best budget desktop harware for high performance of matlab

I am currently running matlab on a Intel Pentium 32-bit 2GHz 2GB laptop with Windows XP and Matlab is very slow. I want to get a desktop PC set up to run it and was wondering what people might recommend in terms of hardware. The Mathworks recommendations are somewhat vague beyond highly recommending 64-bit systems. For Matlab applications such as data and signal processing with large datasets, are there any recommendations for how many cores, how much RAM, and how much speed Matlab can effectively utilize? I'm have a tight budget, and would like to invest in a good set of hardware but not overspec. Matlab gurus please share your thoughts!

[J]

Thanks for your help, Thomas!

Answer 1

[Thomas]

'Budget' is a subjective term. Anyways as regards to a fairly cost effective configuration for you desktop I would recommend the following point to keep in mind.

1. If you intend on using the Parallel processing toolbox to speed up application - make sure the processor you have has 12 cores (since the parallel toolbox support 12 workers from R2011b) -Eg AMD opteron 12 core - $1100 ( http://www.amazon.com/AMD-Opteron-Magny-Cours-Processor-OS6172WKTCEGOWOF/dp/B003BYRHLM) or intel hex core i7 (hyper threaded) - $537 ( http://www.buy.com/prod/intel-core-i7-i7-970-3-20-ghz-processor-socket-b-lga-1366-hexa-core-6/216058841.html)

2. Have at least 1Gb/core - (though this depends on your memory footprint for the type of jobs you need to do) -I would recommend at least -16GB RAM - $90 ( http://www.amazon.com/Kingston-Technology-Modules-KHX1600C9D3K4-16GX/dp/B0033BTACM)

3. If you intend to do GPU computation go with a decent GPU such as an NVIDIA CUDA enabled GPU - I would recommend at least 1GB -GPU memory - $425 ( http://www.amazon.com/57Y4479-Quadro-2000-Graphics-Card/dp/B004GV6Q3Y)

This should give you a decent system for less than $2000 which should be reasonable depending on the amount of computation you do.

Finally, it would come to the $ amount budgeted for this desktop.

Hope this helps..

[Walter Roberson]

Note that the parallel toolbox is optional / extra-cost.

[K E]

I know 1-2 GB per core is Matlab's recommended minimum. But does it make sense to go to say 4 GB per core? I am trying to get a sense of "good enough", "great", and "silly" in terms of RAM to buy.