build photo editing computer

Sedko

Sedko

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Edit My Images
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Hi everyone
I would like to build new computer with all the specs required for smooth running photo editing software like lightroom and cs6...
Need some advice on where to buy parts...
My budget is around £700
Thank you

Also does anyone have experience with pc specialist site? They sell configured beasts
Thank you
 
I have just built a new PC for less than £500, The best thing about it is the Solid State Drive it is so much faster than a standard drive but they are expensive and you would need a large standard drive to store your photo's, I went for the intel i5 processor which is great, but you don't need any fancy graphics card for editing.
 
A 64 bit operating system and as much memory as you can find would be my suggestion.
 
livewires71 said:
I have just built a new PC for less than £500, The best thing about it is the Solid State Drive it is so much faster than a standard drive but they are expensive and you would need a large standard drive to store your photo's, I went for the intel i5 processor which is great, but you don't need any fancy graphics card for editing.
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I too have an Intel i5 processor and no graphics card, I'm very impressed with the performance.
 
I can also recommend scan. I bought a pc a about a year ago from them and have had no problems. I also got mine for photo editing. Included the following:

i5 processor
64 bit operating system
64 gb SSD
2tb Hard drive
16gb Ram
Nvidia graphic card

Runs like a dream. All for less than a £1000. If you get a standard graphics card and smaller hard drive you should be able to get something similar within budget. Monitor would be extra though.

Rich
 
I7k, OS and software Ssd, Ssd for caching and lots of ram, nvidia graphics cards do actually boost photoshop performance and Lightroom should follow. Novatech, scan and overclockers.
 
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twist said:
I7k, OS and software Ssd, Ssd for caching and lots of ram, nvidia graphics cards do actually boost photoshop performance and Lightroom should follow. Novatech, scan and overclockers.
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no point getting the i7, as photoshop/lightroom isn't hyper threaded so no use for the extra virtual cores- just get the i5 2500k and be done with it.
An SSD won't really speed up photoshop either, but it will work nicely as a scratch drive (a scratch drive not being the os drive), but what you need is ram ram ram
 
mrjames said:
no point getting the i7, as photoshop/lightroom isn't hyper threaded
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There is no such thing as software which is hyper-threaded. It is either single threaded (sequential) or multi-threaded. PS/LR is multi-threaded and it can use as many cores as you can give it.

Hyper threading is a hardware based technology to enable 1 core to do 2 things at once. Because of the way hyper threading works, you tend to get a 10-15% speed increase in most multi-threaded applications. There are some apps where you can get much more than this.

Whilst I would agree with your statement on getting an i7, it will be faster than an equivalent i5, but not by much.

Also, unless you are doing anything which is hardware accelerated with photoshop (only a few things are), graphics card choice is pretty irrelevant - anything current will do - including onboard graphics.
 
Sedko said:
Also does anyone have experience with pc specialist site?
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Yes they are very good, they built mine, i will dig the specs out and post later, but the main things are, running intel i7 quad core, with 16gb of RAM, expandable to 32gb, 1 TB hard drive, OS windows 7 64 bit, which make it fly, i run 2 monitors, with lightroom 4 on one, and CS6 on the other. For the tower it cost me about £760 :)
 
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Another vote for pcspecialist.

I've had a couple of desktops and a laptop from them. They have good after sales service too.
 
arad85 said:
There is no such thing as software which is hyper-threaded. It is either single threaded (sequential) or multi-threaded. PS/LR is multi-threaded and it can use as many cores as you can give it.

Hyper threading is a hardware based technology to enable 1 core to do 2 things at once. Because of the way hyper threading works, you tend to get a 10-15% speed increase in most multi-threaded applications. There are some apps where you can get much more than this.

Whilst I would agree with your statement on getting an i7, it will be faster than an equivalent i5, but not by much.

