New computer and I am thinking of moving back to PC from Mac.

antc

antc

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Name
Anthony
Edit My Images
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Hi all,

Its coming time where i need to upgrade my computer. Its really starting to feel its age now for things, slow to edit large images and especially panoramas. I am running on a 2011 MBP which I have maxed the ram to 16gb and stuck an SSD inside.

Currently I don't like what I see in the world of mac any longer, the equivalent spec to my machine now seems to run at £2500 or so and is way more than I want to spend on a computer. Hence me looking back towards Windows. I think the other thing I am looking forward to its being able to spec the machine to exactly how I want it.

The machine is used for photo editing, PS and LR CC. And for usual admin stuff such as email, internet etc. When looking at building this new machine it would also be nice if it could game a little, although nothing super heavy as I have my Xbox1 for this purpose.

What would you guys suggest as an ideal spec for such a machine? I am thinking something like the following, but I last looked/specced something together about this time last year and I know the new kabylake processors are out now.

- CPU = 4/6core latest Intel i7 (much advantage to 6 core for my use?)

- 32gb Ram

- Asus x99-a motherboard

- m.2 ssd for boot drive. I am told these are blazing fast and much faster than standard ssd drives.

- GFX Card = now, as mentioned above, I would like if possible some gaming potential here. Also, multiple display connections. Now I have been out the loop a while with gfx cards, I see some now that can come with 3/4 display ports etc, and I use display port to connect my current monitor to my Mac which works great. If I got a card with 3/4 ports, does that mean for example, I could connect my current screen, and also perhaps a 40inch hd or uhd screen to watch tv or media while i work on my Benq screen?

- Monitor = I Use a BenQ SW2700PT photo editing monitor at present and I plan to continue to use this as I find it to be an excellent screen.

Now editing storage, I am thinking perhaps a pair of 512 ssd mirrored to store say the last 1 to 2 years of images on, so they are live, fast and so on. Then a pair of 3tb drives, again mirrored for archive to put on previous years images etc. To be clear, I am not using mirroring here as a backup, just if one drive fails I can continue and just get a replacement drive connected and rebuild the mirror.

Then I need to look at what I can use for a proper speedy backup solution.

Love to hear what you guys think and/or what you have done for yourselves?
 
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LR still doesn't take advantage of much multi-threading so the 6 or 8 core i7 won't make that much difference. It seems to be clock speed that makes the biggest difference. You can get a fast i5 processor for much less than the i7 ones. However, if you do lots of multi-tasking, the processor has more in reserve to do other demanding stuff at the same time.

M2 SSDs do have much faster data rates than normal ones, but in real life I haven't noticed any appreciable difference over my SATA Samsung Pro for editing work - maybe a fraction of a second moving from one RAW file to the next. The PC does boot about 3 or 4 seconds faster, and LR seems to open slightly faster. Nowhere near the difference than going from a traditional disk to SSD.

I also use dual discs in RAID for long term storage, but as this is mostly photos I've gone through before, and I'm not under pressure to process them quickly, I don't mind that it takes very slightly longer to open them, and I don't really notice once a catalogue is open and moving through the images. I would suggest not getting the dual SSDs, and spending the money on other things that make the computer nicer to use such as a well soundproofed case, all-in one water cooler for the CPU which will come into its own if you decide to overclock but allows for near silent running.

For graphics cards, Nvidia seem to have the upper hand at the moment and a 6gb 1060 card seems to be the sweet spot for performance against price, with the 1070 cards being as fast as the previous generation 980Ti models, but at a lower price with much cooler running. Unless you are into running the latest games at 4K, then there's no need to go for a higher specced 1080 or the Ti model which should be released soon.
 
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Lightroom absolutely is multi-core/thread capable. Especially during batch processing/exports. I can light up all 8 threads on my 2600k.

The usual advice seems to stand, at least a quad core, at least 16gb (32 may be a bit overkill for 90% of edits but it's futureproofing I guess), SSD for OS and programs, also SSD (doesn't have to be separate) for your LR cat and at least your current working set of images that can be moved off to spinning disks when completed. I wouldn't bother raiding SSD for your use as you say you'll be backing up to spinning media anyway.

