mtdmitchell Posted June 8, 2010 Posted June 8, 2010 I’m going to build the wife a nice pc for around £500-£600, not having built one or kept up to date with the latest components for a few years .I’ve spent a few days with my best friend Google trying to find out the sort of spec I should go for, here's what I’m thinking: AMD Athlon II X4 Quad Core 630 2.80GHz (Socket AM3) Gigabyte GA-770TA-UD3 (Socket AM3) PCI-Express DDR3 Motherboard Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB SATA-II 32MB Cache - OEM (HD103SJ) x 3 Asus GeForce GT 220 1024MB DDR2 PCI-Express Graphics Card Corsair XMS3 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit (CMX4GX3M2A1600C9) LG GH22NS50 22x DVD±RW SATA ReWriter (Black) - OEM Win 7 64bit That alone comes to about £520 (not including the Win 7 cost) and I still need to buy a PSU, Case and few cables etc. I’m not sure if I should go for raid or just simply use another drive for backups. The PC will be used for Lightroom and Photoshop only- she recently imported 1500 photos from an all day wedding so the pc needs to be quick to copy this volume of raws and render them. Do I even need a quad core? Does lightroom\Photoshop harness the technology? I would be interested to hear from any photographers and the spec of your rigs.
srochford Posted June 9, 2010 Posted June 9, 2010 More RAM! 4Gb doesn't feel like enough if you're going to be working with multiple RAW images. Definitely need a good backup system - that disc will fail at some point (not because it's a Samsung but because that's what happens to spinning discs!) and there's not going to be happiness if the pictures are lost :-) Photoshop can use multiple cores (John Nack on Adobe: What's the story with Photoshop & multi-core?) but I think that whether you benefit depends on what you are doing - some stuff won't be improved by multicore but would be better with faster discs.
broc Posted June 9, 2010 Posted June 9, 2010 As srochford says, Photoshop is CPU & memory intensive and can exploit multi-core systems. I bought a cheap DELL Optiplex Q6600 with 8gb memory and stuck 3x HDD in it, one for the system and a RAID1 pair for data, both of which are backed up to my Homeserver. I am running Windows 7 64 bit.
danrhodes Posted June 9, 2010 Posted June 9, 2010 I have 12GB DDR3 2133Mhz in my PC and when I'm working with multiple RAW Files from my 1D I end up using most of it! CS4 is very RAM and CPU Hungry. D
mtdmitchell Posted June 9, 2010 Author Posted June 9, 2010 your probably right i need at least 6GB and probably raid now, cant see me sticking with this £600 budget.
mtdmitchell Posted June 9, 2010 Author Posted June 9, 2010 "picks himself up of the floor" and shouts how much for 12 GB ram!! is it over kill though? my wife has been using a laptop core 2 duo and 4 GB ram for the last year or so with no problems
mtdmitchell Posted June 9, 2010 Author Posted June 9, 2010 Light room is the main software used, photoshop is only used for stuff Lightroom cannot do
K.C.Leblanc Posted June 9, 2010 Posted June 9, 2010 (edited) I'm running CS3 with 2GB on a single core machine, I am however fairly patient. I think an upgrade is in order. What do people do about backing up their photos, at the moment I just copy them to a spare harddrive. Edited June 9, 2010 by K.C.Leblanc
danrhodes Posted June 9, 2010 Posted June 9, 2010 (edited) "picks himself up of the floor" and shouts how much for 12 GB ram!! is it over kill though? my wife has been using a laptop core 2 duo and 4 GB ram for the last year or so with no problems My Pc is a bit OTT I must Admit! Intel i7 965 3.2Ghz - Intel® Core 12GB Hyper-x DDR3 2133Mhz - Kingston Technology Company - HyperX DDR3 - Raid1 for System Drive Raid5 for my Data Drive using 1TB Seagate Disks. Its a good partnership, and lightening quick! D Edited June 9, 2010 by danrhodes
K.C.Leblanc Posted June 9, 2010 Posted June 9, 2010 My Pc is a bit OTT I must Admit! Intel i7 965 3.2Ghz - Intel® Core 12GB Hyper-x DDR3 2133Mhz - Kingston Technology Company - HyperX DDR3 - Its a good partnership! D That and a 1D!!
mtdmitchell Posted June 9, 2010 Author Posted June 9, 2010 I'm running CS3 with 2GB on a single core machine, I am however fairly patient. I think an upgrade is in order. What do people do about backing up their photos, are the moment I just copy them to a spare harddrive. i got Jacked!
mtdmitchell Posted June 9, 2010 Author Posted June 9, 2010 My Pc is a bit OTT I must Admit! Intel i7 965 3.2Ghz - Intel® Core 12GB Hyper-x DDR3 2133Mhz - Kingston Technology Company - HyperX DDR3 - Raid1 for System Drive Raid5 for my Data Drive using 1TB Seagate Disks. Its a good partnership, and lightening quick! D how fast do the images rendor?
