All PC Savants Please Weigh In On My New Build

[brad_smith8]

<p>There are ways to make a system like that cooled with fans virtually silent. A big case helps (I use a <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Corsair-Obsidian-Black-Computer-CC-9011015-WW/dp/B006L6ZSWC/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1422728314&sr=8-1&keywords=corsair+550d">Corsair 550D</a> - similar to yours, but I preferred the styling with the door) and after putting the fans on rubber mounts, I have to put my head down on the case to hear it.</p>

<p>Also these new cases put the power supply on the bottom, sucking air from below the case. I keep my case on a carpeted floor, so that wouldn't work. The solution is to flip the power supply over so it draws air from inside the case.</p>

[brad_smith8]

<blockquote>

<p>I agree over raid o with Brad. I'm a fan of raid o, I've done it for ten years or more and today, it's even safer. But with a fast 500gb ssd, I don't think it's worth the trouble tbh. And in regards to wc'ing, I'm on my first water cooling unit and went with a reputable brand, Corsair. If you research the Corsair H100, failure rate is nothing to worry about.</p>

</blockquote>

<p><br />I was referring to a RAID0 array as primary storage <em>with</em> an SSD for OS, programs and scratch.</p>

[EricM]

<p>Personal choice. This is going to be a hot rig and needs a lot of air. Lots of air moving means lots of noise, dust, and in my house, dog hair. I've spent so much money on the best fans trying to get a silent computer and other than a few Mac Pro;'s I've worked with, it's not possible for me. Not only do I wish to have it silent, but there is also the rpm changes of the fans that go up and down as the cpu gets hotter and colder. I couldn't imagine my monitor and keyboard producing noise and now that my box is silent, I could never go back to air cooled and have any noise come from it.</p>

<p>And if one is buying the 4790K, I certainly hope the clock speed is increased a bit and you unleash a bit of that potential. I've been running a 2600K at 4.3ghz for two years with no issues. It's a few simple settings in bios or Asus software, that turns a $300 cpu into an $800 cpu.</p>

<p> </p>

[Mary Doo]

<p>IMO one of the perils of assembling your own system is the lack of experience. Yes, the system may/will very well work, but is it optimized? Are the chosen components working at optimal level pairing with each other? That was one reason I chose to have my system configured by CyberPowerPC because I believed, with their vast amount of experience, they could better understand the components and their tradeoffs, and their prices were so reasonable I didn't think I could save much if I chose to buy every component myself. I did assemble a PC years ago. I loved the experience for the sake of knowledge. But now I would rather have it done by other people.</p>

<p>Randy, if you have trust and confidence in your IT guy, he has a credible amount of experience assembling PCs, and he understands your photographic need, then go for it. Otherwise, do check out other avenues.</p>

[chuck -]

<p>There are several advantages to going with the i7 6-core, although I think the 5820 is quite enough. The first advantage is going with an Intel X99 chipset mobo, opening the door to DDR4 memory - which would be a boost to Photoshop operations. The second advantage is that some X99 mobos include SATA Express 10Gb/s ports; these will be awesome when SSD manufacturers move up from 6Gb/s units.</p>

<p>As for the liquid-cooled debate - I'm on my second liquid cooled and I will never go back to all fans. I don't miss the noise, and I believe that "cooler is better" for all electronics...</p>

<p>I agree with others to use WD black drives. With the speed of components today, I'm not sure RAID has a place in a computer anymore. Maybe in an NAS for redundancy...</p>

[randy_myers3]

<p>Thanks for all of the additional responses everyone.</p>

<p>Mary, I would actually LOVE to go with the pro builders as you have but any of them that "I" have checked out have always been MUCH more expensive than buying the parts and having them put together. I'm surprised to hear that you thought they were reasonable.</p>

[Mary Doo]

<p><< I'm surprised to hear that you thought they were reasonable. >></p>

<p>Not sure what the pricing are now. I dug out my electronic receipt dated 7/3/2012 (older technology):<br /> <br />For $1,880 in 2012, this has been my system, and it's still very fast today (just noticed that the SSD drive that I had replaced with a 1TB was 120GB). May be a big part of the lower cost was the AMD (instead of Intel) CPU - which was highly reviewed in my research at that time. Also they provided free RAM upgrade to 32GB.</p>