GPU depends on what games really. even the intel CPU onboard GPU will handle up to 3 displays at 3840x2160 for 2D work (assuming you have 3 DP ports on the motherboard) but will start to struggle for 3D/games.
 
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So I have been thinking about my gaming requirement for this machine and decided against it, as in I will do my gaming on my xbox1. So the gaming requirement of this build is out. I will make the presumption at this stage it would be best to have some form of gfx card for the following reasons -

1. To give a number of ports to connect screens to. As mentioned, initially it will be to drive 1x27inch 2560x1440p screen, but would like the option of being able to add a second screen.
2. Because LR/PS would make good use of it?

What do you recommend and what do you guys use?
 
neil_g said:
Gaming at that res will need a hefty card. Something like a 980 or the newer 10 series.

Lightroom and PS not so much, most see benefit turning gpu acceleration off.
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Cheers Neil, so something fairly low key then by the sound of it, no big deal about LR/PS use of the card. I had been looking at the Radeon 480 cards as they seem to have 3/4 DP ports, but even now wondering if thats overkill. What would you get if you were me, for my uses?

I guess something else that just popped into my head also is that by having a much less beefy card, should help a long way to making the machine much quieter and also produce less heat? As one of the aims of my build will be to make it as silent, and cool running as possible.
 
Modern integrated graphics are pretty decent and will happily drive a couple of screens (assuming you get a half decent mobo) so it could be you don't need a graphics card at all.
 
Nawty said:
Modern integrated graphics are pretty decent and will happily drive a couple of screens (assuming you get a half decent mobo) so it could be you don't need a graphics card at all.
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So been having a brief look around this morning, a lot of the motherboards I have been looking at (unto around £300 or so) seem to have both a DP and HDMI port. Cant seem to find any that I have come across with dual DP. Are they common and I just haven't seen one? Or is DP+HDMI fine and will run a pair of 1440p screens no issues are we saying? I only have 1 screen at the mo and it may stay like that (2560x1440), or I may go for 2, or 1 1440 and one 1080.

Just asking as I have been out of the pc building game for just over 5 years now, although looking forward to jumping back in and customising a machine to my exact requirements :)
 
To be honest, I've been out of the PC building game for about 6 years so am totally out of touch and probably not much help to you - a quick google will tell you more than I know.

That said, if I were building a machine I would get a dedicated graphics card if for nothing more than freeing up the RAM for program usage.
 
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Morning all,

So had a little time to go through and come up with what I believe to be a decent spec for my new pc. Could I ask that you guys just take a look at it for me, make sure I haven't missed anything obvious, and if you think I have gone overkill on anything, or can suggest any areas of improvements, please feel free to comment and let me know.

Here is the spec I have come up with -

full


Regarding the lack of gfx card I have specced, as per discussions above someone kindly pointed out that the onboard ports dp or hdmi should have enough power to output what I need.

For the particular motherboard I have specced, it is capable of the following -

Onboard Graphics Outputs Integrated Graphics Processor
Multi-VGA output support : HDMI/DisplayPort ports
- Supports HDMI with max. resolution 4096 x 2160 @ 24 Hz
- Supports DisplayPort with max. resolution 4096 x 2304 @ 60 Hz
Maximum shared memory of 1024 MB

So am I correct in saying it can power both of these ports a the same same? Just to check.
 
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I'd probably save money on the case and water cooling unless there was a good reason to do so (I'd expect to pay £35 tops for a case unless they're a LOT more expensive than 5 years ago, and probably £35 for a decent heat sink & fan). I'd probably also have either a single 1TB SSD, or keep the Samsung 500GB & add a 2+TB HDD for image storage longer term.
 
ancient_mariner said:
I'd probably save money on the case and water cooling unless there was a good reason to do so (I'd expect to pay £35 tops for a case unless they're a LOT more expensive than 5 years ago, and probably £35 for a decent heat sink & fan). I'd probably also have either a single 1TB SSD, or keep the Samsung 500GB & add a 2+TB HDD for image storage longer term.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the suggestions Toni! :)
 
I agree with the person who said buy an i5 quad. There's not much value in a i7 from a LR/PS point of view. I'd buy a more silence-oriented case but that's just me. Power supply is a good choice.

