Report: Linux box for freesurfer, using Mint 15 (Ubuntu 13)

Overview

I recently built a new desktop machine with some concern for being able to run FreeSurfer well on it. It was not clear to me how various choices would turn out, so having now substantially completed the exercise I thought others might be interested.

Hardware

I suspected that a driving criterion would be the choice of graphics hardware brand:

• Different brands of graphics hardware have different levels and reliability of drivers for OpenGL. My expectation from experience and recent reading was that nVidia would be a safest choice here, Intel less so, and AMD/ATI least.
• Most motherboards come with built-in video. This is useful for testing and for many purposes, but a dedicated graphics card (with chip-vendor of choice) would be speedier.
• Motherboard video functionality if often provided as part of the main CPU.
  • Since AMD CPUs would furnish ATI video capability, which I preferred to avoid, this drove a decision to use Intel CPU. Not mandatory, but avoids having any ATI drivers on the system.

Bruce advised that in Intel line of CPUs, get Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge, for memory management that cooperates better with some FreeSurfer algorithms.

So:

• Intel CPU. I chose i5 model that that happened to be a good price for the speed, and included Intel 4000 graphics (highest level available at this date).
• Motherboard
• nVidia add-on graphics card