New pc for design work, etc .. laptop or not ??

[Sunset]

This is a good idea. However, while most brokerage houses offer solo traditional 401k plans not all allow solo Roth 401k's.

Might have to phone around, I know Vanguard offered it as I got mine there.

 

[target2019]

By sims I mean simulation runs. I am using LTSpice, and other circuit simulation SW to simulate circuity designs. Some circuits are fairly large, with high node counts, and my laptop bogs down.

This is your support page:
https://www.analog.com/en/design-center/design-tools-and-calculators/ltspice-simulator.html

You may want to check that the installed version is correct for your processor and up-to-date.

Here is a short article by the author with information to speed up the process.
https://www.analog.com/en/technical-articles/ltspice-speed-up-your-simulations.html

Here is a group that supports the software.
https://groups.io/g/LTspice/topic/ltspice_too_slow_or_stuck_on/79130527?p=

 

[USGrant1962]

Might have to phone around, I know Vanguard offered it as I got mine there.

Yes, Vanguard i401(k) includes a Roth option.

 

[Qs Laptop]

Might have to phone around, I know Vanguard offered it as I got mine there.

The bulk of my investments are at Fidelity. They do not have a Roth 401k option. I also have an account at TD Ameritrade. They do offer a Roth 401k plan so I started one with them.

 

[albireo13]

I have optimized my simulation runs and it helps. Still, I want a beefier machine with more than 12GB RAM. With multiple apps open, and multiple windows, my laptop does bog down.

 

[NW-Bound]

Ah, this thread reminded me of the time I did consulting work at home and was able to write off the PCs I bought to do the work. Since then, I hardly used the desktop PCs anymore, and they are now way obsolete.

For his design work, the OP needs lots of CPU power and mucho RAM. Fancy graphics cards for game animation do nothing for him. A laptop is usually limited in the RAM size, though there are some with 32GB.

Modern CPUs are so fast, it's crazy. I just bought a small 14" laptop for portability. It comes with an AMD Ryzen 5 5600U 6-core CPU clocking at 15385 on CPU Mark V10.

The OP's laptop comes with an i7-1065G7, I think. It clocks at 8840 on CPU Mark V10.

Here are some more numbers.

i7-7700: 8910

Ryzen 9 5900x: 39475

 

[Freedom56]

It's not just CPUs that are fast (I have a Ryzen 9 5900X on a HP Omen 30L series) but also modern GPUs are amazing. I have a NVIDIA RTX 3070 TI with great hardware video encoding and decoding speed. My desktop boots up Windows in under 5 seconds. Also the cooling systems for CPUs and GPUs have become significantly better.

 

[target2019]

Pretty sure GPUs play a significant part of the computing, not just the display. For example, GPUs are found in mining rigs.

 

[Sunset]

Ah, this thread reminded me of the time I did consulting work at home and was able to write off the PCs I bought to do the work. Since then, I hardly used the desktop PCs anymore, and they are now way obsolete.

For his design work, the OP needs lots of CPU power and mucho RAM. Fancy graphics cards for game animation do nothing for him. A laptop is usually limited in the RAM size, though there are some with 32GB.

Modern CPUs are so fast, it's crazy. I just bought a small 14" laptop for portability. It comes with an AMD Ryzen 5 5600U 6-core CPU clocking at 15385 on CPU Mark V10.

The OP's laptop comes with an i7-1065G7, I think. It clocks at 8840 on CPU Mark V10.

..

+1


Ram is cheap these days, I'd be looking at a desktop starting with 32 Gig of ram and up-gradable to at least 64 Gig. Make sure the 32 Gig does not fill all the slots, so there is no waste if step up to 64 Gig.



And pick a fast SSD, etc..

 

[jim584672]

I think most of these things are overkill. You might shave a second off a file load or something. Not that having a state of the art system isn't nice, but the cost / reward ratio is hard to justify unless you have a specific use case that really requires it.

 

[NW-Bound]

Pretty sure GPUs play a significant part of the computing, not just the display. For example, GPUs are found in mining rigs.

I think most of these things are overkill. You might shave a second off a file load or something. Not that having a state of the art system isn't nice, but the cost / reward ratio is hard to justify unless you have a specific use case that really requires it.

The OP was talking about running SPICE, an electronic circuit analysis and simulation.

