smacl wrote: ↑Wed Sep 26, 2018 8:37 am
That is a seriously nice setup! What point cloud software packages are you currently running on this and where do you find are the processing bottlenecks?
Thank you!
There are over 20 different programs related to point clouds I use or have used on the system, I can give you a full list if you really want them. Pointools, Scene, Cyclone, Premiere, Lightroom, Photoshop, Revit, Maya, Unreal, Unity, Steam, Oculus, Potree, Capturing Reality, AutoCAD, Euclideon's suite, and Handbrake, to name a few, often with many of those open at the same time. The only REAL bottleneck might be the speed of the RAM, as you can get faster now, but faster RAM did not even exist when I built it, nor was it particularly stable until recently. If you have 10 gigabit Ethernet hooked up (it comes out of the box on both the Synology and the Zenith Extreme) you will never run out of storage either, and have no real reason to run spinning disks in the machine.
It suffered from some BSOD issues related to the 960 Pro's firmware for a while, the BSOD's seemed to come around out of the blue and were difficult to diagnose because they were also related to particular versions of Windows that are always being pushed out. So if you build a similar system, make sure you do all driver updates AND firmware updates for ALL your components, and they will play nice with each other. On Win10 you want to leave updates on because of all the security vulnerabilities constantly being found.
The problem with those BSOD's was that memory was unable to dump anywhere (because memory would crash), making it kinda tricky to solve. After they were cleared up, I could not be happier with it. It has been rock solid stable, runs cool, (it's all watercooled, but with factory parts [usually 2x EVGA 1080 Ti FTW 3 Hybrid's, and a NZXT Kraken v2]) and it has a 5+ year warranty on many of the components.
I have had the system run stable for weeks at 98% with 3 GPU's in it when crypto mining would generate a large profit, and it never went over 50 degrees due to the water cooling those cards provided out of the box. I only had it mining at 98% available hashrate because those last 2% were for 1080p streams in the background while I worked from a laptop. It still achieved better hashrates than advertised on any forum I've read, and it was hooked up to 2 4k monitors. It really is remarkable what the system is capable of. I would say if your income is mainly generated from being on the computer, and working as fast as possible means more income for you or your business, it is absolutely worth every penny. I have it paired up with some nice monitors, a good keyboard / mouse, and it is overall a joy to work on. Most of the time, it's running as fast as I can think.
TL:DR:
That gushing aside, it will get maxed out (91-95%) during some particular operations done on an individual scan during the standard workflow in both Scene and ReCap Pro. It will just spike up there for a few seconds, and then the CPU utilization is so low I sometimes question if it's even doing anything.
On truly massive projects, of course, you will eventually run out of RAM, but I normally have it load an entire project into RAM at once, and haven't run into that problem, yet. There is also the factor that some programs just aren't built to run on systems like this, so it may be overkill in some cases