Recommendations for fast PC

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In general yes that will give the most performance. If you overclock your machine up the ying-yang like I do make sure it's stable before trying to compile designs on it :)

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!!! Make sure your heat sinks & fans are free of dust. Long compiles in Quartus can really heat things up. For me, I went with this 50$ gaming mid-tower case: IN WIN Griffin Black ATX Gaming Case (Google it for photos & vendors.) The 1 huge fan on the case is really effective.

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I'm not a proponent of overclocking. PCs give me enough headaches with stable hardware....

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Ok, here is the poor mans way to shorten compile time:

1. Use Q2 9.1sp2, or, Q11 32 bit. (Q10 64 bit is slower)

2. Run your prototype project at a lower frequency & higher speed grade & gate count FPGA with these settings in Q2:

Physical Synthesis Optimizations -> all off (affects the fitter compile time)

Analysis & Synthesis Settings -> disable Timing Driven Synthesis.

More Analysis & Synthesis Settings / Synthesis Effort -> Fast (affects analysis & synthesis time, If your project uses a huge number of logic cells as memory arrays and your Fmax is really bad, keep this in auto)

Fitter Settings / Fast fit. Fitter Settings / placement effort & Router effort -> 0.25

Fitter Settings / Router timing optimization level -> Minimum

Fitter Settings / SSN optimizations -> off

If you are using logic cells as memory arrays, this also slows down compilation by a considerable amount.

Note on my current project, filling 50% of an EP3C55, I went from 10 minutes to 7 minutes with these settings. After overclocking only my PC's ram modules & disabling Windows's virtual file, the 7 minutes went down to 4 minutes.

Also note that overclocking your CPU or bus speed has very little effect.

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!!! Make sure your heat sinks & fans are free of dust. Long compiles in Quartus can really heat things up. For me, I went with this 50$ gaming mid-tower case: IN WIN Griffin Black ATX Gaming Case (Google it for photos & vendors.) The 1 huge fan on the case is really effective.

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Fan filters help a lot to help keep the dust out. My machine is liquid cooled so dust bunnies don't scare me :)

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- RAM : I think qdr (quadruple data rate)-DRAM correctly used in windows will help

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I have never seen a PC with QDR RAM. A quick Google search didn't reveal anything either. Do you know any examples you could post links to?

As others have stated in this thread, my experience has been that memory bandwidth is one of the most important things to improve compile times in Quartus. It seems that QDR RAM could make a big difference here.

Some other observations I have made:

• The 32bit version of Quartus is generally faster than the 64 bit version. I assume this is due to the extra memory bandwidth required for the larger memory pointers required for 64 bit.

• Enabling multicore in Quartus does not always speed up the process and can in some cases even slow it down. (When compiling C code such as for Nios on the other hand, multicore makes a huge difference.)

Additional poor-man's method compile speedup trick:

Use 'Classic timing analyser' in Q91sp2. The fitter will run about 50% faster & might give you a better Fmax depending on your design.

It's interesting that Quartus 32 bit is regarded as faster than Quartus 64 bit.

As memory bandwidth and clock speed seem to be the key hardware specs, the i7-2600K seems to be top trumps. It's rated at 3.8GHz (boost, but I assume it can run continuously with enough cooling) and supports DDR3-1066/1333 memory. It also supports something called intel® fast memory access (http://www.intel.com/en_uk/consumer/products/processors/specifications.htm?proc=52214#fastmemorytechnology)

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I have never seen a PC with QDR RAM. A quick Google search didn't reveal anything either. Do you know any examples you could post links to?

As others have stated in this thread, my experience has been that memory bandwidth is one of the most important things to improve compile times in Quartus. It seems that QDR RAM could make a big difference here.

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Sorry for inconvenience. I saw quad data rate memory but it is for static ram only.

src : http://www.qdrconsortium.org/