[Leica] New Build Q4 2022

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Geoffrey
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[Leica] New Build Q4 2022

Post by Geoffrey »

Hello!

First - this is an amazing place, and I have no idea how it's escaped my lurking for so long.

I'm planning to build a new workstation for Leica's Cyclone 360 and 3DR. We handle our BIM work on other PCs due to work bandwidth. I will likely have to build three of these stations, and I want to ensure I get it right the first time through. I'm not an expert at building PCs and would appreciate any feedback to help optimize the setup.

The build: https://pcpartpicker.com/list/JCCnKp

Reading through some of the posts here, there appears to be some preference towards Intel processes, Nvidia graphics cards (which I'll be using) and Windows 10. Are the gains of these products drastic over AMD and Windows 11?

The budget is whatever it needs to be - time is our most valuable commodity.

Thank you in advance!
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Re: [Leica] New Build Q4 2022

Post by badam »

Hello,

Win 11 forget it for now at least.

For Register 360:

Cpu: it does not matter at all you can buy intel or amd. However who really is on the edge so can save 1-2 sec then focus on single core performance instead of multicore. If you are fine with imports during out of workhours then you can buy even a ryzen 5. In the daily work you won't notice a thing.

Ram: Keep in mind for import the almost minimum is 64gb (with hdr images). You would just risk crashed imports with 32gb ram. If you can afford then i'd buy 128 or more ram. Even with 64 gb ram i would just use single threaded imports. We had issues with balanced imports overallocate the memory so it crashes.

Gpu: rtx3090 is totally unnecessary it won't be used at all. If you want some gpu buy something cheap. If you want to use other softwares which requires that then fine. (I think 3dr also uses the same pointcloud render engine)

Storage you can get any decent ssd, but size is critical. You need temp space at least 3 times as your project size. So it depends on what kind of ptojects you are going to do. With 2tb ssd you would be good for about 1000-1500 setup (rtc360 low res with hdr images). You need to have some archival storage preferably NAS.

We only use reg 360. So we built this machine:
Ryzen 5600g without dedicated gpu and 64gb of ram, ssd 500gb. (Projects stored on NAS for safety and for project mobility).
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Re: [Leica] New Build Q4 2022

Post by smacl »

I tend to agree with Adam above. My choice for a workhorse PC would be the 5950 rather than the 7950 which is still very new and looks to be very power hungry, see this thread for more discussion. I'd also go 128gb RAM and mid-range rather than high end card until such time as you need it.
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Re: [Leica] New Build Q4 2022

Post by Geoffrey »

Thank you very much for sharing your insight, Adam and Shane.

We aren't operating at the scale of anything outside 300+ setups, we're firmly in the AEC sector. Once we process, everything is moved to our NAS. I need to develop a different strategy for storage across long-term projects, but that's a thread for another day.

I'll roll back to Windows 10, beef up the RAM to 128GB, and downsize the graphics card. The CPU is to be determined after I have a chance to read through the thread shared by Shane.

Until then, the revised build: https://ca.pcpartpicker.com/list/TdncPX
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Re: [Leica] New Build Q4 2022

Post by badam »

Geoffrey wrote: Sat Nov 12, 2022 9:19 pm Thank you very much for sharing your insight, Adam and Shane.

We aren't operating at the scale of anything outside 300+ setups, we're firmly in the AEC sector. Once we process, everything is moved to our NAS. I need to develop a different strategy for storage across long-term projects, but that's a thread for another day.

I'll roll back to Windows 10, beef up the RAM to 128GB, and downsize the graphics card. The CPU is to be determined after I have a chance to read through the thread shared by Shane.

Until then, the revised build: https://ca.pcpartpicker.com/list/TdncPX

Reg360 project handling/moving is an another rabbit hole, official answear is slow (archive, reconnect, etc...). There are few topics about this, and i wrote down several topic what we do.

Here is one of the topic
viewtopic.php?p=68451#p68451

I'd just add that, reg360 only uses lot of ram during import. And only just when you import in multisetup mode and you have hdr imagery in the imported setup. So it depends on what will be your case, but maybe 64 would be enough. Another thing is that if you import setups in safe mode (i'd suggest you do it like that) reg 360 will only use about 35-40gb ram (still multithreaded but not imports multiple setup simultaneously) in this case the 16core won't be utilized nor the 128gb ram. So maybe consider a main machine and two lower spec. 128 gb will be good for post processing the clouds.

