New PC ordered... hopefully an OK spec for photo editing?

pjm1

pjm1

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Paul
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I probably should have posted this before clicking "submit" on the order, but I'm impulsive that way, sometimes.

Current PC is an aging ultrabook - pretty slow in all respects, but portable. I need (well, want) a new workstation for... erm... work and, surprise surprise, a decent chunk of photo editing (PS, LR, maybe some occasional panorama stitching). I decided against simply upgrading the laptop - instead spending about £600 on a new small tower desktop. I have an unused Win 7.1 64bit disk from when I was planning to build a system a year ago, so I only need the black box (I also have a 24" IPS display). I've gone for:

Intel i7-4790K quad core
16GB RAM
120GB SSD for OS & apps
1TB secondary HDD for storage (will be backed up to a pre-existing NAS)
Onboard graphics
Nothing else!

I'm thinking the pretty speedy Haswell refresh CPU should do the job with Photoshop and LR both being multithreaded apps. Aside from the AMD Piledriver CPUs it seems very good bang for buck towards the upper end of available performance today - and should be significantly more powerful than the Piledriver (but about 2-2.5x more expensive). Given my need for a decent wedge of RAM and SSD+HDD, I thought an extra £100 or so on a reasonably high-end CPU would be worth it. I do usually have Excel, Outlook and maybe Word/Powerpoint open at the same time as using PS/LR as I find I can justify mucking around with photos far more when I'm multitasking with work... :)

Any views on whether I've missed anything key? Or way overspecced on anything? I realise the CPU is probably overkill, but I'm dying for my PS to be less laggy than it currently is...

I don't game (although I guess we should never say never...)
 
neil_g said:
sounds good to me. unless you have a specific requirement for GPU acceleration (pretty pointless anyway for photo editing - dons flame suit).
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Thanks Neil... I managed to squeeze it all into a £600 budget (ok, I think I went about £10 over). Obviously not having to shell out for an OS or monitor (as well as keyboard, mouse & optical drive all sitting here waiting) definitely helped. It really is amazing the quality of kit you can pick up for relative pennies nowadays. It seems that spending £1k+ on PCs is pretty much reserved for gamers now?

Having just saved £45/month on my Sky subscription, I reckon it won't be long before I make the leap to Adobe CC Photographer's Pack. My current PS version is very old! I'll wait until I get my new toy first, though...
 
What PS version are you on? If its lower than CS4 then you may find that it doesnt run much faster. mainly because CS3 was 32bit only and cant use all of the RAM available, this generally makes it significantly slower. CS4 and above are all 64bit and can access as much RAM as you can throw at it.
 
Good point - yes, it's an old 32-bit version. I'd have thought the new PC should still run it a decent amount faster than my current i3-Ultrabook clocked at 1.8GHz. I don't really have an issue biting the bullet and upgrading to CC given it's less than £9/month but will probably wait until the new PC is set up and running. I might also order a graphics tablet first... since I need to sign documents for work I think I can still argue it's a business expense ;)
 
Similar point, but just in case you were going to recycle an old Windows installation, again make sure its x64, otherwise, maximum addressable memory for the OS will be about 3.2Gb! I'd personally recommend Win 7 Home Premium, which is a lot more stable than XP but still has the Start button.
 
Achitophel said:
Similar point, but just in case you were going to recycle an old Windows installation, again make sure its x64, otherwise, maximum addressable memory for the OS will be about 3.2Gb! I'd personally recommend Win 7 Home Premium, which is a lot more stable than XP but still has the Start button.
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Yup... good point but this is an as-yet unopened Win 7 SP1 64-bit disk. It is, coincidentally, the Home Premium version rather than Pro... I thought I had wasted £80 or however much I spent on it when I never got round to building a new PC, but better late than never!

Laptop is Win 8 and I can't say I've ever really loved it. Even though I've put the Start button back, it just feels odd. And that's after 2 years of using it every day!
 
Ok, new PC is in the process of being built, so I'm assured. Hopefully only be a few days before it's sitting under my desk.

So I'll be going from a laptop with a dual-core i3-3217U @ 1.8GHz, 4MB RAM and a 320GB 5400rpm HDD to an i7 with 4 cores @ 4GHz, 16MB and SSD+7200rpm HDD. I reckon in theory I should see close to 4x performance with the new rig, but I guess real world increases might be slightly lower, especially since all 8 threads are unlikely to be fully utilised even under heavy load?

The biggest hurdle will be keeping my install of Windows clean and clutter-free. Does anyone dual-boot and have a "fast/minimal" install and a "bloatware" install? I could potentially reserve the former for just Office, LR + PS and minimal printer driver... might prevent it from becoming too cluttered but is that more trouble than it's worth, in practice?
 
I just don't install bloatware at all! I use quite a wide range of software, but the last time I reinstalled windows was because I was installing my SSD, not to clean it up.
 
neil_g said:
just dont install crap you dont need :)
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miker said:
I just don't install bloatware at all! I use quite a wide range of software, but the last time I reinstalled windows was because I was installing my SSD, not to clean it up.
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You're both spot on of course. The problem I find I have is "oh, I just need to convert this file from <xxx> format to <yyy>..." so I download, say, a music file conversion tool which then sends me off thinking about what music player I use... I try a few etc. etc. Media players, HTPC stuff etc. are the worst culprits for me. As well as panorama stitchers, image browsers etc.

Before I know where I am, I have half a dozen new apps installed which I've then forgotten about in 2 weeks time.

I'm thinking I should probably set up VMWare or similar to have a small virtual install just for cr@p that I might only want to run a few times. It'll be limited to accessing its own version of the OS etc., so won't bloat out my "proper" install. If it is file conversion etc. then it will obviously still have access to the files my main install has.

