Should I get a new CPU for PixInsight?

[MarsG76]

14 minutes ago, Star101 said:

£5K

Its actually $5k... He lives in ustralia., so about £3K.

[MarsG76]

17 minutes ago, Star101 said:

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  

Yes definitely, a PC would be half the price for more processing power...you're not paying a premium for the apple logo.

[msacco]

I'll never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, in a million light years, touch an apple product.
Not because I think they're all that bad, but because I just don't think their products are even close to justifying their price.

I also don't need anything else other than CPU, motherboard and RAM slots.

[Star101]

Yeah, I got the £5K from https://www.apple.com/uk/shop/buy-mac/imac-pro/3.2ghz-1tb?afid=p238|sL4w7cF5j-dc_mtid_187079nc38483_pcrid_104154899041_pgrid_23949283681_&cid=aos-uk-kwgo-pla-btb--slid-----product-MQ2Y2B/A-UK

 

 

[Star101]

Just now, msacco said:

I'll never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, in a million light years, touch an apple product.
Not because I think they're all that bad, but because I just don't think their products are even close to justifying their price.

I also don't need anything else other than CPU, motherboard and RAM slots.

I'm inclined to agree. 

[wimvb]

2 hours 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...

 

 

1 hour ago, msacco said:

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.

The easiest way to test a configuration (swap drives, ssd vs hdd, etc) is to run a benchmark test. It's under Scripts > Benchmarks.

I just did a benchmark test on my laptop (Acer AMD A8, 8 GB RAM) and the bottleneck for me is the swap time. My guess is that this is the most common bottleneck, not CPU speed.

Btw, to free disk space, have a look at orphaned swap files. They are in C:/Users/NNN/AppData/local/Temp, unless another location was specified in Global preferences.

Edited August 20, 2019 by wimvb

[msacco]

15 minutes ago, wimvb said:

 

The easiest way to test a configuration (swap drives, ssd vs hdd, etc) is to run a benchmark test. It's under Scripts > Benchmarks.

Hmmm I've already done that, but I'm not sure how that really helps me realize what I could do better

Generally I'm currently thinking about getting a second hand ryzen 7 2700x, Asus x370 Prime Pro and probably 32GB RAM.

[wimvb]

1 minute ago, msacco said:

Hmmm I've already done that, but I'm not sure how that really helps me realize what I could do better

 

When I did the benchmark test, I got swap times twice the cpu time. Clearly, for me it makes more sense to look over my swap directory and RAM configuration before investing in more CPU power.

All I'm saying is that if PI is slow, a faster computer is the obvious solution. But by that I mean both faster hardware and an optimised configuration of that hardware.  Sometimes, optimising an existing configuration can be enough. Ymmv

[msacco]

45 minutes ago, wimvb said:

When I did the benchmark test, I got swap times twice the cpu time. Clearly, for me it makes more sense to look over my swap directory and RAM configuration before investing in more CPU power.

All I'm saying is that if PI is slow, a faster computer is the obvious solution. But by that I mean both faster hardware and an optimised configuration of that hardware.  Sometimes, optimising an existing configuration can be enough. Ymmv

Well, I've tried that, but there wasn't too much of a difference unfortunately, my SSD's are decent, but they're not amazing.

I believe spending around 550$ on ryzen 7 2700x and 32 GB RAM could be a good investment.

[catburglar]

There have been loads of suggestions here- some relevant, a few less so. You seem to have tried all the relevant ones and they’ve not worked for you, so I think you just need to get the ryzen 7 and the ram upgrade and let us all know that PI is now flying through your workflow.

[Icesheet]

3 hours ago, Star101 said:

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  

Let’s be fair here he says nothing of the sorts. He actually states the point of the video was to demonstrate how PixInsight utilises multiple cores and threading to speed up processing time (which was the point of the OP), not that you need that Mac to do it. We we are all free to choose the hardware to do the job as is he.

 

I’ve actually found him to be the most knowledgeable of the YouTube astrophotographers. Worth a follow. 

[MarsG76]

4 hours ago, Star101 said:

Yeah, I got the £5K from https://www.apple.com/uk/shop/buy-mac/imac-pro/3.2ghz-1tb?afid=p238|sL4w7cF5j-dc_mtid_187079nc38483_pcrid_104154899041_pgrid_23949283681_&cid=aos-uk-kwgo-pla-btb--slid-----product-MQ2Y2B/A-UK

 

 

Looks like you guys up there are being charged a premium... costs down here in a dollar value has the same number in pounds up there, automatically increasing the real cost by 40%!!!  

[msacco]

10 hours ago, catburglar said:

There have been loads of suggestions here- some relevant, a few less so. You seem to have tried all the relevant ones and they’ve not worked for you, so I think you just need to get the ryzen 7 and the ram upgrade and let us all know that PI is now flying through your workflow.

Yeah I believe that pretty much sums it all up, so that's probably what I'll do. Planned on going with the Ryzen 7 2700x, Asus x370 Prime Pro and 32 GB RAM(not sure what speed to take though).