Also, unless you are doing anything which is hardware accelerated with photoshop (only a few things are), graphics card choice is pretty irrelevant - anything current will do - including onboard graphics.
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awesome, thanks for filling in the gaps of knowledge in my post

the 2500k is still the sweet spot in price/performance though- and you'd be better to spend the money you'd save from dropping the 2600k to the 2500k on extra ram. Although £700 is plenty to get the i7 to be honest



@arad85 I'm not that clued up on cs6 as I have no plans to upgrade any time soon, but the new mercury engine that does do gpu acceleration, filters and liquify will benefit from using a supported GPU- and as far as I know all versions of photoshop can access video card RAM
and doesn't integrated graphics utilise system ram? so having a dedicated gpu with ram on it would mean you have more system ram to play with (although not so much a problem now that we have so much ram in our systems)
best GPU to get would be something with 1gb of vram, but the speed really doesn't matter much.
 
mrjames said:
@arad85 I'm not that clued up on cs6 as I have no plans to upgrade any time soon, but the new mercury engine that does do gpu acceleration, filters and liquify will benefit from using a supported GPU- and as far as I know all versions of photoshop can access video card RAM
and doesn't integrated graphics utilise system ram? so having a dedicated gpu with ram on it would mean you have more system ram to play with (although not so much a problem now that we have so much ram in our systems)
best GPU to get would be something with 1gb of vram, but the speed really doesn't matter much.
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Generally, spot on. But the cost of using system ram is pretty much only the space - the effect on bandwidth is pretty minimal for most purposes.

Here is Adobes PS6 GPU acceleration FAQ: http://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/photoshop-cs6-gpu-faq.html
 
I got PC Specialist to build my PC for image editing and they were great. PC is superb and cost me £800 with 24" iiyama screen. I did have 1 issue that was quickly resolved. They are very professional. I built my own PC a few years ago and it was a complete nightmare, never again! It wasn't much cheaper either.

Budget for a screen calibrator.
 
AndyWest said:
I got PC Specialist to build my PC for image editing and they were great. PC is superb and cost me £800 with 24" iiyama screen. I did have 1 issue that was quickly resolved. They are very professional. I built my own PC a few years ago and it was a complete nightmare, never again! It wasn't much cheaper either.

Budget for a screen calibrator.
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Andy how much did your screen cailbrator cost you and what is involved?
 
zchan28 said:
Andy how much did your screen cailbrator cost you and what is involved?
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Around £100 and involves installing a probe via USB, placing the calibrator on the screen and running a program.

I've used it to calibrate all sorts including a couple of TVs (using a different program on the PC especially designed to do this).
 
I just recently upgraded my own PC with photo & video editing in mind. Some parts like hard drives i already had so I went for;

I7 3770k - £249.99
32gb ram 4*8gb 1600mhz £140
Gigabyte z77 upth4 mobo £155
2*120gb ssd drive £139.99 from PC world of all places!
Nvidia gtx580 £135 from eBay
Ocz 750w psu £60 pcworld again was cheapest!
Antec 300v2 case with USB 3 ports £55

I know this is above your budget of £700 but you would not need the gtx580 as its not really any quicker in photoshop than my old ati 6770 was. The ram is down to £130 now, you could save another £20 on the psu and case is anywhere from £10-£200 depending on preference. You could also go for 1 ssd drive for around 70 for 120gb and save some cash that way.

I also updated my camera card reader to a USB 3 model and this really improved import performance, especially on my uhs-1 cards. The motherboard also has 2 thunderbolt ports that I plan to use when the accessories for it come down to a reasonable price.
 
tonyk said:
I just recently upgraded my own PC with photo & video editing in mind. Some parts like hard drives i already had so I went for;

I7 3770k - £249.99
32gb ram 4*8gb 1600mhz £140
Gigabyte z77 upth4 mobo £155
2*120gb ssd drive £139.99 from PC world of all places!
Nvidia gtx580 £135 from eBay
Ocz 750w psu £60 pcworld again was cheapest!
Antec 300v2 case with USB 3 ports £55

I know this is above your budget of £700 but you would not need the gtx580 as its not really any quicker in photoshop than my old ati 6770 was. The ram is down to £130 now, you could save another £20 on the psu and case is anywhere from £10-£200 depending on preference. You could also go for 1 ssd drive for around 70 for 120gb and save some cash that way.

