Hi all,

So in doing a fairly comprehensive search around the forums, a few things have become clear.

1. In terms of hard drives, SSD are much preferred but only in a general sense, not specific to making Dragon faster. It will help with the longevity of the computer, and it might load everything up quicker than the HDD, but once everything is up and running there will be no direct speed gains and it will not reduce lag time of Dragon.

2. 16GB RAM and above is recommended, maybe even DDR4 if possible, because Dragon loads directly into the RAM. The thing is most machines now have 16GB and apparently above that it won't make a dent.

3. M-Tech laptops are apparently the gold standard of hardware for voice recognition, but because of a lot of the skepticism from the top dogs on this site with the potential for hardware gains to improve Dragon, it makes me wonder exactly what are these machines bringing the table that makes Dragon so much better?

4. The number one thing above all hardware improvement to make is the soundcard microphone combination. This will reduce background noise and make the text drop quicker after speaking.

All of this makes me wonder is it really the processor itself, in terms of the amount of cores? The cache amount, and whether it's i7 i9 or above that makes this thing run faster?

EXAMPLE WORKSTATION: I was given a desktop tower from work which has 16GB RAM, 1TB HDD, and i7 6 core processor and Dragon is running like a dream for the moment, but it is a fresh install, so who knows what an empty register and hardly any programs running is doing to improve things also.

Any thoughts on what the handful of hardware improvements are in 2021 which are must haves or have the most bang for the buck for speeding up Dragon and making it run the best?

Many thanks,Kevin

Apart from the minimum amount of 16 GB RAM (and preferably more) you need to look into the single core performance of a processor. Dragon is mostly a single core application. Therefore in some cases it may be more interesting to purchase a cheaper i5 (with higher single core performance) then a much more expensive i7/i9 with much more cores, but slower single core performance.

 

Just a thought.

-------------------------

1. Yes

2. This depends on how many applications you are running so the same answer doesn't apply to everyone. For example, our computer uses 12 Gb of RAM to launch and that doesn't include Excel or Word which we will launch later. By the end of the 1st day we will be using 16 Gb of RAM so 32 Gb of RAM would be our minimum but we run a 64 Gb i9 with 18 cores. Before you get too excited, from a Dragon/KnowBrainer/DragonCapture/SpeechStart+ point of view, it really isn't any faster than in i5.

3. There are 6 things you may not know about M-Tech
   (a) You can reach out to the company president whose technical support is exceptional. He even remoted into our computer to make some changes you won't get from Dell, such as combining Drive C and Drive D memory cache (pardon our ignorance here)
   (b) ONLY M-Tech notebook computers are assembled in the United States; not Apple or Dell
   (c) M-Tech (231) 547-5562 uses A computer chips while other computer manufacturers use B & C run chips (not 100% perfect)
   (d) M-Tech doesn't try to save money on the motherboard, hard drive, fans etc. because your computer is only as good as the weakest link. Example: Dell uses whatever hard drive they can get at the best price from month-to-month. In theory monthly rotating parts should work well but when you keep changing out those parts, you have a potential mismatch resulting in a computer that might not work optimally and you wouldn't know.
   (g) Approximately 13% - 16% of Dell, Hp etc notebook computers are lemons while M-Tech's run around 1%. Notebook computers are considerably more prone to problems because of their size. This technology has improved but those paperthin light notebooks are still pushing the envelope.
   (h) M-Tech really does burn in (test) your computer (old school) before shipping it; unlike pretty much all other computer manufacturers.

4. You are absolutely correct but also note that if you work in an ideally quiet environment you won't need as much noise suppression.

More cache and RAM are desirable but the higher you go, the more diminishing results. For example, our previous M-Tech 8-year-old i7 quad core (used the equivalent of 10 years) runs Dragon as fast as our new M-Tech i9 18 core. If you are not a power user,  an i5 with 16 GB of RAM should be ample; as noted by dilligence.

