Ultimate PowerBi/DAX computer build

[Anonymous]

Hello there,

I am wondering, I recently created a number of quite heavy load measures over a DirectQuery to our transaction table and my BI ground to a halt,.. stutterd and crashed.

I am wondering, what would be the ultimate build of a PC to run DAX. That is to manipulate data, apply changes, have a look at how it works out in the visual and open de query editor again. I have read that DAC mostly runs on a single core for its calculations. That would mean that CPU clockspeed and maybe RAM size would be most important, however I cannot find any builds of PC´s online that focus on data processing. 

That could be because the key is just to write your DAX formulas right and the processing speed of your PC does not matter.

Please let me know your thoughts!

Thomas

[Greg_Deckler · Accepted solution]

@Anonymous - I would have to say #1 is memory. The amount of memory in your machine is going to dictate how big your data models are and what operations DAX will and will not be able to perform on that data. Since everything is done in memory for the most part, CPU speed, disk IOPS, etc. are very much secondary. Jam as much memory as you can into a machine. I once built 4 servers that each had a Terabyte of memory each for a very similar reason. 600+ GB SQL database, could all be put into memory. Geo-clustered between 2 locations with local redundancy. Nifty. And blazingly fast.

[Anonymous]

Sick! But so if it is memmory you need you could reason that hiring a server would solve any problems. I run a:

- Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-8650U CPU @ 1.90GHz, 2112 Mhz, 4 Core(s)

- (RAM) 16,0 GB

and so if i need more processing power I should just build my model in a AWS server no and run it from there?

Because I guess that once I calculate all the DAX I can just access the report via the webclient || download the whole file back to my local machine and run the filters on that correct?

Thomas