Your current classroom desktop spec?

[gshaw]

Just looking at the next bunch of machines coming in, last year we bought Core2Duo E8400 boxes for our main IT rooms and E7500 Lenovo USFF for staff. Still got a good price on the Lenovos so thinking of going for those in classrooms as well... what are you buying these days to hit the price \ performance sweet spot?

[srochford]

Maths department currently buying quad core i7, 4Gb RAM, 1Tb disc - think they're massively over-speccing disc and under-speccing RAM

 

Standard teaching machine is quad core i5, 4GB RAM, 500Gb disc

[gshaw]

That's some serious power there, what are they running to max those beasties out? Or is someone pulling my leg

[SYNACK]

We are currently going i5 for classrooms and i7 860 for power users (NZ$200 difference between), 4-6GB RAM and whatever hard drive they come with, usually 250GB.

[Soulfish]

Currently C2D E7500 with 2gb ram for all desktops. Looking at moving to i3/i5 based chips once Dell offers them as an option on the Optiplex 780

[glennda]

Currently Core i3 HT, 4gb ram 160gb hard disk for both teacher and students just purchased 240 at a very good price from stone

[mrbios]

E5400s 2GB ram, gigabyte motherboard, 500GB samsung drives (only because they are so cheap), 500w generic PSUs all that = about £160 per PC, still can't understand why people would spend double that on a PC that's barely any quicker (i Series cpus)

 

I think for home use there is a price / performance sweet spot, but you need to sway more in favour of price for schools considering how crap our budgets are, i can't understand why people would chuck so much moeny at i5s and i7s when you can get perfectly capable core2s for peanuts these days. hell in an i7 PC the processor costs the same as our entire PCs!! what a waste!

[srochford]

That's some serious power there, what are they running to max those beasties out? Or is someone pulling my leg

 

Not leg pulling; amongst other things, the students are taught parallel programming. The students are expected to write Fortran code which can max out all cores and also investigate things like whether it's better to use 4 cores at full speed or to try and use the Hyperthreading to get 8 parallel threads. The more adventurous students also look at massively parallel programming where they link multiple machines.

 

Of course, if they're just using Facebook and Spotify then this is a bit of overkill (but at least their Matlab and Maple jobs do get a separate core to run on!)