Need help to pick the "best" HW for Pix4D

PIX4Dmapper PIX4Dmapper Questions/Troubleshooting
1

Im about to buy a laptop in order to process data while Im out of my office. I have found 3 different laptops which are within the budget. There are not huge difference between them, but still I want to make sure to pick the “best” one.

It will mainly be used for processing dataset of ~150 images(20 Mpix, ~8MB each)

  • Laptop 1
  • i7, 6700HQ
  • 16GB ram
  • SSD 256 GB (and one free SATA Connection)
  • GeForce GTX 960M, 2 GB.

 

  • Laptop 2
  • i7, 6700HQ
  • 16GB ram
  • SSD 516 GB
  • GeForce GTX 950M, 2 GB.
  • DVD (which I later plan to remove and replace with a SDD/HDD)

 

  • Laptop 3
  • i7, 6700HQ
  • 16GB ram
  • SSD 128 GB + 1TB HDD 5400rpm
  • GeForce GTX 960M, 4 GB.

They all have IPS screens, running on Win10 and costs exactly the same. Im leaning towards laptop 3. And later on replace the 128 SSD with a 256 or 512. But maybe 128GB SSD will be sufficent to run Win + Pix4D and process the datasets. Any recommendations before I press that “Buy”-button?

2

Hello Anders,

Indeed, the 3rd laptop is the best one for processing in Pix4Dmapper. All suggested options have the same CPU, so this is not a criterion based on which you can choose. The amount of RAM is also the same between the options; also, 16 GB of RAM is enough for processing projects of 150 images of 10 Mpixels.

The points that can make a difference in your options is the hard disc and the GPU. An SSD hard disc can decrease processing time, especially for step 3, because loading and writing files in the disc are faster that with an HDD. If you have both an SSD and an HDD drive, you can process in the SSD (saving the initial images and the results folder in the SSD) and then move the project to the HDD, since the SSD is not very big.

Regarding the GPU, the GeForce GTX 960M has the same number of CUDA cores as the GeForce GTX 950M, but it has 4 GB of RAM instead of 2 GB, so it can load more (and process) more images at the same time. GPU processing is implemented during step 1 (and less during step 2) and it can reduce processing time.

In a nutshell, we would recommend you Laptop 3 for processing in Pix4Dmapper. 

Best regards,