STATISTICAL ANALYSIS

Build your own flawless number-crunching rig

LET’S MAKE ONE THING CLEAR: We’re not scientists. We’re just slotting things into motherboards and praying it works, then writing funny words about it. We leave unraveling the mysteries of the universe to those smarter and better trained than us.

But we are pretty darn good at building PCs, and we’ve had requests from the more scientifically minded of our readership for a tutorial on how to build a powerful home PC designed to work on data analysis, statistical modelling, and any other scientific endeavor. With lockdowns in effect, many of us learned to work from home, which is fine and dandy if you’re a writer but a problem if you need access to a lab. Those among you with a need to process huge datasets asked for a machine that could do that work from the comfort of your study, and here’s our answer.

It’s going to be expensive! We need two key things here: A truckload of RAM, and a high-end processor with as many cores as we can muster. This will enable our system to handle millions of points of data, making it capable of performing heavy-duty tasks such as training deep-learning models on consumer data, or analyzing massive amounts of data.

Graphics are an interesting point of debate when it comes to datascience systems. You need to know exactly what sort of programs you’re going to be using on the machine—if you’re running visualization or 3D-rendering software, a more powerful GPU is a must. If you need a system to just perform thousands of complex mathematical calculations, the GPU becomes less important. We’ll be using a relatively high-end graphics card in this build, but our main focus is the CPU and memory.

What else do we need? Well, a pricey processor demands a pricey motherboard, and we also need a hefty power supply to keep this system running. Liquid cooling for our processor is also a must-have, and we’d advise that you do the same even if you want to spend less. If you’re handling lots of data, you’ll need plenty of storage, so we’ll be using a high-speed M.2 SSD as our boot drive, and also including a larger HDD for secondary storage. To contain all this, we need a professional-looking PC case with good airflow and USB-C support for faster data transfers.

So it’s darn expensive, like we said, but we’ll go over some more affordable alternatives later on. This is essentially the best version of this machine we can build, but it’s a build you can tailor to your needs; if it’s overkill, cheaper components will work just fine.