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I would not recommend to buy a notebook to run FreeSurfer. If you want to run many subjects, it takes a lot of time (between 10 and 20 h per subject and processor roughly), so you want many cores and also roughly 2GB of RAM per subject that you are running in parallel. So you want powerful hardware in general.

But whatever CPU and amount of RAM you decide on: it's gonna cost A LOT more if you want it inside a laptop. And the processing power you want for a large study (several hundred subjects) cannot be achieved with any laptop I would say, no matter how much you pay.

In general I would suggest a desktop or workstation PC with 16 GB RAM or more and at least 8 cores. If you have many subjects, you may be better off with 16-24 cores and maybe 32 GB of RAM.

If you want even more details and my personal opinion: a desktop PC with AMDs Threadripper CPU seems like an excellent choice for FreeSurfer these days if you look at bang for the buck. Intel also offers CPUs with many cores, but at a way higher price, and you should not need the extra memory bandwith for FreeSurfer, so in my opinion they are not worth it for this specific task. If you are building a general-purpose server for parallel computing, this may differ.

In case you may at some point in the future want to run other neuroimaging software that works on the GPU (like the eddy correction tool from FSL or whatever): most of these programs are based on CUDA, so if you are getting a graphics card, getting an nVidia card won't hurt.

Tim

(I am not affiliated with any of the mentioned companies, nor with any other hardware company.)

On December 30, 2018 at 9:46 AM mustafa amin noki4gozo@yahoo.com wrote:

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Dear Freesurfer Members,

First I would like to introduce myself my name is Mustafa Amin, and I’m planning to do a study to measure the volume of prefrontal cortex, hippocampus, and ventricle of patients with schizophrenia comparing them with control in Medan Indonesia. I read and saw information that freesurfer is capable in doing the measurement, however I am still not sure about what kind of notebook specification that I need to download and install it. For my knowledge, this is the first study that will be done in Indonesia so every explanation and further information about freesurfer and the notebook will make me very grateful.

I’m thinking to buy an I5 intel core processor, with 8GB RAM, 1 TB HDD, and full HD Nvidia MX130 2G8 specification notebook. If there is anyone in here that can share the minimum requirements of the notebook, it will help me a lot to choose which one to buy. Thank you in advance.

Yours faithfully,

Mustafa M. Amin Consultant Psychiatrist in Biological Psychiatry Department of Psychiatry Faculty of Medicine Universitas Sumatera Utara

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-- Dr. Tim Schäfer Postdoc Computational Neuroimaging Department of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Psychosomatics and Psychotherapy University Hospital Frankfurt, Goethe University Frankfurt am Main, Germany