As for 3dr i don't have thorough experience with it.
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Re: [Leica] New Build Q4 2022

Post by Kruse »

Geoffrey wrote: Sat Nov 12, 2022 9:19 pm Thank you very much for sharing your insight, Adam and Shane.

We aren't operating at the scale of anything outside 300+ setups, we're firmly in the AEC sector. Once we process, everything is moved to our NAS. I need to develop a different strategy for storage across long-term projects, but that's a thread for another day.

I'll roll back to Windows 10, beef up the RAM to 128GB, and downsize the graphics card. The CPU is to be determined after I have a chance to read through the thread shared by Shane.

Until then, the revised build: https://ca.pcpartpicker.com/list/TdncPX
Looking at your PC Part Picker list, the only thing I'd question is the 970 Pro SSD and suggest bumping that up to the 980 Pro like the rest of them. Not sure if you selected that one due to limits on the mother board or just to save a bit of money, but if using that drive as a part of the Register 360 workflow, might as well have the fastest SSD's for that operation. Since I'm processing daily datasets within R360, I think 128GB of RAM is a necessary to keep Register 360 out of the safe mode and importing the data as fast as possible. More RAM is always better for extra headroom, especially if you let Register 360 process in the background while you use the computer for other workflows and software.

I'll be upgrading my own PC here at the end of the year as well and I use Register 360 daily with a bit of Cyclone 3DR on the side. While its true the rendering within the softwares primarily use CPU when flying through the point cloud and processing datasets, the GPU can have a decent impact within 3DR for a couple workflows. With the auto classification within 3DR, it will greatly benefit from a better GPU and having more CUDA cores. I'm running a 3090 on my current machine and it works great for those operations having that horsepower when it uses the AI to auto classifiy point clouds (just one example where a GPU greatly affects performance). If these machines will be solely used for Processing laser scan data, then yeah, it might be a bit overkill for the GPU side of things, but at least it doesn't bottleneck you in other operations/software having a better GPU. Buy the best GPU your budget allows.

As for the CPU, I'd recommend a system built off the 13900k as it's scoring a fair amount higher on the Cinebench R23 scores for single thread compared to the 7950X and since some many operations between Reg 360 and 3DR rely on single threaded operations, that could be a decent improvement and cut down on processing times. In my testing of various computers, the Cinebench R23 scores are very good indicators of import and processing performance with Register 360. Multithreaded workloads and the multithread Cinebench r23 scores show them being neck and neck so I wouldn't be too worried about that. When I was comparing my current 3970x Threadripper computer against one built off the 12900K, the 12900K was almost twice as fast to import the exact same dataset even though the 3970X had a far greater multithreaded score. The single threaded performance determines to a much greater weight the overall import and processing times, especially when you process the HDR imagery.

I'm not totally sure of the Gen 5 SSD compatibility with the 13900k, but I know the 7950x will be fully able to use the nearly double the speeds they offer down the road when they start shipping end of this year or early next. It might be something to consider, but I don't think the faster SSD's will make too much difference with the speed of import/export as it's far more reliant on the CPU and single core speeds.

My new desktop will be based off the 13900K, 4090 GPU, 128GB DDR5 RAM, 3 seperate 2TB or 4TB NVMe drives, with 20 TB of HDD for local archiving. We're not allowed to build our own PC due to our IT policies, so we procure these high performance desktops through Puget Systems in the US. Just a few notes and my 2 cents from all my testing and real world use this last 1.5 years :lol: . I'm happy to discuss more if you had any kind of questions about my past testing with other custom built computers and pre-built ones through Dell, HP and Lenovo.

EDIT: It looks like the Samsung 990 Pros are available which while they don't offer big leap in the max speeds possible, the IOPS are nearly double which means they can read/write the smaller files much faster. Might result in better import/export times considering all the RAW scan imagery files are usually less than 1MB. Just thought it was worth mentioning.
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Re: [Leica] New Build Q4 2022

Post by Resolutionz »

Hello Kruse!