If your computer plays a major role in your workflow, consider paying a little extra for the best tools. Physicians do not purchase their job critical stethoscopes from Walmart. You will typically noticed the large letter "L"  on most stethoscopes. We assume stands for “Lunis”

PS: We are not paid to endorse M-Tech but we do purchase our computers from them

-------------------------

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(615) 884-4558 ex 1

I haven't been using Dragon quite as long as Lunis and Rob and Lindsay, but I have certainly been through enough hardware, memory, disk, cpu, and motherboard changes to be knowledgeable about their effects. I have these things to say: 1) Get some kind of a decent, reliable rig. My 6 year old ? Lenovo laptop runs Dragon just fine with 8GB and a "slow" single core CPU. It certainly runs faster than I can speak. Any modern desktop rig is overkill from that point of view. 2) The biggest memory hog on my 64GB machine is my browser with 40 tabs left open. I should close them more often, but hate the hassle of finding the pages/docs/articles again.

The single most effective Dragon speedup that I have ever seen in 10 or 15 years was when I started calling my external scripts through a DVC shell execute command versus a Dragon scripting command. It was amazing - I got an instant 30% to 50% speedup in deployment speed (as Lunis calls it). I could feel it in every command that I uttered. No computer upgrade has ever delivered anything close to that jump in performance. Rob SP Pro had been right all along - DVC is *way* faster, and I only had to change one 1-line script from DAS to DVC. If you're a programmer who calls external scripts in C#, AHK, etc, then I strongly recommend that you use DVC to call outside of Dragon.

Probably the second-best thing I ever did was to downgrade back to DPI 15.3 and punt 15.6. That move solved many random hangs, slowness, and frustrations. I have had very smooth sailing ever since.

Fortunately for me, I have always had fairly quiet audio environments to work in, even though I lived beside a main road/highway with trucks, buses, Harleys with straight pipes, and racers of all kinds ripping by my cheap apartment windows. I've tried easily a dozen different mic setups from $9.98 Amazon earbud specials to the Sennheiser 3 and soundcard I bought from Lunis. They were more or less all the same in performance.

Finally, I would advise that there is a big difference between "Dragon performance" (whatever that really means) and "productivity" (results and work done). Dragon performance is a tiny part of overall productivity. Choosing a few helpful utilities will help enormously with productivity (which is what you really care about), even though they have nothing to do with Dragon performance. Not that anyone cares, but I would recommend basically all the utilities you see on this forum: SpeechStart, DragonCapture, the amazing SP Pro Utilities set, and KnowBrainer for better scripting and a huge pile of battle-tested command sets. Rather than spending extra cash on computer hardware, I *easily* recommend that you spend $500 or whatever on the full set of those software programs. I've personally used the support services of all the vendors mentioned above, and they are all superb. (And don't forget a few of Edgar's grid, mouse, and C# programming voice tools - they also can improve productivity.)

Software is what will improve your Dragon experience the most, not hardware. Watch the videos on the expert thread too; maybe they can give you some ideas.

Having said all that, if you have a noisy environment life will be harder because noise and Dragon do not get along - Dragon hangs, goes AWOL, requires rebooting, and on and on. All of those kill your productivity.

Hope this helped. My apologies if I missed a software program in my quick list.

-------------------------

Win10/x64, AMD Ryzen 7 3700X, 64GB RAM, Dragon 15.3, SP 6 PRO, SpeechStart, Office 365, KB 2017, Dragon Capture, Samson Meteor USB Desk Mic, Klim and JUKSTG earbuds with microphones, 3 BenQ 2560x1440 monitors, Microsoft Sculpt Keyboard and fat mouse

We would like to point out one small detail: We agree that DVC commands deploy significantly faster in Dragon releases through Ver. 15.3 but not Ver. 15.61. Nuance finally changed out the miserable circa 2006 SAX Basic scripting engine to WinWrap Basic, which we use in KnowBrainer 2017 (w/2020 AI Commands). If Kevin is using Ver. 15.61, he might be better off learning a little Visual Basic because it is used in so many other places and requires 50% fewer characters. You can also copy most KnowBrainer commands into Dragon but as far as legacy DVC scripting is concerned, it is unique to Dragon. However, that's not to say that DVC commands don't occasionally come in handy. There are times when a DVC multi-threaded script is the best choice and for this reason, a few KnowBrainer commands are DVC. KnowBrainer supports DVC, VB and .NET

-------------------------

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I have no arguments at all with Lunis' comment. Just to be clear, right now I have exactly 1 DVC command to shell execute out of Dragon entirely. All the rest of them are in Visual Basic.