I also updated my camera card reader to a USB 3 model and this really improved import performance, especially on my uhs-1 cards. The motherboard also has 2 thunderbolt ports that I plan to use when the accessories for it come down to a reasonable price.
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that's some crazy/fast specs lol I'd like to upgrade mine to 32 gig ram, does it even make a big enough difference compared to 16 gig ram? what amount of RAM did you use before upgrading to 32?
 
I previously used 8gb ram on a intel q6600 system. I notice quite a bit of difference with 32gb particularly when editing large photo files with multiple layers as I can also leave other program's or music open in the background and not worry about ram etc.. I built it to last for quite a few years, I built my last system in 2007 and its still going now just suffers if I'm editing 1080p video.

Personally I would go for a base spec of i7 3770k, 16gb ram(32 if video editing), z77 d3h mobo, 120gb ssd. If you have no interest in games an ati gpu or nvidia gt650.
 
mrjames said:
no point getting the i7, as photoshop/lightroom isn't hyper threaded so no use for the extra virtual cores-
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I'm sorry but that's not true. It uses all 12 threads here. A threaded app will use all worker threads.. logical or physical if the OS supports it.
 
Pookeyhead said:
I'm sorry but that's not true. It uses all 12 threads here. A threaded app will use all worker threads.. logical or physical if the OS supports it.
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As I said above, it doesn't gain much from the logical threads. Try it: see what performance is like with hyperthreading turned off in the BIOS.
 
arad85 said:
As I said above, it doesn't gain much from the logical threads. Try it: see what performance is like with hyperthreading turned off in the BIOS.
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It may not be much quicker in Lightroom than a 3570k but its still quicker and makes more sense for the future updates and versions of Lightroom that will make full use of it. It will also be better for using multiple programs at once. In my opinion Lightroom 4 should be a lot faster than what it is no matter what CPU is in the PC, though that's a different discussion.
 
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tonyk said:
It may not be much quicker in Lightroom than a 3570k but its still quicker and makes more sense for the future updates and versions of Lightroom that will make full use of it.
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No, the point is LOGICAL threads don't speed up nearly as much as PHYSICAL threads. Look at the real world benchmarks for video encoding (which is about as parallel a task as you can get for a real application - i.e. not a benchmark) - the 4 core i7 is about 10-15% faster than the 4 core i5, so 4 LOGICAL cores give 15% more performance. A hex core i7 is close to 50% faster than a 4 core i7. Two real cores gives far more performance gain than 4 virtual ones....

I think it's a hardware architecture issue, not a badly written software issue (in fact, I'm 99.9% certain it isn't ;))
 
arad85 said:
No, the point is LOGICAL threads don't speed up nearly as much as PHYSICAL threads. Look at the real world benchmarks for video encoding (which is about as parallel a task as you can get for a real application - i.e. not a benchmark) - the 4 core i7 is about 10-15% faster than the 4 core i5, so 4 LOGICAL cores give 15% more performance. A hex core i7 is close to 50% faster than a 4 core i7. Two real cores gives far more performance gain than 4 virtual ones....

I think it's a hardware architecture issue, not a badly written software issue (in fact, I'm 99.9% certain it isn't ;))
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I agree that the extra cores of the hexcore chip will be so much better than the quad core i7 as they are "real" but that chip isn't in the op's budget. I think for the op budget £700 he would be better with i7, 32gb, ssd for os as should he start to ever use dslr video capabilities the extra threads and ram will come in handy compared to i5. That's not to say i5 are bad, far from it as they are very good cpu's.
 
tonyk said:
I think for the op budget £700 he would be better with i7, 32gb, ssd for os as should he start to ever use dslr video capabilities the extra threads and ram will come in handy compared to i5. That's not to say i5 are bad, far from it as they are very good cpu's.
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And what I am saying is that he won't notice a difference between 16G/i5 and 32G/i7 for 99.9% of cases (I occasionally do video editing and a lot of recoding and I can't ever remember going to swap which would indicate running out of real memory)...

I'd rather spend the extra on a second - fast and large - SSD for use as a working area.
 
arad85 said:
As I said above, it doesn't gain much from the logical threads. Try it: see what performance is like with hyperthreading turned off in the BIOS.
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Well. in fairness, what you said was it wasn't hyperthreaded so no point in getting a i7.

I've noticed considerable gains with certain tasks... particularly maths intensive ones such as massive burring tasks on very large files.

