Computer Constructions

PLEASE DO THE SURVEY, SO THAT WE CAN SEE AT A GLANCE WHERE RESPONDENTS ARE AT! You may choose multiple answers.

 

We have a lot of discussion about "digital darkroom" and various software to organize and process/edit images--yet rarely is there any discussion of the hardware platform we are doing that upon!

 

My first 'build' was with the Intel 486 processor--and a parts company called Egghead. This is not to say that previously I had not upgraded my workstation. The first jumps were with a Compaq Portable Plus. Then there were addons and updates to the Compaq 386. My latest build this year is as follows:

• MSI - MPG Z490 GAMING EDGE WIFI+Bluetooth motherboard
   
  
• Intel Core i7-10700K Comet Lake Gen 10 8-Core 16 Thread, 3.8 GHz LGA 1200 processor
   
  
• G.SKILL TridentZ Series 64GB (4 x 16GB) 288-Pin DDR4 SDRAM DDR4 3200 memory
   
  
• SAMSUNG 970 EVO M.2 2280 1TB PCIe Gen3. X4, NVMe 1.3 64L V-NAND 3-bit MLC Internal Solid State Drive
   
  
• Intel Optane Memory M.2 2280 32GB PCIe NVMe 3.0 x 2 (for D:/ drive)
   
  
• EVGA GeForce GTX 1650 KO Ultra GDDR6 Gaming, 04G-P4-1457-KR, 4GB GDDR6 Graphics Card
   
  
• Western Digital 8TB Ultrastar DC HC320 SATA HDD - 7200 RPM Class, SATA 6 Gb/s, 256MB Cache Hard Drive
  

I chose this build to do quick video transcoding, voice dictation (via Dragon Naturally Speaking v15--which made this post), and considerations for system life into the future. I can say with the Nvidia Studio drivers, Photoshop simply screams--and other productivity endeavors are so fast to be unbelievable. I still remember on my 8086 going to get a cup of coffee and having a smoke outside on my pipe waiting for a simple graphic to render... :rolleyes:

 

The point is that we all use out-of-the-box solutions or custom build creations. Let's get a discussion going of why we chose what we have, and how it works for us!

I can remember Lotus 123 on an old "blown" XP, and going to lunch while a complex series of spreadsheets calculated! Never was a hardware guy, building entirely out of my reach.

I can remember Lotus 123 on an old "blown" XP, and going to lunch while a complex series of spreadsheets calculated! Never was a hardware guy, building entirely out of my reach.

 

OK. But Sandy, are you using an out of the box (OOB) solution? That's part of the question! :cool:

OK. But Sandy, are you using an out of the box (OOB) solution? That's part of the question! :cool:

Using an 20" HP all in one Desktop, still Win 7, 4TB WD backup and a fair assortment of Photo software, Nikon and others. If I were a hardware guy, I'd have gotten that Nikon Coolscan 4000 ED working and in use by now.

SSD?

Build my first tower in 2009, upgraded it in 2015; thinking about doing a new one soon but am a bit at a loss as to what components to get as I haven't been keeping up for several years now. Before the 1st tower, I was using a stock Lenovo notebook with a docking station and two smaller size monitors.

 

Currently: Asus Maximus VIII Hero Z170, i5-6600K Skylake QuadCore 3.5GHz (funning at 3.89), G.Skill Ribjaws 32GB DDR4, NVDIA GeForce GTX 660 2GB GDDR5, NVMe Intel 400GB, Samsung SSD 850 EVO M.2 500GB SATAIII, 5TB WD Caviar black, 4TB (x4) WD Caviar Black, 2x Dell P2715k monitors.

 

SSD?

Solid-State Drive

Edited February 9, 2021 by Dieter Schaefer

I built my latest computer in December 2019 to replace a 10-year old i7-860 based machine running Windows 7.