-------------------------

Win10/x64, AMD Ryzen 7 3700X, 64GB RAM, Dragon 15.3, SP 6 PRO, SpeechStart, Office 365, KB 2017, Dragon Capture, Samson Meteor USB Desk Mic, Klim and JUKSTG earbuds with microphones, 3 BenQ 2560x1440 monitors, Microsoft Sculpt Keyboard and fat mouse

SSDs are not just preferred, they are essential. While it's true they have superficial benefits, their required because next to the RAM, they play the most important part for speed. Let's try to play out this scenario in a way that makes it clear. First, we have not had to worry about what CPU for several i7 generations. As long as it is a 45-watt i7 or now even an i5, you should have sufficient speed and cache. If you try a low voltage i7, you could run into issues. It really depends on your needs. Which segues into what is enough? Enough RAM enough drive. Enough is no way to reply to someone's needs. Think of this as if you're buying a car. You go to the car dealer of choice and say, "what is enough car for me". If he just sells you a well-regarded brand of car, you may have the wrong vehicle even though it could be the best of its kind. What are you using it for? Driving to work or on a cross country trip? Will it be hauling anything? There answer to what is enough of anything isn't answered properly until we know what your needs are. Are you simply trying to replace keyboarding on a computer because you cannot type or don't not want to type? This Dragon use is drastically different then that of a Legal transcriber who will be Echo dictating at 200 words a minute for very long periods of time. Or will you be doing court reporting where for untold time periods you have to capture and transfer multiple speakers at once? A legal transcriber or court reporter would think 32GB is a minimum working RAM, nearly every court reporter with a newer M-Tech uses 64GB and if the computer can hold more, they would make full use of that maximum amount of RAM. So, never assume someone else's "enough" is appropriate for you. I will say that there is no such thing as "too much Ram" RAM is like goods look and money, enough is never as good as more. In the case of RAM, more RAM allows for more sustained peak performance and prolonged stability. ALWAYS buy as much RAM as your budget allows for. I would rather see you use a i5 and 64GB of RAM then an i7 and less Ram. Ideally you want both, but never spend more for a CPU if your current CPU is sufficient. It won't bring anything to the table because it is the RAM that unleashes the CPUs speed. Think of it like your brain. If I gave you Einstein's brain but didn't give you anything for memory, you would be hamstrung in your efforts to do anything. Just like our brains, computers rely on past calculations to to do future calculations. If I ask you what is 10 X 10, you don't count your fingers ten time to get the answer. You know it from memory. So if I ask you what is 10 X 10 X 10. You know simply to take 100 and times it by 10. If your personal memory is good enough you do not even do that math, you just remember it is 1000. A lot of future computations are made faster by our ability to remember past answers. Computers do the same thing. They buffer information you haver already done and use that for future calculations. Where is this information stored? If you had all the RAM in the world, that is where it would be stored. But since we have got just "enough" RAM it will be stored on a pagefile on a drive. So more RAM would give you more speed because no drive is as fast as RAM. Which also points to why the drive is vital. The drive acts as the buffer for anything the CPU deems worth saving for future use. If you have one drive and that drive is slow, then your retrieval of the pagefile will be slow and so your computer will be hung up waiting for the file to be accessed and retrieved. This is why we always tell people get two drives. Your CPU can do multiple calculations at once, but your drive is only able to do one file at a time. Which file will it be? If you have two drives, you can push the system background resources like pagefiing to that second drive and now your able to free up used RAM while your OS or program is managing it's needs on the C drive. Now, for those that think 16GB sounds like "enough", keep in mind any current i7 can do 42GB of information in a second. So if you only have 16GB it is used up in a fraction of a second and needs to be