Laptop Spec for MF - including massive stacks

[Ed Hurst]

Hello chums,

I wonder if any of you have any opinions on the following laptop spec. and how it will perform with Medium Format files. In particular, I am a mad lunatic with star trail images, sometimes stacking 2,000 16-bit TIFFs. My old Mac Pro just about coped with this once I upgraded the RAM to 32gb. Virtual memory (or which I had plenty) didn't seem to help...

1 E3-1545M, Smart Card Only, with Type-C, Assembly Base, Mobile Precision 7710
1 Intel Xeon E3-1545M v5 (Quad Core Xeon 2.90GHz, 3.80GHz Turbo, 8MB 45W, w/Iris Pro
Graphics P580)
1 17.3" UltraSharp UHD IGZO(3840x2160) Wide View Anti-Glare LED-backlit with camera & Mic
1 Palmrest With Smart Card Only
1 64GB (4x16G) 2133MHz DDR4 Memory, MPWS
1 1TB M.2 PCIe Solid State Drive, MPWS
1 240W AC Adapter
1 Power Cord for 3-pin Adapter (Australia/New Zealand)
1 6-cell (91Wh) Lithium Ion Polymer Battery with ExpressCharge
1 Intel XEON Processor Label
1 Nvidia Quadro M3000M, 4GB GDDR5
1 Intel Wireless 8260 (802.11ac) + Bluetooth 4.1
1 Intel Wireless 8260AC (No WIDI) Driver
1 Internal Dual Pointing Keyboard (US-English)
1 Keyboard Lattice
1 Dell Developed Recovery Environment
1 System Driver for 7710
1 Dell Applications for Windows 10
1 No RAID
1 Windows 10 Pro (64bit) English
1 No Productivity Software
1 Office MPI Card Not Included
1 No Out-of-Band Systems Management, Mobile Precision 7710
1 Dell Data Protection Security Tools Digital Delivery/NB

All opinions gratefully received!

Ed

 

[JeRuFo]

I would invest most in getting the latest processor and the fastest RAM supported. Virtual memory only helps you so far, once you need it, it will fill up more and more with big batch tasks like that. You want to clear the memory as fast as possible, not just have more of it.
Also consider the cooling. A lot of laptops can keep up with you quite easily, but get really hot under full load and start to throttle back, so a super slim ultrabook might not be for you. If you get the GPU involved in your tasks too, the 240W adapter might be a bottle neck too and cause throttling back.
The screen is obviously a battery hog, but I assume you plug it in most of the time when you do crazy stuff?

 

[voidshatter]

RAM capacity is very important - if you don't have sufficient free RAM available then you'd have to do the stacking with divide and conquer.

Depending on your workflow: if you need to use Photoshop for alignment/stacking then single-thread performance of the CPU is important, but with dedicated software like PixInsight, in that case multi-thread performance of the CPU is important.

 

[RobbieAB]

I wonder if any of you have any opinions on the following laptop spec. and how it will perform with Medium Format files. In particular, I am a mad lunatic with star trail images, sometimes stacking 2,000 16-bit TIFFs. My old Mac Pro just about coped with this once I upgraded the RAM to 32gb. Virtual memory (or which I had plenty) didn't seem to help...

Things which jump out at me...

You used to use a Mac Pro, you are moving to Windows 10. Are you sure you actually want to make this jump?

That is a fairly pricey, heavy, laptop: Do you actually need to be able to take your processing power with you? Would you be better served with a cheap portable laptop and a high end desktop? I would expect to be able to put together a desktop that would blow that laptop away for a fraction of the price.

What software do you use? Is NVidia graphics the right choice? (e.g. Capture One recommends AMD GPUs for openCL support)

Personally, I am not a fan of 17" monster laptops as I don't find them particularly portable, and I feel the compromises elsewhere in design to make it semi-portable aren't worth the gains.

 

[Paul2660]

Hi Ed, one other thing to consider, is just go 8 bit, it's night and the 16 bit extra IMO is not worth the huge amount of processing time required. You could try it sometime and see what you thing. Net to me is on a PC, you are printing in 8 bit anyway and the web is still mostly 8 bit sRGB.

