[Digikam-users] Hardware Advice Please

[Carl McGrath]

A great question, I don't have answers but do have a few observations.
- I recently bought a new laptop with quad i7 @2.3 GHZ. It is perhaps 
10% faster than my deskto Quad AMD APU at 2.9GHZ on doing a "Local 
Contrast" exercise in the Digikam editor, which to me is the most CPU 
intensive activity I notice.
- Both of these systems are very usable for Digikam, but more speed is 
always better.
- Digikam seems to run (and max out, occiassionally) on one core. I 
believe I have seen Guiles comment that multicore parallel processing is 
being worked on. In any case, for a given CPU Power dissipation, the 
fewer the cores the better, I believe. More zip per core, until 
multicore is ready.
--If you decide to go with a high power CPU (>100W), which will for sure 
provide better performance, but want to keep it quiet, I highly 
recommend you invest in a water cooling system (Slug on CPU piped to 
radiator/fan on the back of the case). I have been very pleased with one 
I have on an older 125W CPU. They are in the range of $80-$100.
- From what I have seen, the Facial Recognition feature seems to be a 
big resource user. If you plan to use it, that is probably the best 
benchmark to focus on.
--An interesting question for the developers might be - Will facial 
recognition in the future be able to uilize the GPU APIs and pixel 
engines? If so, that might make a high performance (gaming) Graphics 
sub-system worthwhile. Otherwise, I doubt graphics performance would 
make a lot of difference for still image processing. All this might be 
dependent on your OS - I run openSUSE Linux. The Nvidia APIs (and 
drivers) seeem more advanced here in this area.

A great question, I look forward to inputs from others, particularly on 
good ways to benchmark systems with Digikam in mind.


On 11/03/2013 02:04 PM, Mick Sulley wrote:
> I am about to build a new desktop PC.  I think the most demanding task 
> will be DigiKam and I would welcome advice on components.
> I have decided to go with Intel i7 processor, not decided which model 
> yet.  The thing I am struggling with is the graphics card, they range 
> from very cheap to ridiculously expensive and I really have no idea  
> how the quality of the graphics card will affect the performance when 
> running DigiKam.  It will be running Debian.
>
> Any thoughts, experiences or advice would be most welcome.
>
> Thanks
> Mick
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