Studio 13 PC Configuration Recommendation
Mar 17, 2017
It's time to buy a new PC for Articulate development. Despite already having 16GB of RAM in the current PC, the wait time for publishing is still a really big problem.
I can buy the biggest baddest PC in town but I am sure that I would just be throwing money away on some unnecessary features. The question is what hardware features really improves Articulate publishing time?
Memory vs. disk vs. video cards vs number of CPUs vs. CPU speed?
The minimum system recommendations are a joke as we are all well beyond that. I am wondering if anyone has experience with going to solid state drives.
Do I7 CPU's really do something amazing?
Does anyone know if a particularly video card somehow kicks the publishing into higher gear?
I estimate that the current time waste per day due to time spent publishing and republishing is 2-3 hours a day at least so its worth spending money on but I am not interested in throwing $ away or potentially buying some souped up video card that actually makes matters worse.
Recommendations from Articulate are not forthcoming. What say other users? This is actually an important topic and I believe that it would be worthy of Articulate to spend a couple of days doing some controlled benchmarks to understand the software better if they haven't already.
5 Replies
Investing in RAM and I7 CPU is a god investment.
Hi Deborah, I recently moved to a 16GB Surface Book and I'm running both 360 and SL2. I have to say that I did this for the same reasons that you mention - but as a warning, I haven't seen an amazing burst of speed that I anticipated moving from a 4GB Surface Pro 3. Even with the upgrade to the i7 processor! I'm guessing that the speed of the publish function has more to do with the Storyline content vs. the process itself. I have clients that insist on PPT base files, they seem to drain the publishing resources the most - but it gives me time to grab more caffeine, so that's a plus. I will be curious to see if anyone else has been successful in upgrading and getting some speed out of the cost/expense. Cheers from Central Florida! Sam
I had issues with RAM and upgraded my machine as well, have not seen any major upgrade in publishing speed but it no longer crashes when publishing. I think a lot of the time is the processes within storyline itself.
I agree with Andrew, I had an upgrade with my work PC (faster processor, more RAM) and saw improvements in performance with larger, video based projects. However, I think storyline itself works at is own pace so more power won't always speed everything up.
Hi Deborah,
I've recently updated my system. I went from a pretty decent laptop with Intel CORE i7, 16GB RAM and pretty good processor (don’t know the specs sorry, but was good for a 2013 machine). My hard drive was not great, so I got it upgraded a while ago. I was having speed issues too, not only with Storyline, but just trying to run Illustrator, PowerPoint and Storyline at the same time was just really slow. That said, I was not spending as long as you are on publishing. Sure, publishing took some time, but for me the issues were more when working with several applications open and also Storyline files with lots of images or variables.
Anyway, last year I bought a custom-made desktop PC. I won’t pretend to be an expert on this at all—my partner did the research for me and ultimately decided on the bits and pieces required. Aside from everything being newer and better, one key change was that I now have a dedicated graphics cards, which I did not on the laptop.
This machine is AMAZING! I can run all sorts of software at the same time, it’s super fast and my workflow has sped up exponentially. I haven’t done any comparative testing, but I’m sure the publishing is also faster. I just did a quick test on SL360: I published a 117MB Storyline file, heavy on images and including video and audio, to SCORM and it took 3 minutes and 20 seconds.
The main specs for my new machine are as follows in case you’d like to check them out:
I am sure your situation is different to mine, so don’t take this as a recommendation 😊 but just wanted to share what’s worked for me. Do I still have random crashes? Yes! But the difference in speed and performance is astronomical.
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