Hi, My group is buying a new computer we will use in the Martinos Center. I emailed Paul Raines via help and he gave me some guidelines as to what type I should get, but I still have some questions.
1. HDD speed: How hard disk (I/O speed) intensive is freesurfer? What kind of speed difference will having a RAID make? Would there be a big difference from plain SATA?
2. RAM amount: How much memory does running recon-all for one subject generally require? Is it 0.5-1.5GB? Would 2GB be enough to run two simultaneously or do I need 4GB? Or 6GB? How much RAM does running a group map for functionals need?
3. RAM speed: We are buying DDR400 PC3200 RAM. Should I bother paying more for low-latency timings?
4. Graphics speed: What speed graphics card is good enough for tkmedit and tksurfer? Is a Geforce 6000 series plenty, or does having a 7000 series make any difference?
5. Has anyone tried clustering computers together to spread the processing? Should we look into this for our three P4 1Ghz machines?
Maybe you could add this information to the Machine Requirements wiki pages? https://surfer.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/fswiki/FreeSurferBeginnersGuide https://surfer.nmr.mgh.harvard.edu/fswiki/SystemRequirements
Thanks, Kayle