You only need to think about a graphics card for gaming purposes, so I would suggest deciding what you want to play, and then getting advice in a games hardware forum as to the card needed, as these issues tend to have been well explored.

The forums at silentpcreview are generally a good source of hardware advice, as you can only make a machine quiet if it runs cool, for which it has to be efficient. So long-time posters on those forums tend to know what they are talking about :)
 
On the subject of Lightroom multithreading: Puget Systems (a company focused on high powered workstations) used last weeks AMD CPU release as a reason to do some Lightroom & Photoshop benchmarking.

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/a...15-8-AMD-Ryzen-7-1700X-1800X-Performance-910/
https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/a...2017-AMD-Ryzen-7-1700X-1800X-Performance-907/

The tl;dr is that for some stuff Adobe does manage to make use of extra cores but it's far from a linear-speedup. And there's lots of parts that are single-thread dominant. Certainly none of those numbers make me think Adobe are prpgramming-ninja when it comes to maximising parallel processes.

The AMD numbers don't look great but I'd ignore those for now; there's a lot of issues that need to get sorted (it seems that windows isn't currently doing a great job of assigning threads to cores, motherboard won't boot with faster memory dimms,..)
 
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I love building silent pcs. Have even built a 0db gaming machine (albeit low spec) with passive cooling on the cpu, psu and gpu.

Currently have a high end editing/gaming machine but it's silent in an ear to the case at midnight kinda way!

I used a bequiet dark rock pro 3 cpu cooler set to silent profile on motherboard.

Bequiet silent wings 3 case fans set to silent on mobo profile.

Bequiet psu

Asus Strix 1080 gpu which has 0db mode where fans don't spin up under normal use but do when gaming albeit fan profile is set so it's very quiet.
 
I think you're missing out by not haveing a Graphics card, Photoshop and lightroom are both heavy use on your graphics, as it uses it to speed up your workflow. The onboard one uses part of your RAM and for photos, you need as much RAM as possible, I also find that a small SSD for the scratch disk is also a good this.
I have just upgraded my Graphic card and after running some test Photoshop is now running faster.
AS far as a SSD for your boot drive, this will only mean PS starts quicker It will not make PS run any faster.
 
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Given that the OP is proposing to buy 32GB of RAM, which is probably about twice as much as he will ever use, I think we can relax about a gigabyte or two being used for graphics :) Agree about the SSD making a good scratch disk however.
 
dave.hallett said:
Given that the OP is proposing to buy 32GB of RAM, which is probably about twice as much as he will ever use, I think we can relax about a gigabyte or two being used for graphics :) Agree about the SSD making a good scratch disk however.
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but onboard graphics are not the best there is my new card needs two power lead on top of the MB supply
 
Chaz Photos said:
I think you're missing out by not haveing a Graphics card, Photoshop and lightroom are both heavy use on your graphics, as it uses it to speed up your workflow. The onboard one uses part of your RAM and for photos, you need as much RAM as possible, I also find that a small SSD for the scratch disk is also a good this.
I have just upgraded my Graphic card and after running some test Photoshop is now running faster.
AS far as a SSD for your boot drive, this will only mean PS starts quicker It will not make PS run any faster.
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I'm pretty sure your information about LR & PS using graphics is not correct. General user experience suggests current LR runs faster and more reliably with graphics acceleration turned off, and PS only uses graphics processing for a couple of functions. There may come a time when graphics card capabilities are used effectively, but that's not happened yet.

Regarding SSD, if used as a boot drive + place to store the images being worked on then image loading and saving will be quicker. Obviously it cannot affect the speed with which images are processed.
 
I feel the OPs pain. A year ago my graphics card went in my iMac and rather than spending so much on a new Mac, decided to go back to Windows. After getting used to Apple ways and getting out of using MS I dreaded it. Thankfully my issue was resolved as my card had a known fault on it and was subject to a free replacement.

I used Aperture to process workflow and realised that most of my pictures were going to be locked without getting another Mac. Now binned aperture and solely Use non Mac formats just in case. Be aware before you move - and have a look at your backups.

Finally, what does your Mac no longer do? When I looked at spec I realised that although tech does move on, new would not change my life that much. If it runs the software you plan to continue using, what will you gain?
 
ancient_mariner said:
I'm pretty sure your information about LR & PS using graphics is not correct. General user experience suggests current LR runs faster and more reliably with graphics acceleration turned off, and PS only uses graphics processing for a couple of functions. There may come a time when graphics card capabilities are used effectively, but that's not happened yet.

