Examiners don’t usually build forensic machines and machine builders aren’t usually forensic examiners. We are forensic examiners who build machines. We only use top rated, high end hardware specific to the tasks and tools in your lab. Before you just pick something off the shelf, let us help you get the most out of your forensic tools.

Most forensic machines are built by companies that steer clear of PC gaming hardware and tell you it looks “tacky” in an office/lab environment. This limits them to certain hardware that may not use the full capabilities of high end PC components. We aren’t afraid of using the highest end gaming components and use the RGB LEDs to our advantage to alert you of hardware problems.

A lot of machine manufacturers will push dual Xeon or Threadripper products because of the high core count and threads for days. These products work well in server builds and specialized scenarios but not for the average Forensic Examiner. The typical products used (i.e. Magnet, Cellebrite, etc.) don’t need the massive amount of threads and cores in these processors. Lots of cores = Slower core speeds. Fewer cores = Faster core speeds. We can see speeds up to 6.0 Ghz in our current gen i9 processors compared to 3.x Ghz (or less) in the high core count models. Running these common forensic tools on our machines, we have tested both AMD Ryzen 9 (7950X) and Intel i9 (13900KF) processors against a well known forensic machine running a Threadripper (5995WX). The Ryzen/i9 builds blow the doors off the Threadripper. Also, of note, the Threadripper overheated several times during testing despite the builder installed water cooler. Other examiners have reported having to turn off “Turbo Boost” on their Threadripper machines to keep them from overheating. Threadrippers and Xeons are awesome processors and have their place, just not for the average Forensic Examiner running mainstream tools.

On a recent build, using one of the most popular forensic tools, we processed a 480 GB Windows 10 PC image and compared it to a regular, well known, off the shelf forensic machine. We were able to process the image nearly 5X faster at the same machine cost! Time is money and that’s a lot of money saved! You can be much more efficient when you have a machine built specifically for your needs instead of just finding one that will ‘mostly’ do the job.