Page 1 of 1

Computer specification suggestions?

Posted: Wed Jun 21, 2017 9:12 pm
by jrodh
Hi,

I love using my SDRPlay with SDRUNO and SDRConsole. I have been using them on my surface pro with the i7 processor and 16Gb ram. I don't believe the surface has a dedicated graphics card. I find my computer works very hard to process the signal at full 10 Mhz of bandwidth and constantly drops out.

Now, I am investigating a small form factor computer that can satisfactorily process the 10Mhz of bandwidth without a hiccup, but I want to keep the price low... What should I be looking for in specs without going crazy. I'd like it to cost no more than $300 max. Any suggestions? Should I be looking for a dedicated graphics processor that supports CUDA like SDRConsole suggests? I hope to find a PC that I can dedicate to SDR.

Thanks,
Jared

Re: Computer specification suggestions?

Posted: Thu Jun 29, 2017 4:54 pm
by mikeladd
Hi Jared,

A $300 budget for a new off the shelf computer is going to be extremely hard to pull off with a dedicated Nvidia card. You can look into used off lease Lenovo desktops (i5 's and or i7's) and install a EVGA 1050ti.

Re: Computer specification suggestions?

Posted: Thu Jun 29, 2017 7:35 pm
by g1hbe
If you really need to see 10 MHz at a time, then you are certainly going to need a bit of horsepower. For general listening around, I find a couple of MHz (or less) of BW is enough, and my laptop i3 @ 2.4 GHz (with 4 Gigs of ram and onboard graphics) copes well. It actually works flawlessly up to about 6 MHz bw but like I say it's just too much on the screen for me!

Re: Computer specification suggestions?

Posted: Fri Jun 30, 2017 8:03 am
by F1BJB
In fact the annoying dropouts in the sound are not impairing too much the spectrum display.
And displaying a wide range means sharing the dynamic range with many signals that can impair
demodulation of the wanted one even with big computing power.
The main case I miss it is on the 118/136 MHZ air band