computer build

[akocurek]

<p>Hello photo.netters.<br>

I ain't never done this before, but I'm considering building a Windows 7 64 bit machine which will be used for general web surfing, home use and Photoshop.<br>

Camera Raw on my aging XP machine is real sluggish. I also scan 4"x5" negatives on my Epson V700.<br>

Gaming? Oh, I'll probably play solitaire ;-)<br>

Am I going overboard too much with anything? Not enough video card?<br>

Thanks for your time and comments.<br>

Antec 900 case<br>

Asus P6X58D-E LGA 1366 Intel X58 mobo<br>

Intel Core i7-950 3.06GHz processor<br>

Corsair CMPSU-650TX power supply<br>

Kingston 12GB (3x4GB) DDR3 SDRAM 1066 (I may add more if needed in the future)<br>

Sapphire 100296HDMI Radeon HD 4670 PCI Express 2.0 video card<br>

Asus DRW-24B1ST SATA DVD burner<br>

WD 1TB WD1002FAEX SATA 6.0Gb/s primary hard drive<br>

Hitachi Deskstar 5K3000 2TB SATA 6.0Gb/s secondary drive<br>

MS Windows 7 Professional 64 bit OEM<br>

Existing Dell 24" monitor; Existing keyboard and mouse for now</p>

 

[brad_trostad]

Before you go with the i7-950, take a look at the i7-2600k. I just built a i7-2600k system with a asus mono, 8th ram, etc and it

screams. It really chews through 5d2 video too. I bought my unlocked CPU from micro center for $280. If you look at the CPU

benchmarks for this CPU I think you'll see why it is so popular (scores 9000+ vs 6000+ for the same price)

 

 

http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html#.

 

 

There is link on this page that shows price vs performance too.

[jtk]

<p>Brad, I'll bet you've done the math... what's your likely out-of-pocket $$ ?</p>

[brad_trostad]

<p>I can't give you a good out of pocket as I re-used existing drives, video card, power supply, case, keyboard, mouse and monitors. I do know that I spent around $280 for the i7-2600K which included the fan, $160 for a P67xxx Asus motherboard and about $85 on 8Gb of DDR3 (after a rebate). The Asus motherboard is great (USB3, SATA3, e-Sata, Bluetooth, etc). I haven't even started to overclock this thing and it's fast! From what I've read this system can be overclocked nicely. It's sorta cool seeing 8 CPU's listed in the task manager (albeit really 4 x 2 via hyperthreading). I will probably add another 4 or 8Gb of DDR3 as I get more into video editing as Premier seems to like using a lot of it.</p>

<p>FWIW - If you don't like to tinker, I have seen retail i7-2600K systems (eg Gateway, etc) now being sold for around $900 which include 8Gb of DDR3, 1Gb video card, 1.5Tb drive, decent dvd drive, and the video card has three outputs (VGA, DVI, HDMI). A neighbor just found one for $850. Just not sure if the retail system motherboards support RAID, overclocking, etc.</p>

<p>I think the i7-2500 and i7-2600 systems would be more popular but Intel had a chipset recall which pulled all the motherboards for several months.</p>

[akocurek]

<p>Thanks for your input, Brad.<br>

I was looking at Dell, but their XPS 9100 doesn't even have Sata lll or USB 3.0.<br>

John, my cost so far is just under $1200 from Newegg.</p>

[bgelfand]

<p>I think I would wait a month. Intle should release its Z68 chip set this month. Among other things the Z68 will support SSD caching - allow using a Solid State Drive to cache a much larger standard hard drive.</p>

<p>I would also go with the Sandy Bridge CPU - probably just the i7-2600 rather than the 2600K. Since you are not a gamer, the I would start with graphics on the CPU rather than purchasing a separate card. If you find you need it, you can always purchase a descrete graphics card later.</p>

<p>Another advantage of the 1155 boards is the UEFI, which replaces the old BIOS, provides native support for hard disks with capacities greater than 2 TB.</p>

[brad_smith8]

<p>The only reason I can see staying with X58 is that you can easily go up to 24GB of RAM. That said, I'm running an i7 920 @ 3.2Ghz with 12GB and I see it lasting me a long time.</p>

<p>Also have a look at <a href="http://www.maximumpc.com/article/reviews/intel_dx58so2_review">this board</a> (I've had two Asus boards die early on me).</p>

[akocurek]

<p>Thank you Brooks and Brad.</p>

[Stock-Photos]

<p>For the fastest read write times look into RAID 0 drives. This component alone will make your operations (opening, editing, saving those large negative scan files) faster than any other factor in the system. I operate a slide scanning business and RAID 0 is <em>essential </em>for speed when editing scans. For example I open, to edit, sixty 15MB tiff files at once in PS CS5.</p>

[Uhooru]

I would make sure anything you use on raid "0" is thoroughy backed up. Raid 0is fast but if one drive fails you,ve

lostnit all.