danrhodes Posted June 9, 2010 Posted June 9, 2010 Depends what I'm doing, I can pretty much render and Filter or Effect onto a RAW file within a few seconds. Even a 100% Radial Blur with all the bells and whistles takes only 10 - 15 seconds which is rather quick! D
RinSewand Posted June 9, 2010 Posted June 9, 2010 I'd be tempted to go down the Intel route for a bit more grunt... i5 - 750 Gigabyte GA-P55M-UD2 Then throw as much ram as possible. Personally I wouldn't bother with raid for reduncancy, but feel free to use it for speed, I'd just backup to a different phsyical disc. RwD
mtdmitchell Posted June 9, 2010 Author Posted June 9, 2010 Depends what I'm doing, I can pretty much render and Filter or Effect onto a RAW file within a few seconds. Even a 100% Radial Blur with all the bells and whistles takes only 10 - 15 seconds which is rather quick! D dare i ask how much your rig cost?
danrhodes Posted June 9, 2010 Posted June 9, 2010 Honestly I don't know it must be a fair old amount. If you really want to test your CPU and Photoshop try using Photoshop Benchmark V3
danrhodes Posted June 9, 2010 Posted June 9, 2010 I'd be tempted to go down the Intel route for a bit more grunt... i5 - 750 Gigabyte GA-P55M-UD2 Then throw as much ram as possible. Personally I wouldn't bother with raid for reduncancy, but feel free to use it for speed, I'd just backup to a different phsyical disc. RwD Agreed, if you don't want to re-mortgage then the i5 is a cracking chip get some good dual channel RAM and some fast Storage and you'l be away, I used to have an i5 750 before I upgraded, and can vouch for them being a good bit of kit, they run cool too, especially when used with a http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/prods/Components/Cooling/CPUCoolers/ArcticCooling/AC-FRZ-XTR2.html which is also what I now use on the i7 :-) D
mtdmitchell Posted June 9, 2010 Author Posted June 9, 2010 okay now with some good advise i have revised my budget and so far have the following Intel Core i5 750 2.66GHz (Lynnfield) (Socket LGA1156) - Retail + Napoleon Total War Corsair XMS3 8GB (4x2GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit (CMX4GX3M2A1600C9) Gigabyte GA-P55M-UD2 Intel P55 (Socket 1156) DDR3 microATX Motherboard
mtdmitchell Posted June 9, 2010 Author Posted June 9, 2010 How about these for drives? i would have to change the board though, is the SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache a worthy purchase Western Digital Caviar Black 640GB SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache - OEM (WD6402AAEX) [] Internal Hard Drives SATA-II 450GB - 800GB i was thinking 4 of these running raid 5 also two drives running raid 1 for the OS
danrhodes Posted June 9, 2010 Posted June 9, 2010 Sounds good, with those disk in Raid 5 you would have 1.78TB to play with! Make sure you get uber fast drives for the OS Raid1! Also make sure your mobo supports the 6GB/s Aata, I'd say its a worthy purchase as its doubling your max throughput and as your going to be working with big files it seems resonable! D
broc Posted June 9, 2010 Posted June 9, 2010 Before you get too hung up about 6gb SATA interfaces, see if you can find out what benchmarked data rates are for the drives..... I doubt they are capable of sustained data rates that come anywhere close... the interface may peak at 6gb/s when handing commands & transferring data to and from cache but drive latency will still be the limiting factor.
dhicks Posted June 9, 2010 Posted June 9, 2010 I’m not sure if I should go for raid or just simply use another drive for backups. I use an external RAID-1 box - a box, connected via eSATA, that holds two SATA drives that mirror each other, so you can one out as a backup. It's a handy device, although the fan on it does make a bit of a racket. The PC will be used for Lightroom and Photoshop only- she recently imported 1500 photos from an all day wedding so the pc needs to be quick to copy this volume of raws and render them. As well as RAM, Photoshop can utilise a separate, dedicated disk as a "scratch" disk. I don't know what's better / faster / better value, an extra drive or extra RAM, though. -- David Hicks
RinSewand Posted June 9, 2010 Posted June 9, 2010 I'd suggest that more RAM would be an improvement over a scratch disk, especially if a raided disk set is being used anyway. I may be wrong though, and I'd say Lightroom is a deffinate RAM over HDD. 1
danrhodes Posted June 9, 2010 Posted June 9, 2010 (edited) I'd go with extra RAM, as Photoshop uses the scratch disk if it does not have enough RAM to work with, a bit like virtual Memory I suppose! This seems quite usefull - http://photoshopninja.com/application-setup/making-the-most-of-your-photoshop-scratch-disk/ D Edited June 9, 2010 by danrhodes 1
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