cleaned up. Really you will never use 16GB of RAM or if you only have 8GB of RAM you will never use all of that. The OS will only use a small portion and then immediately use the drive for the balance. Once it uses the drive, that is the speed of your computer. The CPU cant run without memory and so it waits for the drive to save and retrieve any store information. So the more RAM you have the more time the CPU runs at full speed and the faster your second drive is, the faster the computer runs when it is forced to use the pagefile drive. Ideally you want as much RAM as you can so the system always has a free amount of RAM to work from while it pagefiles the used amount. If you only have 16GB, you never give it enough RAM. Let's say your computer only uses 50% of the physical RAM. You only have 16GB so in realty it may use 8GB then starts to work clearing that up by usage of the pagefile. It dares not to use the other 8 because that is only about 1/5th of a second worth of work. There is no way that is enough RAM to last it long enough for a SSD to manage the pagefile. But if you have 64GB of RAM, then even at half the system still has 32GB of RAM to work from when it has used up the other 32GB. Keep in mind, we are still not getting 3/4 of a second worth of work from that half of memory. So the question is, how sustained is your personal peak usage. If you are just replacing your keyboard with Dragon as a way to avoid entering text into your banks web site or to order from Amazon, then YES 16GB is enough because our doing virtually nothing. But if you are trying to break into the transcribing world, then you do not have enough to consider that computer a tool of the trade. Would you think a mechanic could get by professionally with a tool set that was enough for a home mechanic? Do you think a butter knife is a sufficient tool for a carpenter that needs to turn in screws? You can call a butter knife "enough" if you are suddenly faced with a loose screw in the kitchen. But it isn't the right tool if you're doing more than one screw. So address your needs from a usage standpoint. In no world do we feel that one drive is sufficient for dragon if your needs are for anything that approaches regular and sustained usage You need that second SSD and that SSD should be the fastest your computer will manage. A Gen 3 X4 NVMe will manage four time the date bandwidth of a regular SATA SSD. Since this drive is your backup RAM, the faster this drive is the faster your computer is. Your C drive doesn't have to be a peak performer. The C drive doesn't do any heavy lifting. Think of having 10 pounds of lead. The needs to move those 10 pounds can be very different. If you have 10 pounds of leads shot, then a heavy bandwidth SSD is not needed since your only picking up small items and moving them But your pagefile is likely to be moving large blocks of DATA that is far better suited to a NVMe drive. So here in a nutshell is the specification we like for anything approaching professional Dragon usage. An i7 or i5 that has more than 6MB of L3 cache. This will include most CPUs out there today that are not ULV CPUs. No less than 32GB of RAM, most court reporters and transcribers max out their system capabilities. In a laptop, this likely means 64GB Two SSDs. any system with two SSDs is better than a system with one but getting a normal SSD 500GB or more for the C drive and a NVMe for your D drive gives you the option of tweaking Windows to run faster and with more stability. Get whatever OS you feel you like. For most people that can be just Windows Home version. If your on a corporate Domain network, then spend the extra $30 and go with Pro. Most go with Pro just because it's only $30 more and it make them feel all warm and fuzzy. So, I7 32GB or more RAM C drive SATA SSD D Drive NVMe but most certainly any SSD of any style is better than nothing. Windows Home Then you can now tweak your system to use these extra specifications. At M-Tech, we happily do this for free or if you like to get under the hood, we can provide the instruction for you to do it yourself. If we, do it it takes 20 minutes or more to log in remotely. It could take you longer. To sum up. Enough for you may not be enough for the next person. But spending money on RAM is a good investment in speed but no so much on a CPU. Two SSDs will give you the ability to unleash whatever CPU you have. Good luck and stay safe.