[indraneel]

<blockquote>

<p>bought my unlocked CPU</p>

</blockquote>

<p>What is an unlocked CPU, if you don't mind sharing? some DMCA thing? First time I'm hearing something like that... or is it un-overclocked CPU, as some vendors misleadingly sell..?</p>

[joewhite]

<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPU_locking">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CPU_locking</a> explains unlocking and overclocking better than I could.</p>

[indraneel]

<p>Thanks Joseph. Interesting, looks like I missed out on all the fun with the older chips. Also, never knew the jumpers they talk about are not just the mobo dip switches, they're real wires!</p>

[martin_engineer]

<p>Looks like a very fast workstation. If you're not interested in future upgrades I'd second the suggestion for looking into Intel Sandy Bridge architecture (i7 2600) to cut the price a bit, especially if you're not interested in over-clocking. <br>

Another thing you might want to consider is a Solid State Disk (SSD). There are some nice informational videos about those on youtube. I'd be so bold as to cut the ram to "only" 6 or 8 GB in order to afford an SSD. <br>

Do you have a backup plan? At the very least I'd recommend spending a few bucks from my budget for an external hard disk for backups. </p>

[chris_letts]

<p>As Martin says - if you want speed consider a solid-state drive. If you use that drive for your photo storage/workspace, AND for your paging file (if you use one) then you could get a big improvement in speed of photo processing. Although your 64 bit Win7 will allow you to use all that memory, check that your photo editing (and other) software can use it too otherwise the extra memory is a waste of space.</p>

[chris_letts]

<p>As I found out on my own PC, the video card doesn't make any real difference to things such as photo procesing - in fact apart from games, my PC is slightly faster with the onboard video than using a video card!<br>

If you are considering a real fast video card for later (e.g. games), you may want to up the power supply a bit too.</p>

[brad_trostad]

<p>Ditto that w/r to spendy video cards. I would focus first on CPU power, memory and HDD performance. When deciding on the i7-2600 motherboard, there is a key choice to make, the P67 or H67. The P67 will allow overclocking which obviously has it's benefits / risks / etc.</p>

<p>However, the H67 uses the new built in GPU and can drive dual video outs! Also, if you look around you will see video rendering benchmarks using the H67 (not overclocked) that really, really kick ... but this is only when coupled with very new software designed to utilize this feature. And this may not be as relevant to single image editing such as Photoshop, etc.</p>

<p>Another reason to consider the H67 series motherboards is that one can avoid purchasing a video card all together if comfortable with the options it offers. So that might save some $$$ to go towards a second drive for RAID or towards a external backup solution (e-Sata, USB3 or Gb ethernet to a NAS).</p>

[john_harper9]

<p>I'll second the recommendation regarding the Sandy Bridge CPUs and chipsets. I don't see any advantage of a discreet graphics card over the embedded HD graphics unless you are gaming or editing video (and the embedded HD graphics exceed the performance of most 2-year old graphics cards). The bottleneck to overcome is disk I/O - to that end, I suggest a hardware RAID 1 or 10 card with plenty of battery backup cache memory. If you have the budget for SSDs and a RAID controller that supports them, a RAID 0 is very fast.</p>

[jim_ducey]

<p>I don't think its possible to go overboard if you are doing photos and video editing. I went for an AMD X6 running at 3.7GH with a coolit liquid cooling an ASUS crossfire lV motherboard and 16 GB ram, a couple of 256GB SSD drives and a QNAP NAS box for storage with 8TB. I get around the slowness of the NAS with 30GB of cashe on the SSD. I have found with this I spend very little time waiting on the computer.<br>

Jim</p>

[jim_ducey]

<p>I should add if you are going the SSD in raid 0 you will need to use a raid card to take advantage of the SSD speed, the raid chips on the motherboards are way to slow. I use Acronis backup software and it works great.<br>

Jim</p>

[wmervine]

<p>I'm going to go against the grain here and suggest a small seperate Gfx card instead of onboard. The reasons why are the onboard will have to utilise your system memory while a seperate card has it's own; I prefer greater modularity in case something dies. With a seperate card, if that dies you won't have to replace the whole cpu and it gives more wiggle room for later upgrades; and there is a small movement to programmers writing code for other processes to run on your gfx card. Nvidia is doing alot with this.<br>

As for the power supply, that is a preety good option, but maybe buy the next model up. Rather have capacity in reserve then stressing what you have with future upgrades.</p>

[akocurek]

<p>Wow! Thanks for the responses. As a soon-to-be first time builder, I'm overwhelmed.<br>

I do plan on adding more storage. I have a 1TB Iomega USB drive that I'm using now. I may get an external enclosure with a few drives. I will have room for a few more internal drives.<br>

I'm looking into SSD.<br>

I have a head ache!</p>

 

[john_harper9]

<p>Most of the feature-rich boards that support the Sandy Bridge embedded HD graphics also have a pcie x16 slot for an add-on card, so a discreet graphics engine can be added if the embedded HD graphics are not sufficient. In all the systems I've built, only one had the embedded graphics fail on the board - not the CPU - and that was an early board that included embedded graphics (a 1-U server board). Intel's embedded graphics are targeted at 1080p HD video playback which I find sufficient for rendering still photos. I find the horsepower needed by CS5, Lightroom, Photomatix, etc. is best provisioned by RAM (8 to 32G) and fast disk IO. YMMV for video editing and adding discreet graphics chips may be desirable. BTW, a good site for digging into Intel's specs for CPUs and boards is ark.intel.com.</p>

[jim_ducey]

<p>The SSD disk have a very short time finding your information compared to mechanical disk. The slowest thing about modern computers is usually the mechanical hard disk, you will never be happy with mechanical disk after your have use good SSD. I have converted my desktop and laptop to SSD. Newegg has many listed with about 20 that are SATA 3. My desktop computers have a transferrer rate of 500+MB/sec measured with HD tune. The OCZ website has a lot of useful information on how to type things with SSD and you never need to defragment. Check warranty time before you buy Intel is usually 5 years where G skill is only 2 years.<br>

Jim</p>

[joewhite]

<p>Adrian-<br>

I don't have any suggestions about hardware that haven't been already mentioned, but I do recommend that you either use a grounded wriststrap (cheap to buy or diy) or touch the case frequently while assembling. The one time I was lax in doing that I managed to ruin some memory. You probably knew to be cautious anyway, but it's good to remember. Good luck, sounds like a very nice build.</p>