Hi Akiko,
> There are three choices;
>
> 1. Buy 2 DEC (Compaq) Alpha XP1000 with 1GB RAM
> 2. Buy 1 DEC Alpha XP1000 and 2 or 3 WindowNT (pentinum III 800MHz, dual
> CPU, 1GB RAM)
> 3. Buy 4 or 5 Window NT
>
> Could you give us some advise?
It depends most on how you want to use the lab and to a lesser extent,
on the equipment you already have available. I suspect you'll find that
two XP1000's are faster than 5 NTs in sheer processing power but
that probably requires equivalent amounts of RAM (because as mentioned
previously, swapping dramatically reduces the speed of spm analyses).
If you only have two people doing fMRI analyses, I'd suggest the first
option. If it's more than that, the first option may still be best
1) if you can add some extra RAM to the XP1000s (2GB each?) and
2) if you already have some machines which can act as x-terminals for
the workstations (i.e., yoke the CPUs on the XPs and use them as a
server). Otherwise, I'd go with the 4-5 NTs.
One thing to keep in mind is scalability of your lab. Presumably once
you get started, your resource demands will grow quickly and you'll
want a system which easily allows you to scale up. The advatage to
XPs is that they are the fastest thing on the market at the moment (in
the workstation range) so you won't need to upgrade the CPUs anytime
soon. The advantage to the NTs is that they're cheap and make good
x-terminals when they're obsolete.
Best wishes,
- Joe
*************************************************************************
Joseph Devlin, PhD * email: [log in to unmask]
Center for Speech and Language * [log in to unmask]
Experimental Psychology Department *
University of Cambridge * Phone: 01223 766 454
Cambridge, CB2 3EB * Fax: 01223 766 452
England *
*************************************************************************
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
|