Back to the main theme: my new PC has just been finished so is winging its way to me now. Rather frustratingly, I had a last-minute change of heart last night, thinking I should perhaps change motherboard (to a Z97) and double the size of the SSD and HDD... which is obviously not going to happen given my newly built box left the workshop this morning!
 
pjm1 said:
Before I know where I am, I have half a dozen new apps installed which I've then forgotten about in 2 weeks time.
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You do know about Start->Control Panel->Programs and Features don't you. You can use that (and run->msconfig) to control what you do and don't have installed and running....
 
arad85 said:
You do know about Start->Control Panel->Programs and Features don't you. You can use that (and run->msconfig) to control what you do and don't have installed and running....
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:D

Knowing about something and actually getting off one's backside and doing it are two different things for me, sadly! It's weird as I'm quite tidy with my computer (filing, organisation etc.) but when it comes to installing/uninstalling, I'm just a complete mess. Sometimes I'll spend an entire weekend reinstalling and reconfiguring partitions etc. for some (but ultimately, limited) gain but for the rest of the year I'll just clutter...

Eventually it gets to the point where I throw my toys out and wipe the OS disk. I'm doing that big time this time around by even having a shiny new box!

The attraction of a VM setup is that every six months I can just delete the VM file and create a new one, without affecting my "working" OS. The question is: can I keep my working OS clean?? :oops: :$
 
I've got tons and tons of software installed on my PC - Adobe CC (PS CC, LR, Premier, Bridge, etc), a stack of games, Office 365, Visual Studio 2013, Hyper-V, etc - and it runs fine.

Software that's installed but not running doesn't do anything but occupy disk space - and with 3TB online, I'm not worried about that. Since Windows 7, Windows doesn't "rot" like it used to.

I do pay attention to my startup, though. Lots of products like to insert things in your startup sequence.
 
pwhysall said:
I've got tons and tons of software installed on my PC - Adobe CC (PS CC, LR, Premier, Bridge, etc), a stack of games, Office 365, Visual Studio 2013, Hyper-V, etc - and it runs fine.

Software that's installed but not running doesn't do anything but occupy disk space - and with 3TB online, I'm not worried about that. Since Windows 7, Windows doesn't "rot" like it used to.

I do pay attention to my startup, though. Lots of products like to insert things in your startup sequence.
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Thanks Peter... that's good to know. Everything I read about Win 7 says it's such an improvement over the old OSes. Apparently Win 8 which I've been using for the last couple of years is better again, but I can't say I've found that. Anyway, I don't want to open a 7 vs 8.1 debate!

The good news is I'm typing this on my new PC. After a bit of a struggle getting the Win 7 installation to see a USB DVD drive (I gave up and created a bootable USB win 7 install... these photo memory cards have their uses!) it was pretty straightforward. If I want to overclock properly I'll need to get a new cooler (I can get up to 4.4GHz with stock) but other than that, it's good to go.

And it's blazingly fast. Ridiculously blazingly fast. I need to do some disk imaging and setting up of backups now (and some continued data migration) but booting up, starting apps and running stuff is a wonderful experience. It was also nice to run the Windows "rating" and get 7.9s for everything except graphics.
 
Nice setup - depending on your m/b overclocking is easier to do these days most have a one button OC , ive just upgraded to this bad boy http://www.bequiet.com/en/cpucooler/446

If you go down this road, just make sure you dont have high profile memory as it does over hang, thou keeps cpu really cool fan on cooler never really gets moving as fins do the job.

At same time, put in a GTX660 card, (for the sake of £135) good to get a few hours playing Battlefield, for when ps gets too much haha
 
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You may wish to check your CPU supports Hyper-v. Some new Haswel chips support virtulisation where are intels general rule of thumb is 'K' chips don't.
 
To be honest, OCing probably isn't going to make much difference for me. I rarely see even a single core running up at 100% for any length of time and with more applications being better able to handle multithreading, I can't really see the processor being the bottleneck in my system. The next upgrade I'll probably consider will (in due course) be a second, perhaps 500GB, SSD. That way I can migrate much more of my data across, whilst still having catalogue and scratch/page files on a separate disk.

I'd be interested to do a bit of research on how best to set up OS/Apps/scratch/data across two SSDs as most of the thinking has tended to focus on having a single (and limited size) SSD.

For now though, the processor and 16GB RAM is certainly more than enough for my needs. I opened up a 2GB file in PS the other day and it flew on absolutely everything I chucked at it except saving the file (which was to HDD rather than SSD). Pretty impressed, to be honest...
 
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You only need VT-d when you are running a type 1 hypervisor (AKA bare metal hypervisor) AND want to do hardware pass through. In addition, your motherboard also needs to support VT-d in the BIOS. Most mobo's don't support VT-d. All modern CPUs that have anything more than a chipmunk powering it will support virtual machines whilst running a full OS (also termed type 2 hypervisors) though.

I run two type 1 hypervisor boxes here - both running ESXi - one is fully VT-d capable, the other isn't. I haven't used VT-d at all yet (and can't really see when I would want to unless running my fileserver as a node on a virtualising server - which I'm not about to do any day soon....)
 
As I said above Neil, almost anything supports virtualisation these days. There's a lot of confusion between virtualisation in general and VT-d which is a specific subset of functionality and is generally not supported on K processors. You can virtualise on K processors (I have done on mine), just not doing hardware passthrough (except the latest 4790K apparently!).
 
Well, back to current tasks... machine is still working well but, bloomin' heck, Photoshop's "Surface Blur" algorithm is slow! All eight "CPUs" maxed out at around 90-100% for about 30 seconds... OK, I was editing in 16 bit mode, but still?

I might have to try to find an alternative method for smoothing out skin blotches.
 
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