 

The new machine running Windows 10 Professional x64:

 

CPU: AMD Ryzen 7 3800X

Motherboard: ASUS AM4 TUF GAMING X570-Plus

Memory: CORSAIR Dominator Platinum 32GB DDR4 3200 (PC4 25600) CMD32GX4M2C3200C16

Graphics Card: XFX RS XXX Edition Radeon RX 570 DirectX 12 RX-570P427D6 4GB OC+ 1284 MHz

Power Supply: Corsair RM750x

Boot Drive: Samsung 970 EVO SSD 500GB (MZ-V7E500BW) (This is a place holder waiting for a second generation PCIe 4 based drive)

Storage: Crucial MX500 2.5" 1TB SATA III 3D NAND Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) CT1000MX500SSD1 (for images)

HDD: WD Black 2 TB Hard Disk Drive - 7200 RPM SATA 6Gb/s - WD2003FZEX (for internal backup and media diversity)

Optical Drive: Lite-On DVD/CD Rewritable Drive LH-20A1L

Case: Antec Performance Series P101 Silent ATX Mid Tower Case

Crucial MX500 2.5" 1TB SATA III 3D NAND Internal Solid State Drive in Cable Matters 10Gbps Gen 2 USB C Hard Drive Enclosure (Off Line on-site backup)

 

It is more than sufficient for running Photoshop CS5, Lightroom 6, as well as Microsoft Office, Quicken, and various other non-photographic administrative applications, and learning DaVinci Resolve. I usually keep my computers for about 10-years; this one should last (probably replacing at least one SSD/HDD).

Build my first tower in 2009, upgraded it in 2015; thinking about doing a new one soon but am a bit at a loss as to what components to get as I haven't been keeping up for several years now.

 

Now is not the time to build a computer unless you absolutely have to. Parts, other than DRAM and storage, are in short supply and expensive.

I can't claim that I'd (or is it "I 'll"?) happily build my next then (or at least now...) contemporary higher end PC myself. I stuck & screwed stuff together before, even at work, but

• prices for good parts are outside my comfort zone for tinkering.
  
• IMHO you need about 2.5+x systems, to keep one running; #1 breaks down, #2 has to work on, the next gets cannibalized, to figure out what exactly was faulty.
  

I could sweep another box with a Sandybridge CPU and DDR3 RAM together. My last, a brave handmedown, broke recently.

I don't claim to know much about components. Of course everybody can look up benchmarks but those tend to say little about my or our use cases here.

 

Yes, I hit my local store before lockdown and recent AMD graphics card launch but was told GPUs were in horribly short supply.

One reason to build myself: Entire PCs seem nasty to carry home.

Parts, other than DRAM and storage, are in short supply and expensive.

That's the impression I got too. Luckily, I am not in a rush anyway.

I use a (now 4 year-old) 17" Laptop running W10. When I bought it, it was a fairly 'high-end' (low to mid-range gaming) Laptop with an Intel i7 2.6 Ghz. processor, 16 GB RAM, 1TB HD and 128 GB SSD (though I would have preferred 512 GB at the time). I wanted something mobile that would allow me to run Lightroom and Photoshop, edit videos and self-record music. It still does the job well.

 

The Laptop screen unfortunately took a hit last year and broke . It would have cost almost as much to replace the screen as buying a new Laptop. So I now use it exclusively with an external 21" screen. Sacrificing the mobility. But the specs are still reasonably competitive with what's available today in the price class, though today's Laptops have newer components that that probably perform better. And RAM is often expandable up to 32 GB or 64 GB these days.

 

My previous (also 4-5 year) old Laptop) was a 17" HP running Windows XP. With just 2GB of RAM, it was on its last legs and wouldn't comfortably run W10 (even though 2GB is still W10's "minimum requirement").

I'd rather put money into a new high-end monitor. CPU and GPU speed count for little when editing stills, even with high megapixel files. Processing speed also plays no part in speeding up tranfer times from card-reader to hard drive.

 

The upgrade to an SSD for the OS and virtual memory was worthwhile in cutting down 'finger-drumming' time though.

 

Otherwise it's operator fumbling that's the main bottleneck. Almost any effect I apply in PhotoShop is done far quicker than I can decide where the slider or curve should be placed!

HP, with with added memory, 32GB RAM, 2T SSD + 4T mirrored RAID storage and big video card with Win 10 does everything I need or want.

