Recommended Hardware for PC-Topp

If you intend to invest in new computers to run PC-Topp it clearly makes sense to buy well equipped, state of the art machines.

User demands and technical standards are subject to constant change and so, specific recommendations are prone to fast aging, too. We offer guidelines rather than prescriptions and we keep them as up to date as possible.

A Powerful Service PC Is All Important

Especially investing in the PC-Topp Service PC pays off very well, as its speed has great influence on the performance of the application on all client PCs. We recommend that you buy a high end desktop PC for this purpose. Dedicated and expensive server hardware is not required, even though that PC runs under a server operating system.

More and more desktop PCs come equipped with a Gigabit network card; this can have a nice performance benefit if the PC is connected to an inexpensive Gigabit switch.

Compared to the Service PC, the client PCs' performance doesn't need to be at the very high end of the scale. Well equipped mainstream PCs in the upper quality range will do fine.

Buy High Performance Hardware

In general, we recommend state-of-the-art CPUs with multi-core technology, currently:

• Servers: Intel Xeon E5[n] or i7
• Clients: Intel i5 or i7

Your new PCs should all be equipped with a Gigabit network card.

Buy Fast Memory

High speed memory is of prime importance for your new PCs' performance. We recommend DDR3 SDRAM which is available in a variety of different versions. For details please see the Wikipedia article on DDR3 SDRAM