Regarding SSD, if used as a boot drive + place to store the images being worked on then image loading and saving will be quicker. Obviously it cannot affect the speed with which images are processed.
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From Adobe:-
GPU preferences
Photoshop provides you with dedicated GPU settings in both the Performance and 3D sections in the Preferences dialog.

Settings in the Performance section

If a suitable video card is installed on your system, it will appear in the GPU Settings area of the Performance section.

  • To enable GPU acceleration, make sure that the Enable OpenGL Drawing option is selected.
  • To fine-tune the card’s performance, click the Advanced Settings button and select Basic, Normal, or Advanced, matching the option with your requirements.
    • Basic—Uses the least amount of GPU memory to run the most basic OpenGL features when sharing the GPU with other applications or when experiencing slow responsiveness. Select this option if you have other programs running that also use the GPU or if you notice bad screen redraws or slower performance when using GPU-accelerated features.
    • Normal—Is the default setting. It uses a large amount of GPU memory to support advanced OpenGL features and should be selected if you regularly use the GPU-accelerated features in Photoshop.
    • Advanced—Uses the same amount of memory as the Normal mode, but enables more advanced features to improve drawing performance. This setting is best when working in 3D or when working extensively with the GPU-accelerated features.
For more info to get best settings look here https://helpx.adobe.com/photoshop/kb/optimize-photoshop-cc-performance.html#set-graphics-processor
 
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I was aware that claims had been made for GPU acceleration, but the experience of users on the forum has been that it actually slows things down compared to running without.
 
It looks damned expensive (in total cost - not on a like-for-like basis) but should go like stink.
 
For what its worth my thoughts are for 1400 odd quid I would want a 512GB m.2 rather than the 256GB and a 1050Ti (extra £36 4GB v 2GB GPU memory). But at that price I think I would be looking for something cheaper either building myself or looking to see what Ryzen systems start coming through.
 
ancient_mariner said:
It looks damned expensive (in total cost - not on a like-for-like basis) but should go like stink.
Click to expand...

Suomi said:
For what its worth my thoughts are for 1400 odd quid I would want a 512GB m.2 rather than the 256GB and a 1050Ti (extra £36 4GB v 2GB GPU memory). But at that price I think I would be looking for something cheaper either building myself or looking to see what Ryzen systems start coming through.
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Thanks chaps. I think I will have a look at costing up a similar system myself, I got no issues building it as I used to do this before I went to mac in the first place. There were a few alterations I wanted to make to that system anyhow, like having a pair of 2 or 3 tb drives rather than 1tb, and perhaps 32 instead of 16gb ram and like you say maybe beef up the gfx card for a few quid.
 
Ok, had a bit of spare time last night so I hope you don't mind. Taking your wants and a £1400 budget had a play in pcpartpicker and came up with this (if the links work):

[URL='https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/kDW8vV']PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant[/URL]

[URL]https://uk.pcpartpicker.com/list/kDW8vV

The cpu is not the most top end, but should get the job done. Plus, being a non-K chip should come with a cooler so saving about £20. There only 16GB of ram, you can always add another 16GB later if you feel you need it. At time when I went to 32GB ram was a lot cheaper (and so were SSDs and HDDs) while there is a change in going from 16 to 32 it is not really noticeable in LR time wise.

Overclockers currently have WD Blue 2TB for £68 each so swapping the ones in the list for these would save £50.[/URL]
 
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I was in the same position - owning a Macbook, I just found it was too underpowered for my needs. Instead of upgrading to a very expensive MBP, I ended up going for a relatively cheap desktop pc - HP ProDesk 400 G3 SFF Desktop, Intel Core i7-6700 3.4GHz, 4GB RAM, 128GB SSD, DVDRW, Intel HD, Windows 7 + 10 Professional 64.

I got mine for £400 odd, and upgraded to 16GB RAM for about £80. Performance is much more acceptable, and only takes time when processing HDR when there are more than 3 pictures to match up. Might not be the highest of spec parts - but it's a good enough workhorse for processing my new images.
 
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