Computer for processing

[DaveG64]

I’m just curious to what sort of computer members use for processing images and what their favourite processing software is 

[Xilman]

Sundry 64-bit PC compatibles, both laptops and desktops.

SWarp, astrometry.net, APT, The GIMP, Siril, ds9, ImageMagick and even xpaint for annotation.

 

Edited March 21 by Xilman
Add more software

[Aramcheck]

After my old PC hard-disk died I got an AMD Ryzen 7 5700G with Radeon Graphics system from PC Specialist. It's got a couple of SSD drives & two regular hard discs & 128 GB Ram. Running Windows 11 & all processing done with Pixinsight.

The SSD drives & extra memory really made a big difference to processing speed.

Cheers
Ivor

[Earl]

Im using an old i9 with 32gb nvme 2060 for everyhting, works fine.

[ONIKKINEN]

My PC has an i7 6770k with 16gb of early DDR4 ram. Its getting a bit old but still works very well. SSD for processing is a must have.

Siril is hard drive write speed limited so still very quick, i would estimate maybe 3 or 4 times faster than Pixinsight or Astropixelprocessor, so i use Siril for calibration and stacking.

Processing in Pixinsight and Photoshop. For the RC-astro tools i have setup GPU acceleration with my RTX 4070ti and any size image will finish BlurXterminator in seconds. My old GTX 1080 was also very fast, so an older model will do just fine for that purpose.

[ollypenrice]

Preprocessing, APP. Post processing, a bit in Pixinsight and a lot in Photoshop. I also use Registar, particularly for composite (multi-scope) images. I consider StarXterminator and NoiseXterminator to be absolutely essential.

Olly

[tomato]

+1 for PC Specialist, I told them what I wanted the PC for and went with their recommendations. It cost around £1K back in 2019 (exc monitor) but is still up to the job 5 years on. I use APP for calibration and stacking, (inc mosaics) and Pixinsight for onward processing (the RC Xterminator tools are also an essential part of my workflow) and Affinity Photo, as I didn't want the pricing model of Photoshop.

[DaveS]

A Scan custom build, Ryzen 9750 CPU, 64GB RAM, 1 and 2 TB m2 storage.

Processing in AstroArt 8 sp5 for stacking and LRGB synthesis, PixInsight for a lot of the heavy lifting, including SPCC, and RC tools.

[DaveG64]

A lot of food for thought I was thinking of getting a mini pc with either 32 or 64 gb ram and at least 2 tb storage with either high end Ryzen processor or intel i7 or i9 

[Elp]

Mini pcs seem good spec from the outset but I'd look into the sustained processing performance. Due to their size heat dissipation might be an issue and you may find the processor throttles during processing to minimise heat output. I was looking at one for another purpose and for this reason alone I avoided going ahead with it. Heat is no good for computers, they need space to breathe or good internal cooling.

[SteveNickolls]

HP laptop (Intel 7500U) with 16GB RAM and 1TB SSD. Use SharpCap Pro to capture DSO's and Deep Sky Stacker for stacking then StarTools to process. With lunar/solar data I capture with SharpCap Pro and then stack and process using AstroSurface.

Cheers,

Steve

[AstroGS]

Apple MacBook Air, M2 processor + 24GB + 500GB SSD, used mainly to integrate and process images on Pixinsight and bit of Photoshop.

This is also used to manage remotely my rig.

[mareman48]

Computer:

Late 2017 27" iMac - 4.2GHz i7 Quad Core - 64GB DDR4 - Radeon Pro 580 8GB

Early 2024 -24"  iMac M3 - 16GB Ram- 500GB Flash, ASIStudio, 

 

Software:

PixInsight, Siril, Photoshop, Topaz Labs, ASIStudio, QuickFits,

 

I find large files are Graphic and Processor heavy, especially using PixInsight and ASIStudio, I have other Macs, but I tend to use this 2 for my Post Processing.

[malc-c]

Best advice would be to look at the requirements stated by the software manufactures.   These days with even entry level computers have multiple cores and threads, with16GB being the standard RAM, and both laptops and desktop system supporting Nvme drives so should be more than capable.  What tends to happen is that most software still uses older core code that isn't written to take advantage of the processing power.  In fact these days its the GPU's Cuda cores that dictates the power of a system, more so in the gaming side of things, as more and more applications can be more easily modified to use  the GPUs processor than to make it a multi core or threaded application to use the CPUs clout.

I have a first gen Ryzen 5 based machine, with 16GB DDR4 vengance RAM,  1Tb  and 250Gb Samsun Nvme drives, 2TB SSD and a 3Tb mechanical drive for archival storage.  Yet when I need to convert a small  STL file into a solid in FreeCAD it still sits there for several minutes whilst it does the math as it can't make use of the 4 cores and 8 threads all turbo'd to 3.7 Ghz !!

Mind you,  having said that Deep Sky Stacker does make use of multi core / treads and it's quite impressive watching it stack a shed load of subs on a modern day machine in a couple of minutes.  Prior to building this machine I had an old AMD FX processor based machine and it was often a case of setting the stacking off and then going off to mow the lawns or run the vacuum around the house and then still have to wait a few more minutes before it finished !!