StarTools

And maybe even the future 1.9...? Have to be ready and all.

So really all of my post-processing is done on an HP Win 10 laptop that's getting to be about 4 years old now. i7-8550U, two IG chips, one Intel, and one Nvidia 940MX as the alternate. In Win 10 settings I force ST to use the 940MX. Earlier this year I added memory up to 32GB, and a 1TB nvme SSD which I cloned the C drive onto, and so is where ST runs. The old 1TB HDD is now the raw data storage for all my AP.

It actually runs ST GPU version decently well. Some modules (HDR, SVD) can lag a bit if I process at high resolution. Typically I don't, binning down to about 2000-2500 pixels wide in most cases. But today I did an M57 at 4000x2600, and things were a bit slower, but not terrible or anything.

The laptop also does acquisition through BYN and well, just about anything else I need a computer for. A second laptop outdoors runs PHD2. So if I want to use ST while the rig is taking pictures, well I'm stuck with my old desktop.

And about that...I tried to soup it up but I guess there's only so much one can do. LGA 775 machine and I stuffed a Q9550 in it. Sadly I can't OC it very much at all because my lame mobo has a pretty hard FSB wall. It also has a 500GB SATA SSD to run the system. The GPU is a version of the Nvidia 460GTX: msi N460GTX Cyclone 1GB DDR5 OC. But I haven't played with it to OC it.

That old thing runs ST GPU surprisingly well, even better than the laptop for some parts (probably the GPU intensive modules?). Except - it crashes entering the color module without fail, and no matter what. I have been unable to figure out why or a way around it (other than running non-GPU, which on this old machine is a big NOPE!).

Thus, I can't process Startools pictures when the laptop is busy doing other things, and this makes me sad. I am probably a year or two from getting a new and improved laptop.

So, for desktop options -- older/refurb machines are all over the place at fair enough sub $500 prices generally. I figure I could get one of those, perhaps even better if it doesn't have a dedicated GPU, and then I can just put the N460GTX inside of it. Would need to be a full size tower of course, nothing slim will allow that thing to fit.

No gaming (all my games are old anyway), so really the requirements are just going to be about ST here. Is the N460GTX pretty solid still for the kind of GPU usage ST wants to do? And on the CPU side of things, what really helps ST? i5/i7/i9? Generation of said chip? Number of cores/threads? Max Ghz/Turbo? Also if the N460 is decent for ST purposes, I may need to limit just how late generation CPU I look for, as that GPU is a bit older.

Anyway, thoughts or experiences with such equipment, anybody? And again this is mostly for backup purposes to go in the office, though of course if I can semi soup it up I wouldn't mind if it ends up better at ST than my current laptop. Most processing will still be done on the HP, and I'll get a new laptop down the line.

Thanks!

Ivo shared a post with an example second hand mibning machine GPU card.
[url]viewtopic.php?f=4&t=1955&p=9182&hilit=gaming+card[/url

ooof the second hand cost for this has risen hugely from the time of the original post, ouch doesn't look a viable route now too pricey

Mike in Rancho wrote: ↑Thu Sep 16, 2021 5:44 am And about that...I tried to soup it up but I guess there's only so much one can do. LGA 775 machine and I stuffed a Q9550 in it. Sadly I can't OC it very much at all because my lame mobo has a pretty hard FSB wall. It also has a 500GB SATA SSD to run the system. The GPU is a version of the Nvidia 460GTX: msi N460GTX Cyclone 1GB DDR5 OC. But I haven't played with it to OC it.

That old thing runs ST GPU surprisingly well, even better than the laptop for some parts (probably the GPU intensive modules?). Except - it crashes entering the color module without fail, and no matter what. I have been unable to figure out why or a way around it (other than running non-GPU, which on this old machine is a big NOPE!).

I'm not sure why the GTX460 would crash... I know that StarTools works fine on same gen, lower tier, GTS450 cards (I got a couple here). Indeed, the GTX460 is ~30% faster than a 940MX (depending on the task). How does it crash? Does it just close the application, does it hang, or do you get any Windows messages? Have you tried different drivers from the NVidia website?