I have read your post with great interest while I am looking for a new rig myself..... Let's start off to say I am not a IT wizard! I mainly use Scene software for registration of scans, but I think the inner workings and use of hardware for Scene and Cyclone are comparable. Currently I am looking into the Riegl RIEGL VZ-600i to replace my good old Faro scanner and the Riegl software seems to make use of all the RAM you can throw at it. I have done a lot of research as to what is coming in the next few months in terms of hardware and I have decided to wait. Apparently AMD is coming with a 7950x3D which should be much more powerful than the current 7950X. Besides that, in Q1 2023 there will be releases of the Gen5 PCIe SSD's. (I also do a lot of Photoshop - Lightroom - DaVinci work with huge High Res 360 images which would benefit from the read/write speed increase). Intel won't release any substantial improvements until 3rd or 4th quarter of 2023 in their CPU range (Z 4 generation) from what I read and that's a too long wait for me. I know a decent GPU will help in some parts of the process with pointclouds, but isn't your choice of a 4090 a bit of an overkill in terms of money vs value? I would really like to know your thought on that decision making process. Obviously I have been looking into the i9-13900K as well, but as it seems that it's at it's end of the life cycle I tend to go for the 7950x3D if the specs are as good as they promise..... Opposite to you I am allowed to built my own rig so if you leave your restrictions out of the equation, what would be your "dream" rig that will hopefully get you through the next 5 years or so......????
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Re: [Leica] New Build Q4 2022

Post by landmeterbeuckx »

Resolutionz wrote: Sat Nov 26, 2022 3:59 pm Hello Kruse!

I have read your post with great interest while I am looking for a new rig myself..... Let's start off to say I am not a IT wizard! I mainly use Scene software for registration of scans, but I think the inner workings and use of hardware for Scene and Cyclone are comparable. Currently I am looking into the Riegl RIEGL VZ-600i to replace my good old Faro scanner and the Riegl software seems to make use of all the RAM you can throw at it. I have done a lot of research as to what is coming in the next few months in terms of hardware and I have decided to wait. Apparently AMD is coming with a 7950x3D which should be much more powerful than the current 7950X. Besides that, in Q1 2023 there will be releases of the Gen5 PCIe SSD's. (I also do a lot of Photoshop - Lightroom - DaVinci work with huge High Res 360 images which would benefit from the read/write speed increase). Intel won't release any substantial improvements until 3rd or 4th quarter of 2023 in their CPU range (Z 4 generation) from what I read and that's a too long wait for me. I know a decent GPU will help in some parts of the process with pointclouds, but isn't your choice of a 4090 a bit of an overkill in terms of money vs value? I would really like to know your thought on that decision making process. Obviously I have been looking into the i9-13900K as well, but as it seems that it's at it's end of the life cycle I tend to go for the 7950x3D if the specs are as good as they promise..... Opposite to you I am allowed to built my own rig so if you leave your restrictions out of the equation, what would be your "dream" rig that will hopefully get you through the next 5 years or so......????
I run Riegl Riscan software on a Intel i9-1940x 3.31Ghz. Rig is 2 years old
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Runs fine. No problems with this setup.
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Re: [Leica] New Build Q4 2022

Post by Kruse »

Resolutionz wrote: Sat Nov 26, 2022 3:59 pm Hello Kruse!

I have read your post with great interest while I am looking for a new rig myself..... Let's start off to say I am not a IT wizard! I mainly use Scene software for registration of scans, but I think the inner workings and use of hardware for Scene and Cyclone are comparable. Currently I am looking into the Riegl RIEGL VZ-600i to replace my good old Faro scanner and the Riegl software seems to make use of all the RAM you can throw at it. I have done a lot of research as to what is coming in the next few months in terms of hardware and I have decided to wait. Apparently AMD is coming with a 7950x3D which should be much more powerful than the current 7950X. Besides that, in Q1 2023 there will be releases of the Gen5 PCIe SSD's. (I also do a lot of Photoshop - Lightroom - DaVinci work with huge High Res 360 images which would benefit from the read/write speed increase). Intel won't release any substantial improvements until 3rd or 4th quarter of 2023 in their CPU range (Z 4 generation) from what I read and that's a too long wait for me. I know a decent GPU will help in some parts of the process with pointclouds, but isn't your choice of a 4090 a bit of an overkill in terms of money vs value? I would really like to know your thought on that decision making process. Obviously I have been looking into the i9-13900K as well, but as it seems that it's at it's end of the life cycle I tend to go for the 7950x3D if the specs are as good as they promise..... Opposite to you I am allowed to built my own rig so if you leave your restrictions out of the equation, what would be your "dream" rig that will hopefully get you through the next 5 years or so......????
A few things to preface... I have never touched anything from Riegl, so I can't speak to the absolute best hardware for that platform. Just the Leica stuff, :lol: Lieven will probably be one of the best resources on here for what's the best hardware for their software/hardware. I also use the Adobe suite of software daily (Primarily Lightroom, Photoshop, Premiere Pro, Encoder, and After Effects) as well as several Autodesk applications (Revit, Civil 3D, Navisworks, and a little bit of 3DS MAX).

