building a new PC

[rowhousepd]

I'm about to build a new PC for the first time soon, and I want to have PT performance in mind when choosing specs for the new system. I've searched around the forum, but as I am sort of a newbie to hardware stuff, I'm a tad unclear about what's most important. (Sorry if this should be obvious.) I get that probably the biggest factor will be is having an SSD, and the new machine will absolutely have one for the OS and possibly even a second for PT. Outside of that, am I correct in thinking that...

1) ... the CPU will impact performance more than the amount of RAM? (I'm planning to get a core i7, probably +3.5 GHz, 16MG of RAM.)
2) ... installing 32GB of RAM won't be an enormous improvement over 16GB?
3) ... a high-end video card wouldn't be a big boost to performance over, say, a mid-range ~$250 card?

Thanks!

[Flag_Hippo]

Storage is the single biggest performance bottleneck for PokerTracker 4 so I'd recommend enough SSD storage to contain both your operating system and your database(s). Most modern CPU's and graphics cards will be more than sufficient but for large databases RAM and disk speed are more relevant - you will get diminishing returns as you add more RAM, but if you have enough to hold the entire database it will help.

[rowhousepd]

Storage is the single biggest performance bottleneck for PokerTracker 4 so I'd recommend enough SSD storage to contain both your operating system and your database(s).

Thanks, Flag_Hippo! Follow-up question to my post above: I got all the parts for the new system and just saw a 500GB SSD on a super sale and grabbed it, which means I now have two SSDs (and a 1TB HDD) to work with here. One SSD is going to run Windows, obviously. Is it best to install PT4/Postgres/my databases on the other one, or should I keep them all on the main drive with my OS?

Most modern CPU's and graphics cards will be more than sufficient, but for large databases RAM and disk speed are more relevant - you will get diminishing returns as you add more RAM, but if you have enough to hold the entire database it will help.

How can I tell how large my DB is?

[Flag_Hippo]

Is it best to install PT4/Postgres/my databases on the other one, or should I keep them all on the main drive with my OS?

If space isn't an issue then the easiest thing to do is to have everything on the main drive with your OS.

How can I tell how large my DB is?

You can see the size of your existing database(s) via the 'Database -> Database Management' menu option in PokerTracker 4.