Purchasing a new workstation - what to look for?

Support
1

Hi,

Hoping to pick some brains about workstation specs - I’m tasked with purchasing a new one for our lab. We’ll be working with large DICOM data sets (up 2 - 2.5GB). These are full-body scans and we’re planning to do lots of bone rendering.

I’m thinking 16GB+ RAM; i7 processor (someone recommended 3GHz+); but I’m a little lost with what to look for in a graphics card. Any help or thoughts appreciated!

Thanks

2

16GB is on the low-end for memory for 3D graphics workstations. Depending on what you want to do it might be enough, but you might consider getting 64GB, especially if your datasets are that big and if you are going to apply some image filters or do segmentation. Nvidia’s GeForce line of (e.g. Geforce 1080) will be sufficient (unless you want to do stereo rendering). A high end SSD for storage will help you load your datasets more quickly.

3

I second @muratmaga.

In general, I would recommend having 10x more RAM than your data set size. In your case, it would mean about 32 GB.

GeForce 1080 should serve you well for 1-2 years, probably even for VR applications.

4

Thanks to you both! @muratmaga @lassoan