc. I can't really do them all together(maybe with the batch preprocess, but I didn't really liked it as much, I could possibly give it another shot though, and that might save me some cash.

[Alien 13]

A fast PC or laptop is just as important as any other astro spend, give me a high end gaming machine over a TAK refractor any day...

Alan

[msacco]

1 hour ago, Alien 13 said:

A fast PC or laptop is just as important as any other astro spend, give me a high end gaming machine over a TAK refractor any day...

Alan

Thanks, do you have any recommendations? Would you got with a second hand cheap 2700x or get a 3900x?

[Alien 13]

16 minutes ago, msacco said:

Thanks, do you have any recommendations? Would you got with a second hand cheap 2700x or get a 3900x?

Unfortunately I am an Intel man combined with Nvidia wouldn't touch AMD with a barge pole I couldn't comment on those chipsets....

Alan

Edited August 19, 2019 by Alien 13

[celestron8g8]

First check and see if there is an update for your driver for your graphics board. If not see how much a new graphic cards is compared to a new computer. Right now school starting back you could possibly pickup a new computer cheaper . Check with qvc.com and hsn.com . They been running alot of sales lately . 

[msacco]

4 minutes ago, Alien 13 said:

Unfortunately I am an Intel man combined with Nvidia wouldn't touch AMD with a barge pole I couldn't comment on those chipsets....

Alan

I've never had an AMD before, but I honestly never understood such statements. i9 9900k costs more than 3900x, why would anyone pick intel chipsets nowadays without a specific reason.

1 minute ago, celestron8g8 said:

First check and see if there is an update for your driver for your graphics board. If not see how much a new graphic cards is compared to a new computer. Right now school starting back you could possibly pickup a new computer cheaper . Check with qvc.com and hsn.com . They been running alot of sales lately . 

Hmm, not sure how a graphics card is related here?

[Alien 13]

3 minutes ago, msacco said:

I've never had an AMD before, but I honestly never understood such statements. i9 9900k costs more than 3900x, why would anyone pick intel chipsets nowadays without a specific reason.

Hmm, not sure how a graphics card is related here?

The Achilles heal of AMD is stability and compatibility with a wide range of hardware/software, my experience is that Intel just works even if its not as fast sometimes....

Alan

[msacco]

2 minutes ago, Alien 13 said:

The Achilles heal of AMD is stability and compatibility with a wide range of hardware/software, my experience is that Intel just works even if its not as fast sometimes....

Alan

Well it's not really the point of the thread, but I can understand what you're saying, my personal opinion is that it's a waste, but I'm a cheapo guy.
I roam on aliexpress, I always get the best budget for value, and I just like buying cheap stuff. So far everything is working fine for me

[Alien 13]

3 minutes ago, msacco said:

Well it's not really the point of the thread, but I can understand what you're saying, my personal opinion is that it's a waste, but I'm a cheapo guy.
I roam on aliexpress, I always get the best budget for value, and I just like buying cheap stuff. So far everything is working fine for me

I like a bargain too.

I am sure Pixinsight has its own benchmark software so its worth looking on their site as to what works best at a certain price point..

Alan

[msacco]

4 minutes ago, Alien 13 said:

I like a bargain too.

I am sure Pixinsight has its own benchmark software so its worth looking on their site as to what works best at a certain price point..

Alan

Holy....Bless you! Thank you so much for that!

[celestron8g8]

53 minutes ago, msacco said:

I've never had an AMD before, but I honestly never understood such statements. i9 9900k costs more than 3900x, why would anyone pick intel chipsets nowadays without a specific reason.

Hmm, not sure how a graphics card is related here?

Graphic Cards are what runs the processing  of your software . If your problem is taking too much time to process then you need a faster computer and that's not always ram to fix the problem . That's why for gaming computers they have a different graphic card to add speed to their games .

[msacco]

1 minute ago, celestron8g8 said:

Graphic Cards are what runs the processing  of your software . If your problem is taking too much time to process then you need a faster computer and that's not always ram to fix the problem . That's why for gaming computers they have a different graphic card to add speed to their games .

Don't want to be rude or anything, but do you actually have any knowledge about computers?

[celestron8g8]

1 minute ago, msacco said:

Don't want to be rude or anything, but do you actually have any knowledge about computers?

I have basic knowledge , no college training or tech training . What I know is what I learned on my own or from techs updating me . 

[msacco]

12 minutes ago, celestron8g8 said:

I have basic knowledge , no college training or tech training . What I know is what I learned on my own or from techs updating me . 

I don't have a college or tech training as well(even though I do work in the industry), but what you said is not really related at all.

A graphics card is responsible for processing the video graphics on your machine, which means that everything that you see on your screen, is being processed in your graphics card.
The reason a GPU is extremely important for gaming, is because things needs to be rendered and fast, the faster something is being rendered on the screen, the more FPS you'll have, and the smoother the game will run.

