Need advice for new cyroET workstation

Hardware and Performance
1

Hi All,

I’m planning to build a new workstation for cryoET data processing and wondering if the hardware requirements differ much from SPA.

My current SPA workstation:

  • Dual Xeon 4216

  • 4 × RTX 3090

  • 256 GB RAM

  • 78 TB HDD (RAID5)

  • 2 TB SSD (cache)

I am planning to use the updated CPU and GPUs like threadripper and 4090, etc.. But for cryoET, do I need to pay extra attention to GPU VRAM, CPU cores vs. clock speed, or faster NVMe scratch disks for large tomograms? Any advice or example configs from people running cryoET would be really helpful.

Thanks!

Chengtao

2

Your current setup looks strong, but for cryoET, GPU memory and storage speed matter more. Go with 4090s for the extra VRAM and use NVMe SSDs for your temporary data. A fast CPU with decent cores is usually better than one with just a lot of cores.