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

TheVoice said:
Always found it a little odd that businesses, libraries etc always use quite beefy CPUs rather than the budget versions, but I guess it comes down to longevity really.

They always manage to be horrendously slow in any case so it's probably a good thing they don't use cheap CPUs.
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The Imperial library pcs are used to run a variety of heavy apps (simulation and engineering etc). The apps are split between systems - i.e not all of them have the same software and obviously not all of them will have demanding apps, but a lot of them do.

In any case it's easier/cheaper to order the whole lot the same spec when you are upgrading all your pcs (library + labs) than try to split them.
 
robgmun said:
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
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In complete contrast, at the university that I attended, the entire complex was wired with 386 thin clients, and a horrible menu driven novell network system. In fact the only place that had 'powerful' systems, was the maths and computer science lab, and they had low grade 486's.
 
SMed said:
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.
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These computers are part of a cluster which is used for big distributed computing projects during University out-of-hours. They're not that wasted.
 
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SMed said:
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.
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About time. I'm sick of Unis, Colleges, Libraries and Schools having slow computers. Over my life I must have wasted (and still do at work actually) dozens of hours waiting for a program to open because the PC is so damn slow.
 
Don't they use them for distributed computing efforts when not in use too?
 
SMed said:
Oh yeah, and they're getting like 250MB/s download speed too. :D
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200 of which i swear is spent on WoW at any one time.. :o

Kidding aside, there's a lot of bandwidth demand, and the service covers the campus, including accommodation, not just the university buildings :p
 
We have just all had upgrades, about 500 of us. Went from a old pentium dual core to a i5 2500 SB. Boot up has gone from 4 minutes to about 25 seconds.
 
Does anyone work for MOD Abbey Wood? I was there 10 years ago for a gap year placement and their machines were shocking. My machine was 90MHz! Dreadful for year 2001 and was even pretty poor for 1996 when the MOD site opened. New entry level machines in 1996 should have been around 133-150MHz. So if anyone works there now, I wondered if they've upgraded since? :-D

Nowadays, I work in admin for a mental health authority and our PCs aren't too bad. Dell machines, Core 2 Duo 3GHz, so about 3-4 years old and runs Office, database and internet stuff fine.
 
We had to make do with single core AMDs for my first year at college(08/09), then towards the start of second year they started adding AMD quad cores with 2GBs RAM and Nvidia 8400GS' in one out of the five rooms. Considering this was in the I.T. area you'd expect them to upgrade them sooner/more. I think the music rooms had the best computers, not sure on the specs of those though but they had dual monitors and what-not.

My dad's work has just had all the computers upgraded to i5s, 6GB RAM and 24 inch monitors for some reason. When I worked there all they did all day was sit on Excel spreadsheets which weren't even that complicated.
 
8GB of RAM? Why so little?

ramqd.jpg
 
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