Why a GPU is not related to pixinsight? A GPU is not important for pixinsight(at least not for processing speed), is because these actions work solely on the CPU, RAM and SSD(or HDD), there is the console on the screen writing a few lines of code, which doesn't make any GPU work hard.

You could also see in the console itself, that each image that's being debayered for example, is working on a single CPU thread, so things will run faster.

I could have 100 of the highest end GPU available on the market connected to my PC, and that would still make 0 difference on my processing speed.

BTW, I also stated in my first post that I have a GTX 770 4 GB, which in today terms it's really not all that good, but it's plenty enough for anything related to pixinsight, and I actually use it for gaming as well and it still rocks high end games.

I'm also not 100% sure about everything I said, the general idea is correct, but could be a few small points that are not spot on accurate.

Edited August 19, 2019 by msacco

[celestron8g8]

9 minutes ago, msacco said:

I don't have a college or tech training as well(even though I do work in the industry), but what you said is not really related at all.

A graphics card is responsible for processing the video graphics on your machine, which means that everything that you see on your screen, is being processed in your graphics card.
The reason a GPU is extremely important for gaming, is because things needs to be rendered and fast, the faster something is being rendered on the screen, the more FPS you'll have, and the smoother the game will run.

Why a GPU is not related to pixinsight? A GPU is not important for pixinsight(at least not for processing speed), is because these actions work solely on the CPU, RAM and SSD(or HDD), there is the console on the screen writing a few lines of code, which doesn't make any GPU work hard.

You could also see in the console itself, that each image that's being debayered for example, is working on a single CPU thread, so things will run faster.

I could have 100 of the highest end GPU available on the market connected to my PC, and that would still make 0 difference on my processing speed.

BTW, I also stated in my first post that I have a GTX 770 4 GB, which in today terms it's really not all that good, but it's plenty enough for anything related to pixinsight, and I actually use it for gaming as well and it still rocks high end games.

I'm also not 100% sure about everything I said, the general idea is correct, but could be a few small points that are not spot on accurate.

Ok , then just scratch all I said and ignore it and i'll just bow out of the conversation here . Don't mean to cause problems . I made those suggestions cause I use to do a lot of editing but  I haven't messed with PI due to my preference . But I had trouble with some of my editing software and updating the graphic card driver was suggested and that fixed part of my problem . So as I said i'll bow out , have a great day ! 

[msacco]

3 minutes ago, celestron8g8 said:

Ok , then just scratch all I said and ignore it and i'll just bow out of the conversation here . Don't mean to cause problems . I made those suggestions cause I use to do a lot of editing but  I haven't messed with PI due to my preference . But I had trouble with some of my editing software and updating the graphic card driver was suggested and that fixed part of my problem . So as I said i'll bow out , have a great day ! 

Thanks, you too! And thanks for trying to help  Didn't mean to be rude or anything like that.

[DarkAntimatter]

For what it's worth, some programs do make use of GPUs to do computations, not just for displaying graphics. Many scientific programs do this. This almost always means running Cuda on Nvidia cards. 

The pixinsight web site mentions that the present version does not use Cuda, but it is planned for the future. 

[msacco]

1 hour ago, DarkAntimatter said:

For what it's worth, some programs do make use of GPUs to do computations, not just for displaying graphics. Many scientific programs do this. This almost always means running Cuda on Nvidia cards. 

The pixinsight web site mentions that the present version does not use Cuda, but it is planned for the future. 

Well yeah but that's not the case 99% of the times

[Icesheet]

Looks like Dylan O’Donnell recently made a similar upgrade decision as you. 

 

 

[daz]

On 18/08/2019 at 19:13, wimvb said:

Have you optimized the settings in General Preferences (under Edit menu)? Here you can set the number of processers that PI uses, and the swap directories.

Not sure if you missed this from @wimvb - I couldn't see a reply but apologies if you did.

There are recommendations for setting up a dedicated SSD as a PI swap drive, and then configuring multiple entries in the I/O preferences to use that SSD as the swap space. Could be a cheap way to test before spending too much money on new hardware...

 

[msacco]

55 minutes ago, daz said:

Not sure if you missed this from @wimvb - I couldn't see a reply but apologies if you did.

There are recommendations for setting up a dedicated SSD as a PI swap drive, and then configuring multiple entries in the I/O preferences to use that SSD as the swap space. Could be a cheap way to test before spending too much money on new hardware...

 

I've actually tried that, but maybe I could still optimize that further, is there somewhere I could see optimal results? I could use a 1TB SSD only for that.

[msacco]

1 hour ago, Icesheet said:

Looks like Dylan O’Donnell recently made a similar upgrade decision as you. 

 

 

I'll watch it when I'll get home, thanks

[Star101]

Basically the guy in the video is saying...Spend £5K on a Retina MAC with 8 cores and cut your processing time.

I think half that price PC with 12 cores would be a better deal  

[MarsG76]

20 hours ago, msacco said:

Don't want to be rude or anything, but

Hahha classic...

Fair question I guess but the "but" in that post cracked me up...