In this video I’m talking high-performance workstations for photogrammetry and GIS analysis—specifically a workflow-first build for Agisoft Metashape + QGIS. This is one of the most data-intensive workloads I’ve specced: 750GB–1TB projects, thousands of RGB + multispectral drone images, and 6–8 jobs in flight. The whole point is to stop guessing and instead map each step of the pipeline (alignment, dense cloud, mesh, DEM, orthomosaic) to the hardware that actually matters, so you’re not sitting around for days waiting on the wrong bottleneck. I break down where Metashape leans GPU vs CPU, why I chose a Threadripper 7960X as the best price/perf balance (instead of just chasing more cores), and why I stick to reliable air cooling when I can. I also go deep on memory sizing—128GB of RDIMMs so RAM isn’t the thing that kneecaps you later—and on storage, because photogrammetry can absolutely I/O-stall. The clean solution here is PCIe 5.0 NVMe (Crucial T700) plus an ASUS Hyper M.2 x16 card for 8TB of ultra-fast active project storage, with room to expand. For GPU acceleration where it counts, I landed on an RTX 5080 as the sweet spot versus a 5090 at current pricing.