Since my day job has been speech processing, I needed a near-silent computer, and I've had my last two custom-built by Puget Systems in Washington State. They do stuff with large fans controlled to run at minimum speed, insulation, etc. The box sits on the floor, and I don't hear it except when it starts up.

 

I'd rather put money into a new high-end monitor.

Me too. I have a nice N.E.C. Multisync 27inch with the calibration tool. I'm still running my PC box from 2012, with an i5 processor, 16GB memory, a 256GB SSD system disk, but added a 2TB SSD a couple of years ago to speed up reading and writing files. My main complaint is the time it takes (1) to read 120MB tif files and (2) to do full backups. It runs Windows 7 and is due for replacement. If the price is right, the new box will have 32GB ECC memory, a lower-end Xeon processor, a somewhat better Quadro graphics card, one permanent SSD drive, and an Icy Dock cage on the front that can hold up to four hot-swappable 2.5 inch SSDs. Will have it built by Puget if possible; if not, then HP.

I had a good friend, now gone, alas, who fixed up and supercharged old computers and collected and installed every known "distro" of Linux. e.g., DistroWatch.com: Put the fun back into computing. Use Linux, BSD.

Jes' sayin'

 

It's nice to have a hobby. I sometimes dis-assemble and re-assemble old cameras and lenses. I find that if I do it over and over again, I usually have enough parts left over to build a new one, of whatever it is.:rolleyes:

I ain't no expert, but I built my PC in 2011 while recuperating from bypass surgery. I've updated components a few times and now have Windows 10 with a Samsung 500 GB SSD C drive (SATA lll), 1 TB Samsung NVMe (PCIe 2.0) SSD, 24 GB memory, Intel i7 950 processor, 4 TB Western Digital 7200 rpm drive and a graphics card (forgot which one!). If I needed to replace it right now, I'd consider a pre-built system; Dell? Alienware?

It's still running well enough. I did a clean install of Windows 10 a few years ago when I replaced the original 128 GB SSD C drive with the Samsung 500 GB.

Now is not the time to build a computer unless you absolutely have to. Parts, other than DRAM and storage, are in short supply and expensive.

 

Indeed. I have done two builds recently--one in December, and the other in January. The first was for my grandson, as a gaming and productivity box. It had been my intention to base the platform on AMD Ryzen, but middle-tier CPU's and mobos were simply unavailable. He ended up with a nice Intel build. On his and mine, parts had to be sourced from different suppliers; Newegg, Amazon, Fleabay, and Best Buy. No one source had everything--and some things they had were simply more costly than shopping around. This is not the usual course, where I ordered everything from Newegg and was done with it. I see that there is still a shortage of AMD processors and slim pickings for a good video GPU card. Some cards are now priced at a third more than they were in the middle of last year.

 

I agree with Rodeo Joe and Hector--a good graphics monitor can make all the difference in an older or middling system. Several years back, I bought a pair of 24" Asus PA-248 ProArt monitors, and an Asus 24" VA-248 1080p monitor. All three have always run off the same video card. This gives lots of screen real estate for color important photo work, as well as good browsing and sizing for web design (another of my afflictions) and general office productivity. The ColorMunki Display head keeps all of them set to changeable colorspace profiles.

Heh. My first and only build was in 1982. It had an 80286 processor with an 80287 math coprocessor (very exciting, it was!). Ran MS-DOS with a 20 MB hard drive, yes that's megabytes - plenty of space for ASCII data files and WordPerfect files!

I’ve never been interested in building a computer and these days I only use laptops because I like their portability. Everything I find that I need comes in a single box. Some of my friends though, they would only build what they want.

 

Rick H.

I stuck & screwed stuff together before

That's all that computer 'building' is - assembly of a kit. It's not rocket surgery!

 

All that's needed to put together a Bitcoin-mining or 'awesome' gaming machine - neither of which are necessary for photo editing - is a wad of cash to throw at it, and half-a-day's spare time to assemble the bits.

 

Oh, and a good selection of spare 3mm and UNC bolts that are never supplied!

Edited February 10, 2021 by rodeo_joe|1

My first 'build' was with the Intel 486 processor--and a parts company called Egghead.

