Need suggestions for workstation

[kedricm]

I'm currently a graduate student in the US. I'm in the market for a desktop workstation that can handle day-to-day tasks such as Office, Web browsing, etc. as well as analyzing large amounts of data on applications such as, MaxQuant, R, and Perseus. I would prefer a small-form factor, however, this is not a necessity. My upper budget limit is $1,500. 

Thank you in advance for you suggestions!

[TheGlenlivet]

Any idea what kind of hardware those applications need to work?  The websites are a little vague on the system requirements.

EDIT - Spelling

[kedricm]

@TheGlenlivet Thank you for your response. I have looked through documentation on both MaxQuant and Perseus and I agree there is little information regarding system requirements. Specifically for MaxQuant, you can specify the number of logical processors when doing data analysis and I have some general idea that this does help performance quite a bit. Based on the documentation, for each thread running in parallel a minimum of 2 GB of RAM is required per thread. This would indicate to me that having a higher thread count (currently running on an quad-core, eight thread MacBook Pro with 8 GB of ram) would be of great benefit, however, I'm just unsure where I should set the limit. I would love to build a Xeon-based workstation, however, these processors are quite pricey... 

 

[TheGlenlivet]

3 minutes ago, kedricm said:

@TheGlenlivet Thank you for your response. I have looked through documentation on both MaxQuant and Perseus and I agree there is little information regarding system requirements. Specifically for MaxQuant, you can specify the number of logical processors when doing data analysis and I have some general idea that this does help performance quite a bit. Based on the documentation, for each thread running in parallel a minimum of 2 GB of RAM is required per thread. This would indicate to me that having a higher thread count (currently running on an quad-core, eight thread MacBook Pro with 8 GB of ram) would be of great benefit, however, I'm just unsure where I should set the limit. I would love to build a Xeon-based workstation, however, these processors are quite pricey... 

 

Take a look at Threadripper processors from AMD.

There are 32 core processors out now and possible 64 coming later this year and they will support enough RAM to run that process.

I had a 16core running at full load for about a year with only breaks for OS updates.  They also support ECC ram depending on the motherboard you choose.