-------------------------

Jerry Michrina  - Technical Adviser

M-Tech Laptops, Inc.

1-231-547-5562 Ext. 11

 

www.m-techlaptops.com

Wow, I think that's the longest post that I've ever seen! I liked the parts where you compared the data rates with the RAM size and showed that the whole RAM gets emptied out in a second. Could you please comment on why my physical memory is only ever half used in the Task Manager (regardless of RAM size)? I think the OS must restrict it somehow. But I don't know what it does with the other half.

-------------------------

Win10/x64, AMD Ryzen 7 3700X, 64GB RAM, Dragon 15.3, SP 6 PRO, SpeechStart, Office 365, KB 2017, Dragon Capture, Samson Meteor USB Desk Mic, Klim and JUKSTG earbuds with microphones, 3 BenQ 2560x1440 monitors, Microsoft Sculpt Keyboard and fat mouse

Windows can never afford to use all your RAM.ling before it gets close it starts to make a pagefile and write it to your drive. So if you have 8 or 64, you will always see some RAM unused. The more RAM you have the less the pagefile gets used but it always gets used. So more RAM gives you longer staying power fkr peak speed and increases the stability of your system between reboots. 

So if you gave 64 your laptop can run at a peak speed four to five times longer before it cleans up the RAM by pushing and paging. Does this help? Please feel free to call and ask for me if you felt I missed the mark. My mind works in a way that doesn't make for simplified text responses.

-------------------------

Jerry Michrina  - Technical Adviser

M-Tech Laptops, Inc.

1-231-547-5562 Ext. 11

 

www.m-techlaptops.com

Thanks Jerry for your response,

Very comprehensive. So allow me to drill down on this a bit, because I feel you've put a lot on the table here. I also have to take into account the likely biases being that you are an expert in the realm of high-end hardware.

1. It seems to be your contention that SSD is essential and will in fact have a direct influence on the performance of software like Dragon. This is obviously new information to me and I expect others. Would you mind qualifying this a bit more? You described that this is because having a second 'fast as possible' drive will directly support the RAM by helping the CPU with the page file, to make everything run more smoothly. Is this the case? Could you please explain how this has any effect on software that runs fully inside RAM?
So the claim is RAM is augmented in its performance by interacting with a second SSD. Seems very interesting and I would love you to elaborate on this.

2. Also going by your post, people who are dictating for hours a day every day in high performance situations... their RAM needs will quickly approach 32GB. This is also interesting, and seems like an extraordinary claim that needs extraordinary evidence. I absolutely expect you to be closer to the facts than me obviously as a lumpen man. But I would also appreciate this to be qualified.

3. The last point which sounded the most intuitively true out of all of this is processors no matter how powerful will be hamstrung by not enough RAM. The implication here seems to be that the actual speed on performance of the processor is affected by RAM rather than just the inability to load more programs.

Seeing as you are so generous with your first post in terms of its detail, I wonder if you wouldn't mind clarifying these few things?

Are you guys still producing Desktops? By the looks of your website you aren't.

Thanks!

We need to separate a software that runs within the RAM and the data in needs and creates that far exceeds the RAM. Also, keep in mind so many more resources are used than just the kne program. So more RAM and support to keep this RAM active is needed. The SSD does just that. Add up your OS, the many programs and the data created and accessed by the programs and you quickly run out of RAM. Otherwise increasing a CPUs speed would be of little value if the actual memory requirements never exceeded the relatively small amounts of RAM we throw at it. WINDOWS is designed to run from drives and use only what is needed at the moment since the assumption has always been their will never be enough RAM. So fir this reason we cannot give it too much RAM becuase windows can at its peak do 42GB a second. If we only need 8 for any extended period of computing then that 42 would be superfluous. 

I am trying to recall all you asked but when in the posting window I cannot see your hood questions. So if you wish, always feel free to call M-Tech so I can deal with them one at a time. But how ask well thought out questions.

-------------------------

Jerry Michrina  - Technical Adviser

M-Tech Laptops, Inc.

1-231-547-5562 Ext. 11

 

www.m-techlaptops.com

I was a bit overwhelmed by trying to read Jerry's response, so I copied it and turned it into easier-to-read paragraphs.

Here is Jerry's info from above:

SSDs are not just preferred, they are essential. While it's true they have superficial benefits, their required because next to the RAM, they play the most important part for speed. Let's try to play out this scenario in a way that makes it clear. 

First, we have not had to worry about what CPU for several i7 generations. As long as it is a 45-watt i7 or now even an i5, you should have sufficient speed and cache. If you try a low voltage i7, you could run into issues. It really depends on your needs. Which segues into what is enough? Enough RAM enough drive. Enough is no way to reply to someone's needs. Think of this as if you're buying a car. You go to the car dealer of choice and say, "what is enough car for me". If he just sells you a well-regarded brand of car, you may have the wrong vehicle even though it could be the best of its kind. What are you using it for? Driving to work or on a cross country trip? Will it be hauling anything? 