SPICE is a program developed at UC Berkeley in 1973. When I was studying EE then, it was run on a Univac 1100 mainframe.

It's purely number crunching. All CPU and RAM. The program is still in use today, and that tells of its usefulness.

GPUs are used in mining rigs, because they can do repetitive calculation of the SHA-256 cryptography algorithm very fast. I wonder if anyone has adapted a GPU to help with SPICE calculations, or if it even makes sense or is possible, even though there are now GPUs with floating-point capability.


PS. Back in 2000, I wrote a program to crunch through a large database of 100 GB, and that consisted of ZIP'ed files. It took more than 1 week running nonstop to finish with a 600-MHz Intel CPU then. The CPU speed was the bottleneck.

 

[NW-Bound]

OK, people have thought of using GPUs to aid with SPICE calculations. This requires rewriting the software, and the structure of the problem of circuit simulation does not readily lend itself to being solved with a GPU.

See this: https://www.eetimes.eu/gpu-powered-spice-simulator/.

 

[albireo13]

I think most of these things are overkill. You might shave a second off a file load or something. Not that having a state of the art system isn't nice, but the cost / reward ratio is hard to justify unless you have a specific use case that really requires it.

It's more than that. Some sims have run minutes and the machine operation is tied up during that time ... using other windows is choppy and also lags.

File loading is not an issue.

 

[Freedom56]

If you have a fast CPU like the Ryzen 9 5000 series, a slow GPU becomes a system bottleneck and defeats the purpose of having a fast CPU. High performance GPUs are needed for content creation such as 4K and 8K video editing with special effects. Modern video editors take advantage of the hardware encoders and decoders as well as video effects using the GPU and it dramatically offloads the CPU during rendering as well as editing. For still photography, many functions in Photoshop will not even work without GPU acceleration.

 

[Brat]

Buy a second, large, monitor if you are using a laptop.

 

[NW-Bound]

If you have a fast CPU like the Ryzen 9 5000 series, a slow GPU becomes a system bottleneck and defeats the purpose of having a fast CPU. High performance GPUs are needed for content creation such as 4K and 8K video editing with special effects. Modern video editors take advantage of the hardware encoders and decoders as well as video effects using the GPU and it dramatically offloads the CPU during rendering as well as editing. For still photography, many functions in Photoshop will not even work without GPU acceleration.

The OP runs SPICE program which does a lot of calculations. In the end, all those calculations result in simple static graphs that need no fancy hardware for rendering.

Here's another example in aerospace: Monte Carlo simulation of a ballistic missile trajectory. You vary many parameters in making the runs which take a long time, such as variations in the propellant, aero coefficients, weather, wind shear, and what have you.

In the end, all that results boil down to a single number: what is the CEP or circular error probability (dispersion of the terminal impact point)? There's no need for any graphics.

 

[albireo13]

The graphics load is low. I just want hi res, 4k display.
I currently have two 27” monitors and want a third.
Number crunching and RAM are what I mostly need.

 

[Freedom56]

The graphics load is low. I just want hi res, 4k display.
I currently have two 27” monitors and want a third.
Number crunching and RAM are what I mostly need.

Just keep in mind that fast CPUs need fast DDR4, fast M2.SSDs, and reasonably fast GPUs or else you will introduce bottlenecks. You also need efficient cooling especially when you run your CPU at clock speeds of 4.8 GHz or higher. I have been using a 4K monitor for about four years now. On my old desktop (from 2015), I was using the integrated graphics initially but had to add a GPU to accelerate the rendering and update of the display at 4K resolution. It made a big difference even for every day applications like Office. Integrated graphics was fine for 1080P displays and even twin 1080P displays, but struggled rendering 4K resolution. I bought my new PC without the GPU due to availability of GPUs earlier this year and the price gouging that is going on. So I installed an older overclocked GTX-950 on my new Ryzen 9 5900X desktop until I could find an RTX 3070 TI at a reasonable price. The performance was better than my older desktop but nowhere near where it should have been. I benchmarked my new desktop with the GTX-950 and got a percentile score of 73%. When I finally was able to purchase my RTX 3070 TI GPU a few weeks ago, I noticed a remarkable difference in performance and I then benchmarked my desktop again and got a percentile score of 98%.