Have you tried under clocking the card?

So, for desktop options -- older/refurb machines are all over the place at fair enough sub $500 prices generally. I figure I could get one of those, perhaps even better if it doesn't have a dedicated GPU, and then I can just put the N460GTX inside of it. Would need to be a full size tower of course, nothing slim will allow that thing to fit.

No gaming (all my games are old anyway), so really the requirements are just going to be about ST here. Is the N460GTX pretty solid still for the kind of GPU usage ST wants to do? And on the CPU side of things, what really helps ST? i5/i7/i9? Generation of said chip? Number of cores/threads? Max Ghz/Turbo? Also if the N460 is decent for ST purposes, I may need to limit just how late generation CPU I look for, as that GPU is a bit older.

The Fermi cards are getting really long in the tooth (they are over 11 years old at the time of this writing), and driver updates stopped a long time ago.

~4-5 years ago, refurb machines used to be a no-brainer, as CPU capabilities had, essentially, not changed. A 2010 i7 Quad Core was only marginally slower than a 2017 Quad Core. Just a bit more power hungry. Intel rested on their laurels a long, long time with no serious competition. Everything changed when AMD released the first Ryzen CPUs. Fast forward 4 years, and AMD is now top dog, and CPU performance has come leaps and bounds from both major vendors.

In terms of CPU/motherboard, etc. buying new now makes more sense than buying used, unless you get some sort of amazing deal. That said, you could consider an ex-server chip. For a long time, it was very attractive to buy older X58 or X79 motherboards and put Xeon chips on them. 6 or 8-core i7 performance for peanuts. Even LGA775 has a Xeon option you can put on there, maxing out the platform. Best of all, the Xeon chips overclock spectacularly well AND can use cheap server RAM. This all became so widespread that enterprising people in China started creating and selling new motherboards with these chipsets. You should be able to still find bundles on places like AliExpress. Beware though that the new motherboards do not typically overclock well due to cheap VRMs. I ran an highly overclocked 6C/12T X5675 system for a couple of years. Fantastic performance. For overclocking you need to invest in cooling obviously, and your PSU needs to be good.

As for GPU choice, at the time of this writing, things are really strange in terms of pricing and availability. So strange in fact, that you almost get better bang for buck getting a laptop than a desktop system. See this video.

The latter comes with perks ("free" screen and mobility) and drawbacks (poor/no expandability) of course.

Thanks Ivo,

I imagine you are right. If I would spend 500 on a refurb, might as well get something state of the art instead for a bit more. Costco just had an i7-11700 for about 850 with a Dell mfg sale. Only thing is it had integrated UHD 750, which could be upgraded (depending on any Dell weirdness). That link from within the other link of the Open CL benchmarks is a bit odd, showing the 750 faster than either my 940MX or the n460GTX. I'm not sure I trust it. Typically I use cpu/gpu userbenchmark, which shows my laptop's 940MX about 25% faster than the 750, and the n460GTX 30% faster on top of that, as you noted.

Mostly just trying to extend this stuff a little bit. The machine is really just for DSS stacking, and it does a decent job of that. Nothing takes overnight or anything, even if I do a 2x drizzle on 24MP DSLR files. However it would be nice to run ST on another machine when my laptop is busy.

But, a modern cpu and gpu would probably be awfully nice.

I don't know if it's the 460 that is causing the crash on the old thing. It just goes "poof" and vanishes. Then again, every ST crash I've had on any machine has done just that, never any message, just closes out. From the early 1.7 beta GPU crashes, to the TDR crashes until I changed that setting, or even the too-fast blue box crashes in 1.8.

Color crashes at the outset, regardless of file resolution (I've literally tried 420 x 320). Once you get past the mask question, the Color screen comes up, but the timer in the lower right corner is frozen, and within a second or two it goes poof.

