New PC for Labview applications

[SSTBRG]

Hi,

Wanted to ask, from your experience, what would be the CPU choice to go if we want to buy new hardware for our lab, where we mainly work with Labview-based GUIs (lots of waveforms, FFT and data acquisition). We also incorporate video encoding/decoding and Matlab scripts which are not too computation-heavy.

I am thinking about i7 6700k, but we can afford Xeons too, I'm just thinking that we might benefit from higher clock rates of the i7, plus it's cheaper.

Suggestions?

[Blokk]

i7 is good obviously, but you could even go with a i5. With most of the operations I would not think you could see any difference. What can make a huge difference, is to deal with the usual bottleneck: hard drive. Get a good quality one, usually what I do when we purchase a new laptop for example, I remove the HDD and use it as a secondary storage (in the DVD bay or externally), and I buy a high performance SSD.

If you want to do lots of video encoding, etc, also get a good video card (I was very happy for years with a Dell Precision laptop, with double video-chips: an integrated one, and a dedicated card for high demand tasks, also played a bit with GPU parallel computation, very nice for FFT, etc...).

[JÞB]

From a "LabVIEW" point of view, its all in the "Clone Pool"

Do you have any asynchronous vi's with needed dataspaces? Beyond that question lies a rabbit hole of well documented functionallity.  #cores=AutoGeneratedNumber of pre-allocated "Clones.(pre-allocated dataspaces)"  For most applications this is a moot point.  

If you have been baffled by this post, Let the OS do its thing and, get the cheaper uP.  If you haven't, discussion is open!

Or, in other words, grab the i7s unless you REALLY need a Xeon.  AND post back why you needed the Si.  LabVIEW is fairly "agnostic" to the Si and OS but, I have heard of exceptions.

[SSTBRG]

Well our applications consist mostly of large amounts of waveforms, and few calculations (FFT) behind them.

I think that we will benefit from the 4GHz x 4 cores we will get on the i7.

The Xeon will probably just result in a more expensive system with little (if any) performance gain.

Jeff, we don't really need async. VI's, and if we do use them, it is usually some Matlab process. I don't see our application using more than several processes at once.