 

[target2019]

I asked Analog Devices about GPU, and received this answer:

LTspice does not utilize any GPU functionality for simulations, so it will have no impact on simulation speed.

 

[NW-Bound]

^^^ That's what I was trying to say. SPICE program is all CPU. If you want a gaming computer, then a fast GPU is a must for rendering animation. SPICE is all number crunching in double-precision floating-point arithmetic.

Anyway, I found that one can buy a small desktop for less than $800 on Amazon which has the AMD Ryzen 9 4900H. This 8-core CPU clocks at 19,448 on CPU Mark V10.

To get the AMD Ryzen 9 5900X at double the speed of the above (39,475), there are desktops starting at $2,000.

I used to assemble my own PCs, but in today's competitive markets, the saving is small. It's better to buy one ready to go, so you can get back to using it to make money.

I used to spend too much time building my tools, instead of just buy the right off-the-shelf tools and apply them immediately.

 

[catii]

Since you're looking for an engineering workstation, I would start off with this article: https://www.digitalengineering247.com/article/when-to-upgrade-anengineering-workstation/

Are you running your software locally, or in the cloud? You can certainly run Spice on a laptop, but why would you? It makes a lot more sense to run it on a desktop that is easily upgraded, & use the more-expensive laptop for show-&-tell to your boss or your client. 32 GB RAM prices are lots different for the two platforms.

There are a number of potential bottlenecks, keeping in mind that the original SPICE came out in 1973, & has never been optimized for modern hardware, that I've heard of (I'm a former Motorola senior engineer). You can work around that by using Autodesk's version of SPICE that is cloud-based. In any case, load as much as you can into the fastest processor available (probaby your GPU). Then look at Xeon or ThreadRipper CPUs.

 

[albireo13]

Don't use cloud based apps. I prefer running locally. I bought my laptop when I retired as my personal pc. We also have a MAC as the family pc but, I wanted to have a WIN machine around for those cases where I want one. This was all fine and then the engineering gig came along. I thought I could just use my laptop. In general it has served me well but, the limitations annoy me now.

 

[Freedom56]

^^^ That's what I was trying to say. SPICE program is all CPU. If you want a gaming computer, then a fast GPU is a must for rendering animation. SPICE is all number crunching in double-precision floating-point arithmetic.

Anyway, I found that one can buy a small desktop for less than $800 on Amazon which has the AMD Ryzen 9 4900H. This 8-core CPU clocks at 19,448 on CPU Mark V10.

To get the AMD Ryzen 9 5900X at double the speed of the above (39,475), there are desktops starting at $2,000.

I used to assemble my own PCs, but in today's competitive markets, the saving is small. It's better to buy one ready to go, so you can get back to using it to make money.

I used to spend too much time building my tools, instead of just buy the right off-the-shelf tools and apply them immediately.

I got news for you I paid $750 with free shipping for my Ryzen 9 5900X (HP Omen 30L) new with the GPU pulled out. The seller, earlier in the year could sell the RTX 3070 TI GPU for about $1200 or more alone to a crypto currency miner or someone willing to pay inflated prices. I was able to register the PC with HP and it is covered by their warranty for one year. The PC came with 16GB of DDR4 RAM and a 1 TB SSD and I bought 16GB more of HyperX 3733 MHz RAM for $98 and added a second 1 TB M2.SSD for $90 and a 4TB HDD for $70. The RTX 3070 TI cost me $630. My total cost was $1638 (plus tax) for a very high performance workstation versus the $3120 (plus tax) price using HPs PC configurator for the same components. The HP 30L series uses pretty high quality components like a 750 watt platinum power supply and liquid cooling for the CPU. I could have purchased a GTX 1660 super GPU and saved an additional $400.

 

[albireo13]

I think I will look for a decent system ready for upgrades, if needed.
A good CPU ... i7-12700F perhaps. 16GB RAM, upgradable to 32GB.
512GB SSD. Not sure yet about GPU.

 

[Qs Laptop]

I think I will look for a decent system ready for upgrades, if needed.
A good CPU ... i7-12700F perhaps. 16GB RAM, upgradable to 32GB.
512GB SSD. Not sure yet about GPU.

Whichever PC you get be sure you know the space available to put in an aftermarket GPU. You want to be sure you have enough room inside the case in the event you want to go with a high end GPU.