While I'm no IT expert either, I had the luxery in the past to get my hands on several different computers to test out what worked best for my Leica software. If you have time to wait it out before purchasing, that's never a bad thing, especially with some big changes coming with the Gen 5 NVMe's and the 7950X3D. By the time those come out, there will be many new comparisons to review to try and vet out what is the best bang for the buck for your scanning workflow and computer needs. If you couldn't wait for the Gen 5 NVMe's to release or if they weren't able to be fully utilized due to either CPU or Motherboard choice, Samsung did recently release the 990 Pro's. While they are only vailable up to 2TB ones at the moment (4TB versions in early 23), they have nearly double the IOPS if I remember correctly which will also help with all software when they have to read/write lots of small files as fast as possible. That would definitely help with the Register 360 workflows. It will be very interesting to see how the 990's stack up against the Gen 5 SSD's when they release.

While the 4090 is definitely overkill for Register 360 and is really just a "nice to have" GPU for 3DR, The primary reason I always spec the most powerful GPU is for all the other software I use daily from Autodesk's Revit, CAD, Navisworks, 3DS MAX, etc. and to all the Adobe software suite such as Lightroom, Photoshop, Premiere Pro, After Effects, and Encoder. I typically don't use the A series NVidia cards, but we do have a few workstations with those installed where they are doing 3DS MAX renderings day in and day out so they find them a bit more reliable for longer renders. In their testing with 3DS MAX, the 3090 would rendering just as fast as the A6000, and in some cases faster. The A6000 just provides a bit more flexibility and reliability with its 48GB of VRAM.

As for my decision making, I go into more reasoning in this thread below, but long story short... The cost of these computers is merely a drop in the bucket for us on a typical project and it's always worth it upgrading as soon as new hardware is released. This ensure we can always finish the work as fast as possible. TIME IS MONEY!!! :lol: While it's deinitely not the case for most people on this forum, I typically upgrade my laptop and desktop between 1 and 2 years of use (sometimes less than 1 year when big updates come out). One of the benefits when my typical project at the moment is $300+ million USD and some other datacenter projects I'm helping with are $1+ Billion USD.
https://www.laserscanningforum.com/foru ... cl#p102587


For my typical workloads and life expectancy of a computer, a computer built with the 13900K, 4090 GPU, 128GB DDR5 RAM, 3 seperate 2TB or 4TB NVMe drives, with 20 TB of HDD for local archiving is the best thing for my typical use cases.

If I were to build a machine with an intended life span of around 5 years, then picking the right platform/mother board is a lot more critical. You're probably right in that the AM5 socket with the current 7000 series and future series will probably be the better buy at this time. If you're dealing with mission critical data and you need the utmost reliability, then you might want to look into a Threadripper pro build with the sWRX80 socket. That one would also provide future upgrades with new CPU's released, but at the cost of higher upfront costs. While the TR Pro's may not be the absolute fastest for the laser scanner software (due to single core speeds when in single threaded operations), they do offer some other features and might be about the most reliable CPU on the consumer market when paired with A series cards and ECC Memory.

If you want the absolute fastest right now, the 13900K is the way to go at the cost of potentially needing a new motherboard if the socket design changes for the 14 series chips. If you want a more future proof platform to ensure you can upgrade and still have about the fastest possible, the AMD platform is the way to go. Just my 2 cents :D
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