"ideal" machine for running altium. - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / general

author: mrpackethead
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 09, 2014, 12:26:57 am
content: Hi,Just wondering what folks would consider "ideal" hardware for running atrium 14 on? Dell are having a sale on, ( so are the others ) and i need to buy a decent windows based workstation for not just Altium but some other cad software as well.

author: free_electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 09, 2014, 12:59:59 am
content: I run it on a 3 year old i5-750 quad core at 2.66GHz. windows 7-32 bit with 4 gig ram on an intel dp55 motherboard.Works perfectly fine.the graphics card is VERY important ! that is where the speed comes from. Altium uses directX HEAVILY. they have a list of tested graphics cards.dual monitors is mandatory ! i use LA2405WG monitors from HP 1920x1200 (not 1080 but 1200 vertical. you can never have enough real estate)and get that 3d navigator.

author: DerekG
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: June 09, 2014, 01:30:10 am
content: Quote from: free_electron on June 09, 2014, 12:59:59 amI travel a lot & work out of several offices. I use a 4 year old Toshiba Satellite Pro L500 laptop - Windows 7 Pro 32 bit with 4GB (only 3GB is accessible) Intel i5 M520 @ 2.4GHz. Video card is an ATI Mobility Radeon HD4650 with 1024MB of dedicated memory.I plug in a keyboard & monitor (LG W2442PA 1920 x 1200dpi ) at each location.Works fine, very stable. You will just likely need a bit more processing power when laying out full panels or when having a half dozen pcbs of reasonable size open at the same time.Just as the video card is very important, so too is using an Intel processor as Altium ONLY test using Intel. There is a recent thread on eevBlog where users are complaining about Altium crashing. I can't say I remember the last time Altium crashed on me & I do wonder how many of these others users are not running an Intel main processor or a reasonable video card.

author: Mechatrommer
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 09, 2014, 07:48:43 am
content: Quote from: mrpackethead on June 09, 2014, 12:26:57 amif you want to buy a PC, buy the latest you can afford. highest core or cpu speed, the best MB, and dont forget the best GPU you can afford. if you are thinking into audio composing buy good audio card and hi-fi. if you are like dave, another good mic and camcorder. etc. you follow this rule you are not just satisfying "atrium", but everything else including your investment in long run and piss poor applications, java and net and viruses that try to deplete all your resources. my rule is quite stringent than this. buy new system with 2X capability than my old system or the old system is broken, i havent met the criteria for 6 years now. my quad 2.66ghz 3gb ram works fine except maybe for piss poor applications that i will always tend to uninstall (even with new system i think). PC movement has been stagnant for sometime the way i see it.

author: free_electron
author_rank: Super Contributor
timestamp: June 09, 2014, 08:45:01 am
content: Quote from: DerekG on June 09, 2014, 01:30:10 amif you go for a laptop you need to pick one that has a dedicated graphics card with its own memory (not shared memory and not 'embedded intel grpahics' )Altium is not that picky on CPU , the graphics card is key.

author: marshallh
author_rank: Unknown
timestamp: June 10, 2014, 01:23:13 am
content: At home i run Altium with a 7870 and 5850 ATI cards. They are slightly older high-mid-range cards.Since Altium is 32bit it's not going to be using any morethan 3gb, but make sure you have enough system ram... 8gb should do it.But for the future, who knows.My i7 laptop with integrated graphics has the same or more CPU as my desktop, but runs barely usably, due to the graphics shortcoming