I even ran some big files through it today, and even SS (which seems to be fairly GPU-intensive) works - and if I have task manager performance graphs open, the 3D and Compute percentages will max out to 99 or 100 quite a bit with no problem.

When Color crashes, the GPU compute and copy graphs throw a 100 percent spike. Again compute has maxed out before, but I don't think I've seen copy max out in any other module.

I tried all the other modules, and they all work fine, except for Flux - which crashed out at entry also, and likewise produced a task manager spike in GPU copy at the point of crash.

I'm wondering if there's some sort of setting or allocation I need to set right. I have not played with the msi Afterburner yet, I suppose I can see if I can slow it down, speed it up, see if anything changes.

Well slowing down the GPU didn't change anything. Nor did I see anything obvious looking over the all monitors in Afterburner while I ran ST. Also tried the Resource Monitor in Windows, figuring that to be better than Task Manager graphs. No hints that I could see. Maybe some heavy page-file stuff, but I couldn't really tell if that was at the point of crash or right after as part of the termination and WER things.

Maybe my little cpu and gpu "soup up" wasn't quite enough to keep this one out of my desktop graveyard any longer. Runs the latest Win 10 though.

Mike in Rancho wrote: ↑Tue Sep 21, 2021 6:19 am Well slowing down the GPU didn't change anything. Nor did I see anything obvious looking over the all monitors in Afterburner while I ran ST. Also tried the Resource Monitor in Windows, figuring that to be better than Task Manager graphs. No hints that I could see. Maybe some heavy page-file stuff, but I couldn't really tell if that was at the point of crash or right after as part of the termination and WER things.

Maybe my little cpu and gpu "soup up" wasn't quite enough to keep this one out of my desktop graveyard any longer. Runs the latest Win 10 though.

StarTools unceremoniously shutting down is somewhat of a "good" sign, in that it's an application-managed shutdown. It means the condition can be caught programmatically. We can do some debugging to see where the offending code might be. Given it's replicable, that helps a lot as well.

If you're otherwise happy with the system, ideally we'd save it from the tip!

admin wrote: ↑Tue Sep 21, 2021 6:55 am
StarTools unceremoniously shutting down is somewhat of a "good" sign, in that it's an application-managed shutdown. It means the condition can be caught programmatically. We can do some debugging to see where the offending code might be. Given it's replicable, that helps a lot as well.

If you're otherwise happy with the system, ideally we'd save it from the tip!

Thanks, Ivo. Though you have more important things to work on of course (new HDR!). I'll give it a go though if you think it might uncover something useful. But I imagine I might be the only one trying to run GPU on an aging heap like this, so it might not really be worth it.

And it might soon join my even older towers in the closet anyway. I had to go into the office today (been 99% WFH since March '20), and managed to pinch an old tower that's been sitting in my room for me to fix for a couple years now. I don't remember what's wrong, but knock on wood a clean W10 install takes care of it. Probably about 5 years old (I can see USB 3.0 ports, at least), but I won't know what's in it until I turn it on and open up the case. Some kind of HP Envy. Big tower. OEM means I likely won't be overclocking anything, but I imagine it will run ST much better, and will probably be a much better platform to play with. Maybe not even worth stealing anything from the LGA775 machine either - since the SSD isn't that big and as you say the N460GTX is getting old. Though might be faster than whatever HP threw inside this thing? Or I just hit up eBay again.

Will post up what CPU and GPU I find in there, and how it runs 1.8, as soon as I can blow all the dust out and get it running!

Mike in Rancho wrote: ↑Wed Sep 22, 2021 6:03 am

admin wrote: ↑Tue Sep 21, 2021 6:55 am
StarTools unceremoniously shutting down is somewhat of a "good" sign, in that it's an application-managed shutdown. It means the condition can be caught programmatically. We can do some debugging to see where the offending code might be. Given it's replicable, that helps a lot as well.

If you're otherwise happy with the system, ideally we'd save it from the tip!

