Re: hardware for Mathematica 6.0
- To: mathgroup at smc.vnet.net
- Subject: [mg80047] Re: hardware for Mathematica 6.0
- From: Urijah Kaplan <uak at sas.upenn.edu>
- Date: Sat, 11 Aug 2007 02:12:12 -0400 (EDT)
- Organization: University of Pennsylvania
- References: <f9gv7e$b73$1@smc.vnet.net>
Well, lets go component by component. CPU--Mathematica's kernel is only multithreaded for some Linear Algebra functions, as far as I know, so a quad-core won't really do much for you (if you want to make full usage of more than one core, you can use Mathematica Personal Grid Edition <http://www.wolfram.com/products/personalgrid/> for quad core or gridMathematica <http://www.wolfram.com/products/gridmathematica/> for more than that.) Right now the Intel Core 2 Duo processors are faster for most Mathematica use. Intel is releasing their 45 nm versions soon (4-12 weeks?) which are quite a bit faster, and support new SSE instructions which will probably give the next version of Mathematica a nice boost. AMD's new processor is coming out within a month, but is starting out a bit slow at 2.0 GHz, and is not really that competitive for your use. OS--Windows would probably be your best bet. Unless you have some peripheral that is not compatible, I suggest a 64-bit version of Vista. (64 bit XP or 2003 should also be okay.) This allows you to use a 64-bit version of Mathematica which uses 64 bit integers, can use much more memory (32 bit is limited to about 2 GB per process on Windows) and CPUs in 64 bit mode can use twice as many registers, for another boost. Graphics card--any mid range card should be fine, even with the new graphics capabilities in Mathematica 6.0, GPUs are not given much of a workout. A Radeon HD 2600 XT or GeForce 8600GT should be fine. RAM--8 GB (if you have a 64 bit OS). Do you need ECC RAM? Buying third party RAM from Crucial or Kingston would probably save you a bit. Hope this helps! Urijah Kaplan David Cardon wrote: > I'm about to purchase a new computer and good performance with Mathematica 6.0 is my main priority. Can anyone prioritize which hardware components (dual-core, quad-core, graphics cards, etc) are likely to give the most "bang for the buck" when it comes to dynamic graphics, number crunching, symbolic computation, etc ? > > I can spend up to about $4000. I was planning on using Windows XP. > >
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