[OKDXA] FT8 and computer question

[Peter Laws N5UWY]

1400 MHz CPU is pretty old at this point (as amazing as that seems)
and confining it to 4 GB is not helping.

My radio PC is an Intel NUC (tiny thing - hangs off the VESA mount
behind my display) and when I got it, I only bothered with a Core i3
CPU (2.something GHz) and 16 GB of RAM because I didn't know there was
a pandemic coming that would mean my life would be lived on Zoom for
quite a while.  Another 16 GB of RAM helped immensely so I was glad
that I put all 16 GB in one of the two available slots.

If you aren't quite ready for a new PC and your old system can support
it, you might consider stuffing it as full of RAM as you can, even if
you have to take out some of the existing DIMMs ...  It will come down
to $$$ of course - it may be cheaper just to replace the poky one.

The remote idea is interesting - you'd only be sending remote desktop
video bits across whatever wire you are attached to.

On Sun, Jun 27, 2021 at 1:52 PM John Geiger <af5cc2 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Since some of us use FT8 for DXing and VHF work, I thought maybe someone on
> the list might have an answer to this question.  For the past 3 years I
> have been running FT8 using WSJT-X on a Lenevo Thinkpad which uses an AMD
> E1-7500 AMU processor running at 1.4GHZ and has 4GB of RAM.  It was acting
> up the other day so I decided to do a full reset on it, wiping the hard
> drive and reinstalling Windows 10.  This ended up taking a while so I
> hooked up my other laptop to see what was going on on FT8.  It is a HP
> Elitebook with an Intel I5-5300U processor running at 2.4GHZ and has 8 GB
> of RAM.  I immediately noticed that the decoded lines filled up the screen
> much quicker on the Elitebook.
>
> So, is having a faster, more powerful processor like the Intel I5 likely to
> lead to more stations decoded on FT8 than I would get with the slower
> processor?  I kind of prefer to take the Elitebook traveling with me, but
> if it will lead to significantly better decoding, I will leave it in the
> shack running remotely and take the Lenevo with me when traveling.
>
> 73 John AF5CC
> ______________________________________________________________
> OKDXA mailing list
> Home: http://mailman.qth.net/mailman/listinfo/okdxa
> Help: http://mailman.qth.net/mmfaq.htm
> Post: mailto:OKDXA at mailman.qth.net
>
> This list hosted by: http://www.qsl.net
> Please help support this email list: http://www.qsl.net/donate.html



-- 
Peter Laws | N5UWY | plaws plaws net | Travel by Train!