There answer to what is enough of anything isn't answered properly until we know what your needs are. Are you simply trying to replace keyboarding on a computer because you cannot type or don't not want to type? This Dragon use is drastically different then that of a Legal transcriber who will be Echo dictating at 200 words a minute for very long periods of time. Or will you be doing court reporting where for untold time periods you have to capture and transfer multiple speakers at once? A legal transcriber or court reporter would think 32GB is a minimum working RAM, nearly every court reporter with a newer M-Tech uses 64GB and if the computer can hold more, they would make full use of that maximum amount of RAM. So, never assume someone else's "enough" is appropriate for you. 

I will say that there is no such thing as "too much Ram" RAM is like goods look and money, enough is never as good as more. In the case of RAM, more RAM allows for more sustained peak performance and prolonged stability. ALWAYS buy as much RAM as your budget allows for. I would rather see you use a i5 and 64GB of RAM then an i7 and less Ram. Ideally you want both, but never spend more for a CPU if your current CPU is sufficient. It won't bring anything to the table because it is the RAM that unleashes the CPUs speed. Think of it like your brain. 

If I gave you Einstein's brain but didn't give you anything for memory, you would be hamstrung in your efforts to do anything. Just like our brains, computers rely on past calculations to to do future calculations. If I ask you what is 10 X 10, you don't count your fingers ten time to get the answer. You know it from memory. So if I ask you what is 10 X 10 X 10. You know simply to take 100 and times it by 10. If your personal memory is good enough you do not even do that math, you just remember it is 1000. A lot of future computations are made faster by our ability to remember past answers. Computers do the same thing. They buffer information you haver already done and use that for future calculations. Where is this information stored? 

If you had all the RAM in the world, that is where it would be stored. But since we have got just "enough" RAM it will be stored on a pagefile on a drive. So more RAM would give you more speed because no drive is as fast as RAM. Which also points to why the drive is vital. The drive acts as the buffer for anything the CPU deems worth saving for future use. If you have one drive and that drive is slow, then your retrieval of the pagefile will be slow and so your computer will be hung up waiting for the file to be accessed and retrieved. This is why we always tell people get two drives. Your CPU can do multiple calculations at once, but your drive is only able to do one file at a time. Which file will it be? 

If you have two drives, you can push the system background resources like pagefiing to that second drive and now your able to free up used RAM while your OS or program is managing it's needs on the C drive. Now, for those that think 16GB sounds like "enough", keep in mind any current i7 can do 42GB of information in a second. So if you only have 16GB it is used up in a fraction of a second and needs to be cleaned up. Really you will never use 16GB of RAM or if you only have 8GB of RAM you will never use all of that. The OS will only use a small portion and then immediately use the drive for the balance. 

Once it uses the drive, that is the speed of your computer. The CPU cant run without memory and so it waits for the drive to save and retrieve any store information. So the more RAM you have the more time the CPU runs at full speed and the faster your second drive is, the faster the computer runs when it is forced to use the pagefile drive. Ideally you want as much RAM as you can so the system always has a free amount of RAM to work from while it pagefiles the used amount. If you only have 16GB, you never give it enough RAM. 

Let's say your computer only uses 50% of the physical RAM. You only have 16GB so in realty it may use 8GB then starts to work clearing that up by usage of the pagefile. It dares not to use the other 8 because that is only about 1/5th of a second worth of work. There is no way that is enough RAM to last it long enough for a SSD to manage the pagefile. But if you have 64GB of RAM, then even at half the system still has 32GB of RAM to work from when it has used up the other 32GB. Keep in mind, we are still not getting 3/4 of a second worth of work from that half of memory. 

So the question is, how sustained is your personal peak usage. If you are just replacing your keyboard with Dragon as a way to avoid entering text into your banks web site or to order from Amazon, then YES 16GB is enough because our doing virtually nothing. But if you are trying to break into the transcribing world, then you do not have enough to consider that computer a tool of the trade. Would you think a mechanic could get by professionally with a tool set that was enough for a home mechanic? Do you think a butter knife is a sufficient tool for a carpenter that needs to turn in screws? You can call a butter knife "enough" if you are suddenly faced with a loose screw in the kitchen. But it isn't the right tool if you're doing more than one screw. 