I used to work everything in 16 bit but stopped about a year ago. The hard crunch as you know is the creation of the smart object, and in 8 bit the time is like 1/4 to 1/8 to process the same number of files.

Just a thought.

Paul Caldwell

BTW, love your work.

 

[Ed Hurst]

Thank you so much, everyone, for your considered views. It's all extremely helpful.

This is not something I am purchasing, right now, but have an option on using. So it's more a matter of finding out whether you think it will work well for my own, particular (and mad) purposes! I will update once I have some experience with it.

You guys are wonderful,

Ed

 

[RobbieAB]

In that case, yeah, I think the biggest issue is going to be size, weight, and the Windows 10 / Mac OS X issue. As far as capabilities go, it should be more than capable compared with the Mac Pro.

 

[Ed Hurst]

In that case, yeah, I think the biggest issue is going to be size, weight, and the Windows 10 / Mac OS X issue. As far as capabilities go, it should be more than capable compared with the Mac Pro.

When you refer to the Windows / OSX issue, are you referring to the ability of the Windows machine to read Mac hard drives? If so, I have a software solution to that that seems to work pretty smoothly.

 

[Satrycon]

HFS explorer for windows will read any mac os disk/drive..its free.


your spec looks good, i would go with HP not dell, but that varies country to country.


if you use LR a quadro GPU is better ideally with 4gb vram or GTX Titan, but openCL is better for certain apps

high speed ram, no dreamcolor calibrated display ? or would you use an external monitor ?

use an SSD for your OS drive, and 10,000RPM raid for all the images.. i would use a 2TB SSD for the images only if i have a reliable LTO type backup

When you refer to the Windows / OSX issue, are you referring to the ability of the Windows machine to read Mac hard drives? If so, I have a software solution to that that seems to work pretty smoothly.

 

[RobbieAB]

When you refer to the Windows / OSX issue, are you referring to the ability of the Windows machine to read Mac hard drives? If so, I have a software solution to that that seems to work pretty smoothly.

I was actually referring to the religious fervour discussion of the merits of the two operating systems often causes.

Honestly, if it's a machine you are borrowing, try it and see how you like it. As far as computing power is concerned, it should be more than capable of dealing with anything you throw at it I suspect.

I know such a machine wouldn't be something I would want to use, even "free", because I detest the 17" laptop form factor. That is my personal opinion though.

 

[Ed Hurst]

I was actually referring to the religious fervour discussion of the merits of the two operating systems often causes.

Honestly, if it's a machine you are borrowing, try it and see how you like it. As far as computing power is concerned, it should be more than capable of dealing with anything you throw at it I suspect.

I know such a machine wouldn't be something I would want to use, even "free", because I detest the 17" laptop form factor. That is my personal opinion though.

The religious fervour aspect I take no notice of - as long as it works, I don't care. :clap:

As for form factor, I take your point, but I guess when working at my desk, it can sit under the desk and be plugged into my monitor anyway...

 

[MrSmith]

i’m not adept at reading pc specs but i see you have a decent video card, SSD, processor etc but where/what are your fast external in and out like thunderbolt 3? being able to move stuff around or have external cards is a must for working on large files (i use a working/scratch disk over thunderbolt with my MacBook) if i have a lot of files to process i have them written to an external ssd instead of the drive that is doing the number crunching, speeds things up a lot.
USB-c/thunderbolt 3 is the future whether you like it or not.

 

[Ed Hurst]

i’m not adept at reading pc specs but i see you have a decent video card, SSD, processor etc but where/what are your fast external in and out like thunderbolt 3? being able to move stuff around or have external cards is a must for working on large files (i use a working/scratch disk over thunderbolt with my MacBook) if i have a lot of files to process i have them written to an external ssd instead of the drive that is doing the number crunching, speeds things up a lot.
USB-c/thunderbolt 3 is the future whether you like it or not.

Thanks for that, mate. The laptop is equipped with Thunderbolt 3.