Can someone provide a minimum spec to buy - this will be for reefmaster only and saving of log files. Has to be future proof as well, at least 3 years.

Will be using to map the local rivers - so not sure on requirements as the river fits in an area of 1000 sq km for our local towns including land. River is much small area obviously but wouldnt mind having a single map for the region including land around the river.

I updated about 6 months ago to an all SSD notebook running Win8.1 with maximum RAM and a fast processor (was spec'd as a games notebook but I'd rather draw a map than play shoot em up games).

Advantages:

Speed of startup - about 9 seconds to the windows screen
Speed of map drawing - a lot faster than my previous Win7/HDD notebook
Speed of drawing mosaics - takes only seconds to draw a large area of mosaics

Disadvantages:
Expensive

So I would buy the highest spec PC that you can afford...

.Meggs1 wrote:
What's specs have you got

Are the surface pro3 any good - or better off with a laptop? Am using ipads a fair bit

I have a Surface Pro 3 and it is a very nice bit of kit, but I'm not sure I would recommend it for use with ReefMaster. You are paying a lot for the form factor but the actual specs are not great - the top models will give you 8GB of RAM and a 500 GB SSD, which is pretty good but you could get better for quite a lot less in a standard laptop. Also the Surface uses an integrated graphics unit (GPU) which shares the system RAM and cannot be upgraded.

For RM use memory is the most important - the more the better. Big maps, in particular, use a lot of RAM and I would go for 12 or even 16GB. Any current processor likely to be fine and have less impact on RM performance than memory. The next major release of ReefMaster is going to use some GPU features, so performance will be improved with a dedicated graphics processing unit. Quite a few laptops do feature these and in my opinion it's worth spending a little extra on (you'll see benefits outside of RM as well). For general system performance you really should include a solid state disk (SSD) - no single change to a system gives more of a performance boost, and they have come down in price a lot recently.

Matt,
I am a bit confused by the recommended size of RAM. My new laptop has 8 GB, but Reefmaster never uses more than 3 while calculating a map. I recently upgraded from a cheap laptop with an i5 with 6 GB, and was disappointed to see very little difference in performance (map calculation/generation is still painfully slow when plenty of tracks are used). Will the PC use only a certain amount or fraction of the available RAM for Reefmaster, or is there maybe some setting that I overlooked? I agree, though, that an SSD made a big difference for loading databases (not to mention booting!)

I really love the program, but wish the actual map generation in Reefmaster (as well as raster charts in IMC) was quicker! Any advice for settings etc. would be highly appreciated.

Memory usage scales with map area, more than anything else (e.g. much more so than number of data points) so how much memory RM uses when calculating the map depends on the size of the map you generate. So if you are generating maps that use 3GB as they generate then it is true that there is little to be gained by having more memory than that, unless you want to open multiple projects at the same time. Sidescan mosaic can use quite a bit of memory as well - and will probably use more once we have integrated the sonar viewer work. You can never have too much memory!

Matt,

What quickens up map generation or is that something coming up with graphic card integration?

@skinnee

Processor Core i7-4710
Main drive three 128Mb SSD in Raid0 - OS & programs
2nd drive 1Tb SSD - storage
32Gb RAM
Win 8.1 x64
GT70 graphics

Hopefully this will keep me going for a while...

That's pretty extreme Meggs!

I'm running with 16GB of RAM, SSD on what was a top of the range Alienware laptop a couple of years ago. I max it out on my approx 25x15 mile map. It still generates fine but the swap file usage slows it down quite a lot, a full contour map generation takes about 20 minutes. Memory seems to be the key to generation because before I started bouncing around the limit it would take 4-5 mins top.

But 20,50,100 minutes or 24 hours if it comes to it is nothing to wait for what Reefmaster has given me in terms of the level of detail I now have of our coast and the extra productive fishing spots we now have.