LET’S MAKE ONE THING CLEAR: We’re not scientists. We’re just slotting things into motherboards and praying it works, then writing funny words about it. We leave unraveling the mysteries of the universe to those smarter and better trained than us.
But we are pretty darn good at building PCs, and we’ve had requests from the more scientifically minded of our readership for a tutorial on how to build a powerful home PC designed to work on data analysis, statistical modelling, and any other scientific endeavor. With lockdowns in effect, many of us learned to work from home, which is fine and dandy if you’re a writer but a problem if you need access to a lab. Those among you with a need to process huge datasets asked for a machine that could do that work from the comfort of your study, and here’s our answer.
It’s going to be expensive! We need two key things here: A truckload of RAM, and a high-end processor with as many cores as we can muster. This will enable our system to handle millions of points of data, making it capable of performing heavy-duty tasks such as training deep-learning models on consumer data, or analyzing massive amounts of data.
Graphics are an interesting point of debate when it comes to data science systems. You need to know exactly what sort of programs you’re going to be using on the machine—if you’re running visualization or 3D-rendering software, a more powerful GPU is a must. If you need a system to just perform thousands of complex mathematical calculations, the GPU becomes less important. We’ll be using a relatively high-end graphics card in this build, but our main focus is the CPU and memory.
This story is from the October 2020 edition of Maximum PC.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber ? Sign In
This story is from the October 2020 edition of Maximum PC.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
Already a subscriber? Sign In
2TB Crucial T500 M.2 PCle 4.0 SSD
The best budget 4.0 drive?
Hyte Y40
Traditional design meets Hyte
Lenovo Legion Go
A handheld gaming PC, just on a larger scale
Dough Spectrum One
As stunning as Dough's original glossy display
AMD Ryzen 7 8700G
1080p gaming with integrated graphics? Hell, yes
AMD Radeon RX 7600 XT
As cost-effective as an RTX 4080 Super
MSI GeForce RTX 4070 Ti Super 16G Ventus 3X
Iterative change and 4K dominance
STATE OF THE PC INTEGRATED GRAPHICS
Can you get by without a dedicated GPU?
Nvidia GeForce RTX 4080 Super
LONG AGO, before the reign of the Supers, there was a graphics card. It was bold, gauche, and built with the blood of a Titan, with gaming in mind. Its heart was near identical to the goliath it was born from, yet it lacked the memory, spirit, absolute architectural majesty, and subsequent price tag of its Titanic kin.
THE ULTIMATE PC BUILD GUIDE
Strap in as we divulge 20 more tips on how to become the next master PC builder