Hello, I am going to purchase an i9 processor desktop with windows 10 for performing ephys experiments. I will use psychophysics toolbox for visual stimulation. According to the specifications given for psychtoolbox I have prepared the following configurations (given below) which needs to be assembled.
Can anyone guide me if these are fine or I should go with a dell/hp all in one desktop. and what would be the best graphics card to be used with windows 10. Any help will be highly appreciated.
Intel Core i9 12900 (16 Core, 24 Threads, Up to 5.1 GHz)
Z690 Chipset Motherboard With WIFI
2x 16GB DDR4 3600MHz (32GB)
NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX 3060 12GB
512GB Ant Esports NVMe m.2 SSD
1 TB WD Blue/Seagate Barracuda SATA HDD 7200
360MM AIO CPU Liquid Cooler
750Watt Power Supply
MID Tower Case
Genuine Microsoft Windows 10 Home 64-Bit
Usual advice applies wrt. operating system and graphics card, as described on our homepages System requirements section:
If you need high reliability, precise visual presentation timing precision, especially on multi-display setups, consider switching to Linux as operating system for your stimulation computer (Ubuntu 22.04.1-LTS recommended atm.) if that doesn’t clash with some other requirements of your ephys setup.
If you do that, or if you want at least the option of switching later, get a modern AMD graphics card, a much better choice (unless you’d need CUDA compute, a NVidia proprietary technology). Technically, on a pure Linux setup, even the processor built-in Intel onboard graphics might be enough, depending on performance and display requirements, something not doable on Windows.
If you don’t care about (even the option of) Linux, then it doesn’t matter if you choose AMD or NVidia, both will either work or not and there isn’t much one could do to fix that in case things don’t work for you. Windows 11 would be probably a better choice due to Intel Thread director support for Intel Alderlake processors, but PTB isn’t officially supported or tested on Win11 yet, so may or may not work ok’ish.
For any further advice from myself: help PsychPaidSupportAndServices. Any serious lab should have a paid support membership anyway if you care about your research software. If you partake in our currently running user survey, mentioned at the top of this forum, it even comes with a small discount.
Best,
-mario
Thanks for all the information. I will go with windows as I am not familiar working in a Linux. I would need another piece of advice,
does it matter in windows (10) if I have a PC with AMD ryzen graphics card or an NVIDIA Ge force RTX 400 series as I am not sure if they would affect the timing precision on multi display setups.
Good luck, especially if precise timing is required on MS-Windows multi-display. Familiarizing with Linux - it is not that difficult anymore nowadays, as many of your colleagues could confirm - might be faster than trying to coerce Windows multi-display into something robust and usable. Assuming you don’t have to use some ephys related interface software that only works on Windows, that is. But whatever you like.
I don’t know what RTX 400 is? But AMD Ryzen graphics is a builtin graphics chip of AMD processors, different from the setup you spec’ed at the beginning. Onboard graphics has lower absolute performance than a discrete AMD or NVidia card, but for many visual stimulation scenarios that is not really a showstopper. Timing problems are more often caused by bad operating system choice and setup, without knowing more about your specific needs for your paradigms, I’m inclined to say it doesn’t matter, with each, things may or may not work, mostly due to Windows OS deficiencies or driver bugs. The AMD Ryzen onboard graphics would be the better choice for a later switch to Linux though…
Anyway this is already way more free advice from myself than appropriate, as long as you don’t have a paid support membership, so my free contributions to this topic end here.
-mario