My dedicated Dragon machine is now 5.5 years old. I'm getting continuous freezes. Even after reinstalling the operating system, and other troubleshooting. I have come to the conclusion it's time for a new one. 

What matters to me is DPI 15 delivers fast and accurate performance, the ability to drive 2 x 4K montiors at 60Hz, fanless and small. 

My current machine was bought from AtLast Computer in the UK which specializes in NUCs and Fanless. But I think I over bought back in February of 2017. This W10 home machine I'm using now has 32gb of 4DDR. Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-7700T CPU @ 2.90GHz, 2901 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 8 Logical Processor(s).

It does run DPI fairly well, but I think I could get away with something less expensive. As for gaming, I only play chess and do Lumosity now I'm semi-retired.

What about an i5 or i3 even? and wouldn't only 16gb of ram work well? But I don't know if that is enough to also drive two 4K monitors at 60Hz. Any thoughts?

Member: International Institute of Not Doing Much

We recommend Intel i9, i7, i5 or AMD equivalent processors; not i3. 16 Gb of RAM (8 Gb  minimum) for most end-users; 32 Gb of RAM or more for power users. We recommend 512 Gb or larger SSDs (256 Gb minimum). 

HOWEVER, before popping for a new computer consider that your computer might be running too hot and may or may not be rescued. Regardless of what manufacturers claim, fanless is BS and a recipe for shortening your computer life. A tiny bit of mud getting into your case, which occurs in all computers, can make it overheat. If vacuuming out your computer interior is an option, do it. If you have the option, consider opening as much as your computer to the air as possible. Even consider running a small fan and see if that doesn't improve things. Today's computers should run nearly a decade. We have a 10-year-old gaming computer (which last longer because everything is bigger and has more air circulation space). It came with Windows 7, upgraded to Windows 10 and is running as well now as the day we bought it. We only replaced it because we were nervous about how much more life it really had.

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Drag on...

In your post you're listing machine specs which are much identical to the one I have and currently use dictating this message with Dragon Pro individual 15.61

Aside the fact that Dragon software is an incredible piece of bloatware* that loves to crash and corrupt itself from time to time. It does need a lot of improvements, although it does performs acceptable on such machine as long as you don't have too much background services running.

So I would check starting with your disk I/O performance. must be an SSD, best best of courses is and M.2 NMVe type. How much RAM is available and CPU priority settings. Do you have hyperthreading enabled? microphone type, quality and audio clarity speaker speed all are contributing factors as well.

The less services and background resources are running the better.

I've seen it perform acceptably on my old Acer 5742 laptop, I3 2.4GHz with upgraded to 8GB RAM and an SSD. of course you have to speak little bit more slower in a word by word pronounced style.

One other thing is that the default settings create an absurd mass of *.log and *.DRA files. Disabling dragon logger service in services.MSC and especially disabling the DRA file generation improves performance as well. Additionally you can try testing stopping and disabling as well Dragon service under services and it becomes more responsive.

I cannot tell you why it needs those two services as so far performs just as well with both of them being disabled. in fact I'm dictating this all post here with those two services disabled and sentences come up fast on the screen.

overall it's clearly faster and with effectively no misinterpretations or "mishearing" spoken words. of course clear pronunciation being always a key, speaking like a classic British newscaster.

Try it!  You might end up with the expression "oh wow!"

Of course there are other variables which contribute to performance matters.

LMK!

*For those who take offense on this remark, perhaps someone can explain to me while after a while my 500 GB SSD was reported as "full".the culprit being Dragon *.LOG *.DRA files