You mention 15%.. but I find it nearer 20% to be honest, and that's not to be sneezed at.. especially with video encoding, as 20% of one hour is 12 minutes saved on a large 1080P encode.

20% is massive.


Get the i7.
 
I don't think anybody is giving bad advice or anything like it, buts its easier to add an ssd at a later date than it is to add another CPU, especially if you consider cost. SSD are falling in price, 240gb for around £120-140 and could be £99 by years end. If he buys 16gb and its 4x4gb then it costs more to upgrade later. If the op goes 16gb and is only photo editing, then it makes sense, though i would go 2x8gb leaving upgrade options.
 
These people Very professional very competitive on price.

Got mine within your budget and it works very well for picture editing.
 
mrjames said:
the 2500k is still the sweet spot in price/performance though- and you'd be better to spend the money you'd save from dropping the 2600k to the 2500k on extra ram.
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Curious why you're recommending a 2nd generation Sandy Bridge part over 3rd generation Ivy Bridge chips? I'd look at the i5-3570 or similar.

Also I'd normally ignore the 'K' SKUs, not a fan of overclocking these days.
 
Thorburn said:
Also I'd normally ignore the 'K' SKUs, not a fan of overclocking these days.
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It's really easy to do on Sandy/Ivy and you get a significant boost almost for free (mine is o/c from 3.5->4.3) and since they speedstep, you only get the overclock when the processor is maxed out.

No idea why you'd go for Sandy over Ivy, but the sweet spot is, as mrjames pointed out, the i5 variant that you can overclock.
 
Know it's easy to do, but see too many systems which have minor issues due to overclocks.

Tipping point for me was when I left my old i7 system (i7-965 running at about 10% over stock) batching out video encodes for 24 hours. Came back the next day to find it bluescreened after 18 hours and all the videos had corruption artifacts and audio pops at random places - re-ran the batch again at stock and all came out flawlessly.

Total time I'd of saved from the overclock if it had worked was about 1 hour.

Used to be heavily in to it in the Pentium 4 days, had the worlds fastest system in 3D Mark 2001 at one point, phase-cooled system running at -40c, etc, and even in recent years have done LN2 and Liquid Helium testing, but modern chips are far more complex in terms of interactions between multiple cores, caches and the various clock domains, so there is far more to go wrong.
 
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Thorburn said:
Know it's easy to do, but see too many systems which have minor issues due to overclocks.
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This is unlikely to happen with Sandy/Ivy as all you are doing is adjusting the maximum CPU clock multiplier. Everything else stays at stock - including the memory subsystem (which is where I'd expect those recode issues would be introduced).

A 20% hike in performance is still a 20% hike in performance and it is effectively free on the Sandy/Ivy unlocked processors.
 
Thorburn said:
Know it's easy to do, but see too many systems which have minor issues due to overclocks.

Tipping point for me was when I left my old i7 system (i7-965 running at about 10% over stock) batching out video encodes for 24 hours. Came back the next day to find it bluescreened after 18 hours and all the videos had corruption artifacts and audio pops at random places - re-ran the batch again at stock and all came out flawlessly.

Total time I'd of saved from the overclock if it had worked was about 1 hour.

Used to be heavily in to it in the Pentium 4 days, had the worlds fastest system in 3D Mark 2001 at one point, phase-cooled system running at -40c, etc, and even in recent years have done LN2 and Liquid Helium testing, but modern chips are far more complex in terms of interactions between multiple cores, caches and the various clock domains, so there is far more to go wrong.
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thats why you should prime for at least 24 hours after an overclock :)

my i7-2600k oc to 4.4Ghz is rock solid :)
 
Tugster said:
Anyone else used these people ?
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It might be a bit late to come back to you on this. I have recommended PC Specialist many times over the years since I bought a few for my company before I retired. I know of at least 12 PC's since then, none of which have given any problems. I can't comment on support because as far as I have kept in touch with the buyers, none has been needed. These were all small business buyers who use PC's all day every day.

I hope this helps

Steve
 
Thanks for the reply Steve, unfortunately the upgrade cash has now been eaten up elsewhere.....I'll keep them in mind for when I am looking again
 
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