Thanks, Ivo. Though you have more important things to work on of course (new HDR!). I'll give it a go though if you think it might uncover something useful. But I imagine I might be the only one trying to run GPU on an aging heap like this, so it might not really be worth it.

And it might soon join my even older towers in the closet anyway. I had to go into the office today (been 99% WFH since March '20), and managed to pinch an old tower that's been sitting in my room for me to fix for a couple years now. I don't remember what's wrong, but knock on wood a clean W10 install takes care of it. Probably about 5 years old (I can see USB 3.0 ports, at least), but I won't know what's in it until I turn it on and open up the case. Some kind of HP Envy. Big tower. OEM means I likely won't be overclocking anything, but I imagine it will run ST much better, and will probably be a much better platform to play with. Maybe not even worth stealing anything from the LGA775 machine either - since the SSD isn't that big and as you say the N460GTX is getting old. Though might be faster than whatever HP threw inside this thing? Or I just hit up eBay again.

Will post up what CPU and GPU I find in there, and how it runs 1.8, as soon as I can blow all the dust out and get it running!

Oooooers! I love a good mystery box Do let us know what you find.

admin wrote: ↑Thu Sep 23, 2021 9:38 am Oooooers! I love a good mystery box Do let us know what you find.

Well, a mixed bag. But once can't complain when given a free computer if it can be fixed.

It was stuck in an endless blue screen recovery loop, so I just wiped it. Updating the bios and UEFI diagnostics was a royal PITA, but somehow I backed my way into actually accomplishing both.

Inside is a i7-6700. Not the K version, sadly, but does have the big 95W heat sink/fan for the 6700K. Go figure. PSU is pretty weak 300W, but ATX form factor so piece of cake to replace. 32GB. 1TB HDD. GPU also pretty weak, an OEM GTX 745. I think it might be slower than my laptop's 940MX, and also the old N460GTX. Though it would be more modern than the N460, and might have 4GB dedicated compared to 1GB.

When I load up ST, the info tab says there are 3 compute units, same as my laptop. I think the N460 says 7?

Anyway, I suppose not bad overall for a 5 year old tower, and a fair number of goodies as a platform for souping up some. Theoretically I could probably get a used 6700K chip. For now though, I just ordered some kind of 1TB Evo Plus nvme SSD. Amazon says it'll be here same day.

So the real questions will be what to look for in terms of a new or used GPU card, and then a PSU with enough W to handle that and anything else I might add.

Still getting this computer set up properly, but so far so good. I now have a second place to run ST, and in full color.

Fairly comparable to my laptop. No surprise I guess, as the turbo load speeds of both CPU's are both about 4.0, and the GPU's are similarly ranked (as in, poorly lol).

I went through some identical test data on each machine and timed the modules. The desktop proved faster at everything, maybe just the tower architecture and the fact it can throw more power, or the fact that I bought a faster nvme SSD this time.

Now I just have to wait for the GPU market to come back to earth.

Until then I might run Afterburner on it and see how much it can handle.

I did manage to crash ST several times! I think the first was from not setting the timeout delay in regedit. Another was from too-fast select and deselect of stars in SVD, so that issue still exists to a certain extent.

I also ran into some major bogging in Wipe, if using artificial dark/bias and setting the edge area low. I can't remember if it crashed, I think so but it might have been before I reset the delay. Either way, I think there's heavy GPU usage going on, and the little ST timer freezes and unfreezes - like it does when you intentionally try to overstress SVD. The laptop has a little trouble with it also, you can hear the fans all ramp up to max.

Anyway I just let it go on the last test and it made it through to the other side.

I do note, however, that unfortunately the effects of the artificial bias aren't limited to the chosen edge percentage, but seem to apply image-wide. I will have to test more and see if this is different from before. The reason I like to try it is that the Nikon will sometimes get an edge glow when hot, that mostly just happens to one horizontal and one vertical side. So a 10 or 15 percent edge bias should work fine, if it mostly left the rest of the image alone (other than however it has to blend itself).