 

I did something similar back in 2005, with an Intel 530J (Pentium) processor. I got everything from Egghead too. It was fun and rather easy and in the end good to say I put it all together myself. Also it was nice that it had just the features I wanted. Well actually I'd have loved for more features but price is always a constraint whether buying parts and assembling or getting a prebuilt product. I made upgrades over the years but by 2014 I was ready for a completely new model given all the operating system, processor, motherboard, graphics and memory improvements over that period. So in 2014 I got a prebuilt system. Now in 2021 I am again feeling like it might be time for another 'upgrade'. Simple LR edits on photos from a 40+ megapixel camera can take minutes now when I've got other things running as well (like Sandy's Lotus123 comment above).

That's all that computer 'building' is - assembly of a kit. It's not rocket surgery!

 

(snip)

 

Sometimes slightly more than that, but usually not so much more.

 

As above, I had an 20286 system in 1987, and needed the 80287 to go with it.

 

It seems that the board wasn't designed quite right, and I had to build a special board to supply the 80287 clock.

(The design of the 80287 uses a separate clock from the 80286.)

 

It took a few tries to get right, but it plugs in to the 80287 socket, and the 80287 plugs into the board.

 

But yes, most of the time there isn't much to it.

I think my first home build was with an old Pentium chip when it first came out, then there was a Celeron with the whole overclocking phase. Operating systems started with win 95 and then I graduated to NT which I thought was a really solid system. I stuck with the NT tree until I think Win 2000 came out which, correct me if wrong merged the NT line into the regular Windowns line. I built another box or two along the way, I think using AMD processors. About the time of the iMac G4 computers, I started doing more photography and got into Orange Coast College photogtraphy program. It's there in their digital lab I worked on G4 iMacs at school and my pc at home, working in photoshop. I started to get annoyed with my home pc as I spent too much time tinkering, trying to max its performance and the constant need to find and update drivers etc. convinced me to switch. When the the Power PC G5 chip came out, I bought an iMac and never looked back. Then the intel Macs came in and stuck with it. finally when the retina screen MBP came out, I waited until the monitor discoloration issues subsided after the first revision and got one of those and I'm now on my third MacBook Pro. I run two monitors off of it and though the monitors are an old cinema screen and a thunderbolt 27" it works well. I bought the old Cinema screen to run off of a PowerMac G5 a friend gave me that I wanted to dedicate to run Nikon Scan, but I've never been able to get Tiger working on it or Mountain Lion so I just hooked up the cinema to work off my 2019 MBP with a couple of adaptors, works great!

Simple LR edits on photos from a 40+ megapixel camera can take minutes now when I've got other things running as well

 

Your problem sounds as though it may have some relatively inexpensive fixes.

 

For a diagnosis, when you computer slows down, start Windows Resource Monitor; simply type RESOURCE MONITOR into the Windows search bar and select the program (I have it pinned to my Start Menu).

 

The first place to look is at Memory. Are you using all your memory? Do you have hard page faults? A few hard faults (this indicates the operating system has to page the area in from disk) are acceptable and inevitable, but a high, sustained number of hard faults will slow the system to a crawl. Memory upgrades are relatively economical, especially for memory with the speed used in a 2014 system. If you do want to add memory, replace it all. Don't try to add to 7-year old memory.

 

Next, check the Disk Tab. Are any of you disks running at or very near to 100% with long queues? If so replace with larger, faster storage. If you are not running SSD, you should be. A 1TB serial SSD from a good manufacturer (Crucial, SK Hynix) is right around $100 (US); Samsung serial SSDs are slightly higher. Just try to stay with TLC, not QLC, SSD, especially for the System Disk (C: Disk).

 

Last check the CPU Tab. If you are pushing 100% CPU, see which processes are using the CPU. If it is the programs you are using, then a computer upgrade may be necessary.

 

If your resources are being consumed by the Operating System, then a re-install of Windows may solve the problem. Reinstalling Windows and all your programs and not losing any data is not a trivial task. My checklist for doing it is 10-pages long. But after a clean install, I have found my system ran faster.