Hi all, does anyone have any recomendations for a laptop for around £1500 to run DJI Terra and WEB ODM on?
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Hello Ben @ben855, and very warm welcome to DroneHub.
Well by now you have used G___leAI (being a bit cheeky there) but here goes:
The Dell G16 (7630) … BUT !! with some crucial upgrades to consider.
Please see Caveat’s #1/#2/#3.
Caveat #3 is my personal preferred option.
PROCESSOR Intel Core i9-13900HX or i7-14700HX (Excellent multi-core performance for WebODM point-cloud generation).
GRAPHICS: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 (8GB) or [RTX 4070] (Essential for DJI Terra’s 2D/3D reconstruction algorithms). I would recommend a 4070 if at all possible if your budget could stretch a little.
RAM: 32GB: DDR5 (The baseline comfort zone for datasets up to 600–1,000 images). Caveat#1: Although I would recommend upgrading to 64GB.
STORAGE: 1TB NVMe SSD (Crucial because drone image processing reads/writes massive amounts of temporary cache files). Caveat#2: Although I would recommend upgrading to 2TB NVMe SSD
ESTIMATED COST: Generally scales between £1,200 and £1,600 UKP depending on seasonal Dell promotions and precise GPU choices.
Caveat#3: Then there is the gaming laptop option which tend to be much more powerful (and expensive) generally scaling between £1,200 and £2,000 UKP called Alienware (who were bought by Dell in 2006.
Drone photogrammetry software like DJI Terra and WebODM are incredibly resource-heavy.
DJI Terra strictly requires an NVIDIA GPU for its CUDA-based acceleration, and WebODM software scales significantly better with a high RAM capacity (64GB/+) and multi-core CPUs like Intel Core i9.
Sources: Dell.com / Dell Community Forums / FB__k and G___leAI
Hope all this is of some assistance / use for you.
This year I spent £1,700 building a ott (over the top) Desktop PC Core i9 - unlocked (overclocked & water cooled) to 5,5GHz - stable and the amount of heat produced raises my room temp. up another 3deg.C 
Mike
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Cheers Mike,
Yep, hammered myself on google AI and got very similar info to you. I don’t want to go for bare minimum specs as I understand how much this will bottleneck. Looking for a good compromise to be able to cover 50 acres at a time 2d thermal and standard mapping outputs. Going to keep digging.
Thanks for your help.
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