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I am using an old computer running windows xp and recently came into so money so looking to upgrade to a new system. What are the main components that make a good desktop for running the cr_Ev solver that money can buy? What are the main specifications that I should be looking at?
not sure if I need all this or how much paying for top of line makes a difference? Or what makes a good desktop. Computer will mostly be for running simulations and maybe working with lots of large files for both poker and other things. if anyone else has recommendations, let me know, thanks!
First of all, please upgrade to a 64bit operating system of Windows 7 or above. It's really important to have a 64bit operating system, given that 32bit systems have a disadvantage that they can only assign at most 1.5GB of memory to any one program. This puts a limitation on the largest possible tree that can be processed.
As for memory, this only affects the maximum size of tree that can be fit into memory. At the moment a 4bet tree takes around 600MB (300MB with memory compression), so as long as you have a decent amount of available memory there should not be any issues. If you make sure that you have, let's say, 8GB of available memory then you should be able to handle just about anything. And should you ever need more memory, then this is one of the easiest and cheapest items to upgrade.
When it comes to speed, the only real factors to look at are CPU and number of cores. If you have a 4 core system of 3.5GHz, then essentially you're running a 4*3.5=14GHz system. The solver scales really well with the number of cores, so 2x as many cores will come down to a speedup of 2x. One thing that is really important to know here though, is that you need to look at the number of
physical cores. Often systems are advertised as having 8 processors, while there are actually only 4 physical processors present.
Finally, when it comes to the processor, please just make sure that it's been released somewhere in the last couple of years. Now, this is very unlikely to be a factor, because just about any processor that is sold today will work perfectly fine, however, most of the recent advances in CPU development are in efficiently managing memory and such, so processors that are really old might not deal as well with programs that deal with large amounts of memory.
That's about all I can think of.
Cheers,
Scylla