Imperial College London using i7 2600 CPUs... in the Library

SMed · 27 Nov 2011 at 22:36

Yep. All the libraries are running Intel i7 2600 CPUs with 8GB of RAM and 23" HP monitors for all the libraries across the various campuses (including hospital libraries in most sites).

Pretty overkill for using Word and web browsing.

RomanNose · 27 Nov 2011 at 22:38

Well surprise surprise, some students might run heavy programs such as matlab or Cad.
It's probably more cost efficient to get beefy machines that can pass through many upgrade cycles than get low end ones that will topple in 2 years.

currantloaf · 27 Nov 2011 at 22:41

Imperial College London (officially The Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine) is a public research university located in London, United Kingdom, specialising in science, engineering, business and medicine.

It wouldn't be rated so highly or considered if it could not provide ample computing power for those who will need it.

pingwing · 27 Nov 2011 at 22:41

Cool, coming to your campus to type this week, Birkbeck is still on the cheap core2. Better than Queens Belfast though who didn't get W7 last upgrade...

randal · 27 Nov 2011 at 22:42

They'll probably be using those 2600s for another 4-5 years yet. Our lab at college had 486 sx25s when we started, they were still there when I left 6 years later.

Nickyyy · 27 Nov 2011 at 22:43

We use windows 7 with i3's in our library, all they have on them is office and IE.

However in the Labs we have i5's with 8GB of ram and a decent video card for what it is, and two monitors per workstation.

robgmun · 27 Nov 2011 at 22:46

When i was at uni in 95 a lot of the computers were pretty high spec for the time. Only one department were stuck with 386's when everywhere else had high end 486's or pentuim 1's. I even remember one lab having Sun computers that must have been mind bendingly expensive at the time

lcg · 27 Nov 2011 at 22:46

Nickyyy said:
We use windows 7 with i3's in our library

Same here, and they have 4GB RAM, but the OS is 32-bit.

nicholas_yiu · 27 Nov 2011 at 22:49

The library PCs weren't licensed to run CAD when I was back there.

I still remembered the nightmare I had trying to run large CAD models on the Mech Eng Pentium 4 PCs with 17in monitors 4 years ago! The PC fans whirling like mad when I start manoeuvring the CAD models.

Somehow I don't think they will upgrade them for about 5-6 years.

Helios1234 · 27 Nov 2011 at 22:49

I remember the computers in our department (RSM) at Imperial featured some very nice processors. The ones in the library must have been upgraded recently!

Cleeecooo · 27 Nov 2011 at 22:51

MY old secondary school apparently has 2600K's in every single computer. They got them for less than £500 a computer!!

Alex_6n2 · 27 Nov 2011 at 22:52

Not much different to what Bristol University computers have inside them. They have to be capable of running Matlab/Autodesk CAD/Garrad Hassan/etc etc and that's just as an engineer.

If the graphic designers/computer modellers use them then they could probably do with 16GB of RAM!

Shayper · 27 Nov 2011 at 22:53

Greenwich is all on i5's

It's a pain in the arse trying to use matlab on a slow PC, same with big models on Simul8

Begbie · 27 Nov 2011 at 22:55

Yeah wait another 5 years and there all still the same though!

Count yourself lucky, were still on windows 2000 with of course single cores and a max of 2gb on some machines

ng93 · 27 Nov 2011 at 22:56

Cleeecooo said:
MY old secondary school apparently has 2600K's in every single computer. They got them for less than £500 a computer!!

Lucky ****

I've never used a school computer that wasn't painfully slow

The worst part is the GPUs though, college just upgraded their computers but still have Intel graphics, which makes them useless for a lot of stuff

Cleeecooo · 27 Nov 2011 at 23:01

ng93 said:
Lucky **** I've never used a school computer that wasn't painfully slow The worst part is the GPUs though, college just upgraded their computers but still have Intel graphics, which makes them useless for a lot of stuff

they were slow when I was there

Only dual cores

Brookert · 27 Nov 2011 at 23:01

wish my uni had i7 computers, takes 5 minutes just for it to load general applications!!!

Strife212 · 27 Nov 2011 at 23:17

RomanNose said:
Well surprise surprise, some students might run heavy programs such as matlab or Cad.
It's probably more cost efficient to get beefy machines that can pass through many upgrade cycles than get low end ones that will topple in 2 years.

birdysaver said:
It wouldn't be rated so highly or considered if it could not provide ample computing power for those who will need it.

Are such programs even on the library computers. They are for writing documents generally.

Obviously they will have computing labs and high performance machines and clusters.

Having said that, nothing is worse for productivity than having an unresponsive computer.

EdGey · 27 Nov 2011 at 23:19

Beats our single core 512's when I was last there...

SMed · 27 Nov 2011 at 23:31

Not sure if cad or matlab can run on the library machines. But even if they did, medical students certainly don't need them in the hospital libraries.