So address your needs from a usage standpoint. In no world do we feel that one drive is sufficient for dragon if your needs are for anything that approaches regular and sustained usage You need that second SSD and that SSD should be the fastest your computer will manage. A Gen 3 X4 NVMe will manage four time the date bandwidth of a regular SATA SSD. Since this drive is your backup RAM, the faster this drive is the faster your computer is. Your C drive doesn't have to be a peak performer. The C drive doesn't do any heavy lifting. Think of having 10 pounds of lead. The needs to move those 10 pounds can be very different. If you have 10 pounds of leads shot, then a heavy bandwidth SSD is not needed since your only picking up small items and moving them But your pagefile is likely to be moving large blocks of DATA that is far better suited to a NVMe drive. 

So here in a nutshell is the specification we like for anything approaching professional Dragon usage. An i7 or i5 that has more than 6MB of L3 cache. This will include most CPUs out there today that are not ULV CPUs. No less than 32GB of RAM, most court reporters and transcribers max out their system capabilities. In a laptop, this likely means 64GB Two SSDs. any system with two SSDs is better than a system with one but getting a normal SSD 500GB or more for the C drive and a NVMe for your D drive gives you the option of tweaking Windows to run faster and with more stability. Get whatever OS you feel you like. For most people that can be just Windows Home version. If your on a corporate Domain network, then spend the extra $30 and go with Pro. Most go with Pro just because it's only $30 more and it make them feel all warm and fuzzy. 

So, I7 32GB or more RAM C drive SATA SSD D Drive NVMe but most certainly any SSD of any style is better than nothing. Windows Home Then you can now tweak your system to use these extra specifications. At M-Tech, we happily do this for free or if you like to get under the hood, we can provide the instruction for you to do it yourself. If we, do it it takes 20 minutes or more to log in remotely. It could take you longer. 

To sum up. Enough for you may not be enough for the next person. But spending money on RAM is a good investment in speed but no so much on a CPU. Two SSDs will give you the ability to unleash whatever CPU you have. Good luck and stay safe.

-------------------------

Jerry Michrina  - Technical Adviser

 

-------------------------

Bill Miller :-)
C1-2 Quadriplegic with a 255 High Bowling Game
Co-founder of Manufacturing Genuine Thrills Inc.
Business website: http://www.ikanbowler.com
Personal website: http://www.lookmomnohands.net

When it comes to making Dragon faster or more to the point, prevent it from slowing down, we recommend adding a checkmark to Conserve disk space required by user profile which you will find under the DragonBar Options/Data tab. You won't be able to run Accuracy Tuning but it may be worth the sacrifice. We've had good luck with this setting for the past 3 weeks but  your mileage may vary. We found this to be more useful to Dragon end-users experiencing a noticeable slow down after a few hours of use

-------------------------

Change "No" to "Know" w/KnowBrainer 2020
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(615) 884-4558 ex 1

M-Tech makes desktop computers on request. They built our new i9-10980XE 3 GHz 18 core 64 GB of RAM with dual SSDs

-------------------------

Change "No" to "Know" w/KnowBrainer 2020
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If my two bits will help any, all processors are hamstrung by RAM, and all RAM is hamstrung by disks. As a general (almost unbreakable) rule, there is never enough RAM for the OS - that's why the OS has a page file on disk. Yes, SSD disks are "essential" in that they are far, far faster than SATA disks. You can easily feel the performance difference moving from SATA disks to SSD disks. The MTech guy was talking about a big SATA C drive and a faster second SSD drive, but SSD drives have been routinely used for C drives for a few years at least.

This whole topic is probably taking more air time than it is worth. Get a modern processor. Get SSD drives. Get 32GB of RAM. Don't sweat the details about the last few percentage points in processor, RAM, or SSD disk speeds; you'll never notice any of it in real life. Spend the extra money on voice software. Concentrate on your productivity, not on the last iota hardware performance. My two bits.


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Win10/x64, AMD Ryzen 7 3700X, 64GB RAM, Dragon 15.3, SP 6 PRO, SpeechStart, Office 365, KB 2017, Dragon Capture, Samson Meteor USB Desk Mic, Klim and JUKSTG earbuds with microphones, 3 BenQ 2560x1440 monitors, Microsoft Sculpt Keyboard and fat mouse