10 hours ago, Icesheet said:

Let’s be fair here he says nothing of the sorts. He actually states the point of the video was to demonstrate how PixInsight utilises multiple cores and threading to speed up processing time (which was the point of the OP), not that you need that Mac to do it. We we are all free to choose the hardware to do the job as is he.

 

I’ve actually found him to be the most knowledgeable of the YouTube astrophotographers. Worth a follow. 

I agree, and I also really agree with what he says that investing in astro gear is important, but we spend a lot of time processing images, and that's really a big deal, at least for me.
For me, there is nothing worse than a wasted time, having to debayer my images, wait for 20 minutes, then align, integrate bias, darks, flats, calibration, integration. All that is taking me AT LEAST 1-2 hours without even getting to the actual process.

So it's an investment, and it's rather funny considering I don't even own a very suitable AP gear(SW 200p and EQ5 which will be replaced as well in the following months), no guiding camera, and a non cooled camera(Canon EOS 6D).

But it's something I'll also get soon.

I'm not sure any more suggestions are needed, it's always welcome if anyone got some more ideas or suggestions, so feel free to share, but I believe I've pretty much decided. Thanks for the help everyone

Edited August 21, 2019 by msacco

[discardedastro]

I'll throw in my two cents...

I have an i7-2600K - older than yours! I use PI pretty regularly without issue, but did have some slow performance initially which I investigated thoroughly. The biggest single upgrades I made in terms of actual performance were cheap:

* RAM - enough to fit a typical stack in RAM, which for me was 32G (about £90)

* Storage - getting the I/O unblocked was a huge boost. I used a low-cost NVMe disk (a 970 EVO) and a PCIe adapter (£100 total, I think)

PI is fairly CPU-bound on some tasks, but they're not slow. I'd definitely make those two upgrades first, and see how you get on. I've done nothing else and it's perfectly acceptable (most "heavy" ops take <1 min on images from an ASI183MM-PRO).

As an aside, if you're going down the Ryzen path, PC3600 CAS-16 is the performance sweet-spot, not 3200. Corsair have new parts out targeting that exact point, as do others. Also, PCIe 4 storage is a thing - it will be most worthwhile for PixInsight, and is fairly cheap for half a tera.

[Photosbykev]

I've recently built a new computer for image processing and rendering work and it's based on the 9900k running at 4.9Ghz with 64Gb of ram and fast m.2 drives. I understand that PI doesn't use the GPU and the author doesn't intend to support them anytime soon so it all about the cpu and memory

[Star101]

Anyone invested or played with the AMD Ryzen 29XX CPU?

The 2990WX looks fantastic for Pixinsight ( Drool 😛 ) 

ryzen-threadripper

[discardedastro]

7 hours ago, Star101 said:

Anyone invested or played with the AMD Ryzen 29XX CPU?

The 2990WX looks fantastic for Pixinsight ( Drool 😛 ) 

ryzen-threadripper

My next build is very likely to be based around the 3900 - it's an absolute no-brainer for price/performance against Intel now.

PI is naturally very good at parallel processing if you've got the IO to match, and the PCIe4 drives now available with Zen 2 (and with Intel eventually, no doubt, though Intel have for the last 10 or so generations of chip heavily segmented high-IO capacity parts into the "enthusiast" parts at four times the price) will satiate the requirements of a 32-core part running on 32 images at once.

Edited September 25, 2019 by discardedastro

[upahill]

19 hours ago, Star101 said:

Anyone invested or played with the AMD Ryzen 29XX CPU?

The 2990WX looks fantastic for Pixinsight ( Drool 😛 ) 

ryzen-threadripper

I looked at the 2950/2990 but couldnt justify the price yet for my new build. Ended up settling for the 1950X

Eventually was considering going for the 2990WX but the 3900X looks pretty awesome (different socket though ) - the threadripper wins out on multithreaded performance though if you dont mind the higher leccy bill.

This rig should last me a couple of years, my old FX-8350 lasted 6!

Edited September 26, 2019 by upahill
changed cb to r15

[upahill]

On 23/08/2019 at 00:29, Photosbykev said:

I've recently built a new computer for image processing and rendering work and it's based on the 9900k running at 4.9Ghz with 64Gb of ram and fast m.2 drives. I understand that PI doesn't use the GPU and the author doesn't intend to support them anytime soon so it all about the cpu and memory

Nice system, looks like the 2080Ti is as good as I've read.

[Photosbykev]

1 hour ago, upahill said:

Nice system, looks like the 2080Ti is as good as I've read.

No complaints so far and hopefully will keep me happy for a few months lol

[happy-kat]

On 20/08/2019 at 19:34, wimvb said:

 

The easiest way to test a configuration (swap drives, ssd vs hdd, etc) is to run a benchmark test. 

Cheers for the tip off, I ran the what was needed using cmd and then powershell. 

[kirkster501]

My processing machine for Pixinsight is an i7-8700k Overclocked to 5Ghz with 32G of RAM and an Nvidia 1070Ti graphics card with 4TB of SSD. In other words, a powerful machine. I built it myself after much research. 

Even this machine can take a minute or so with intensive stacking and complex, layered processes like TGV Denoise.