[sims] hardware requirements of SIMS discover

[Hedghog]

Hi all,

just had a few pages of a presentation floated infront of me about SIMS Discover which indicate the need for a discrete 3D graphics card. Is this true or will it run ok with an i5 prcessor? Reason for asking is that most of the likeley users have laptops and are not very keen on having a desktop.

[Mcshammer_dj]

The spec for Discover did seem very high and specific, however in our experience it should run on a lower hardware range than Capita state. The best advise I can give is to try with either onboard graphics or lower processor and you may find it will be fine.

[LosOjos]

Hi all,

just had a few pages of a presentation floated infront of me about SIMS Discover which indicate the need for a discrete 3D graphics card. Is this true or will it run ok with an i5 prcessor? Reason for asking is that most of the likeley users have laptops and are not very keen on having a desktop.

 

Hi @Hedghog - this thread might help you out http://www.edugeek.net/forums/mis-systems/78189-sims-discover.html

 

I'm running it here, but I do have a discrete graphics card so I'm not much use in answering your question. What I will say was that I upgraded from a basic 64mb card to a decent 512mb and the performance improvement was dramatic - although Discover did still run on the lesser card.

[vikpaw]

It will run, on quite low spec, but the user experience will be a pain. I recently saw a demo on a laptop from Capita, and it was struggling, and this was a marketing pitch!

If you can give it some juice, it will certainly help. How many users are you planning on having, and will they need it on their laptops. Some people talk of it only being utilised by a few people, rather than dished out to many, though it was originally marketed as a tool for all teachers. Maybe you could set up a central desktop to run it, and people could access that.

Don't forget, running the app and getting it setup, is different to using the data from it. You might have a power user / data manager type person that sets up all the analyses, graphs, then these can be exported for others to use the info. Dynamic groups can feed to sims, and the users can do reports on these groups, and get notifications of group changes directly in SIMS without necessarily needing to use Discover itself.

[Hedghog]

@vikpaw

 

Thanks for this - it is likely that only a small number will use the system and we do have a data manager who will set it up. The problem we have is that the two deputies who are going to get the most use out of this have a teching load as well so portability is a must (we can't afford two PCs per person.

[matt40k]

I've ran it on a onboard 16mb graphic card on a server - it works. Ok, I wouldn't like to actual use it. But it works.

[Rawns]

We've got it installed on a Win 7 64-bit laptop and that has an Intel i5 CPU @ 2.40GHz along with 4Gb RAM. It works OK but when you have 3 or more tiles with info in, it does become a bit "clunky".

 

However, it fly's on my desktop PC which is Win XP 32-bit, Pentium Duel Core E5200 @ 2.5GHz, 3Gb RAM and an ATI Radion HD 3400. And I'm running 2 monitors. Even if I stretch Discover across both of them, it handles multiple tiles with no problems at all.

[Edu-IT]

We've got it installed on a Win 7 64-bit laptop and that has an Intel i5 CPU @ 2.40GHz along with 4Gb RAM. It works OK but when you have 3 or more tiles with info in, it does become a bit "clunky".

 

However, it fly's on my desktop PC which is Win XP 32-bit, Pentium Duel Core E5200 @ 2.5GHz, 3Gb RAM and an ATI Radion HD 3400. And I'm running 2 monitors. Even if I stretch Discover across both of them, it handles multiple tiles with no problems at all.

Does Discover work nicely across two screens or is it better to get one bigger screen?