<p>CARE1: Professional Wiring for All WIRING Inside The System Chassis - Minimize Cable Exposure, Maximize Airflow in Your System [+19]<br /><br />CAS: NZXT Switch 810 Hybird Full Tower Gaming Case w/ Dual 140MM Pivot Fan Slots and Front USB 3.0 (White Color)<br /><br />CD: LG UH12LS28K 12X Blu-Ray Player & DVDRW Combo Drive (BLACK COLOR)<br /><br />CD2: 24X Double Layer Dual Format DVD+-R/+-RW + CD-R/RW Drive [+20] (BLACK COLOR)<br /><br />COOLANT: Standard Coolant<br /><br />CPU: AMD FX-8150 3.60 GHz Eight-Core AM3+ CPU 8MB L2 Cache & Turbo Core Technology<br /><br />CS_FAN: Default case fans<br /><br />ENGRAVING: Custom Message - Max 35 characters (including spaces) [+0] (MV Boli [+0]) ENGRAVING_MSG: Mary Doo Photography<br /><br />FA_HDD: Vigor iSURF II Hard Disk Drive Cooling System [+21] (2 x Systems [+27])<br /><br />FAN: CyberPower Xtreme Hydro Liquid Cooling Kit 240MM w/ Dual Fan(CPU & GPU Liquid Cool Capable, Extreme Overclocking Performance + Extreme Slient at 18dBA)<br /><br />FREEBIE_CS: NZXT Sentry Mix Fan Controller w/ Six 50W Channels & Five LED Color <br /><br />Switches [+0]<br /><br />HDD: 2TB (2TBx1) SATA-III 6.0Gb/s 64MB Cache 7200RPM HDD (2TB x 2 (2TB Capacity) Raid 1 High Performance with Data Security [+99])<br /><br />HDD2: 120GB Corsair Force GT Series SATA-III 6.0 Gb/s SSD – 555MB/s Read & 515MB/s Write [+136] (Single Drive)<br /><br />IUSB: Built-in USB 2.0 Ports<br /> <br />KEYBOARD: Xtreme Gear (Black Color) Multimedia/Internet USB Keyboard<br /><br />MEMORY: 16GB (4GBx4) DDR3/1600MHz Dual Channel Memory (Free upgrade to 32GB)<br /> <br />(8x4GB) Major Brand] Corsair XMS with Heat Spreader)<br /><br />MOTHERBOARD: [CrossFireX] ASUS M5A97 AMD 970 Chipset CrossFireX Support DDR3 <br /><br />Socket AM3+ ATX w/ 7.1 Audio, GbLAN, USB3.0, SATA-III, RAID, 2 Gen2 PCIe, 2 PCIe X1, & 2 PCI<br /><br />MOUSE: XtremeGear Optical USB 3 Buttons Gaming Mouse<br /><br />NETWORK: Onboard Gigabit LAN Network<br /> <br />NOISEREDUCE1: Sound Absorbing Foam on Side, Top And Bottom panels [+29]<br>

OS: Microsoft® Windows 7 Professional [+31] (64-bit Edition)<br /> <br />OVERCLOCK: Extreme OC (Extreme Overclock 20% or more)<br /> <br />POWERSUPPLY: 1,000 Watts - Standard Power Supply - SLI/CrossFireX Ready <br /><br />SERVICE: STANDARD WARRANTY: 3-YEAR LIMITED WARRANTY PLUS LIFE-TIME TECHNICAL SUPPORT<br /> <br />SOUND: HIGH DEFINITION ON-BOARD 7.1 AUDIO<br /><br />USB: External USB 3.0 4-Port Hub [+29]<br /><br />USBX: NZXT Internal USB 6-PORT Expansion Module + USB Bluetooth 2.X EDR Dongle with Led Light Thumb Size [+29]<br /> <br />VIDEO: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 670 2GB 16X PCIe 3.0 Video Card (Major Brand Powered by NVIDIA)</p>

[randy_myers3]

<p>Thanks Mary.<br /><br />When you bought from them, did YOU pick the parts or did you have them help you with what they already knew worked well together?</p>

[steven_clark]

<p>We don't mean to rag on your friend's recommendations. They are actually pretty good for say a video rendering workstation. Photoshop, however, is still often limited by single-core speed in many places from what I can find (nobody aside from computer hardware journalists has the resources to really compare this stuff).</p>

<p>The "Devil's Canyon" (Intel's marketing models are so meaningless techies refer to the chips by their development codenames) Core i7 4790k and Core i5 4690k are the current kings of the per-thread performance game because they are the latest desktop architecture (the only four-core chips in Intel's "extreme" lineup is the i7 4820k, which is from a previous generation, codename Ivy Bridge-E, consuming nearly 50% more power for about the same clock speed as the i5 4690k and slightly lower per-clock performance). The Devil's Canyon chips also are rigged to cool better than other chips which makes them better candidates for overclocking to squeeze some more performance out. In Photoshop whether these "Devil's Canyon" (Haswell architecture with 4-cores and 2 channels of DDR-3 memory, and better heat dissipation) or Haswell-E (Haswell architecture with 6 or 8 cores, a different motherboard chipset, and 4 channels of new still-kinda-sluggish DDR4 memory, the i7 5nn0k/x models) chips are faster depends on where it's being measured:</p>

<p>Toms hardware shows two benchmarks. On a benchmark of the filters in Photoshop that can split work across cores well, the 6-8 core Haswell-E chips perform 16-31% better than the Devil's Canyon 4790k. However, on the parts of Photoshop that can use the graphics card for processing the Devil's Canyon part is faster (about 10%) because there's only one thread dispatching work to the GPU so the faster clock trumps more cores. Similarly a review at ExtremeTech shows the 4790k beating the more expensive cores on PCMagazine's Photoshop CS6 benchmark which is 11 filters run after the other and their times added up (by about 20%).</p>

<p>All of this reveals the big secret: we're only talking about plus or minus 25% performance for a doubling of the price of the core system components. CPUs are important but they don't get exponentially faster with cost.</p>

<p>Also keep power consumption in mind. All energy consumed becomes heat in short order and that heat needs to be dissipated. More heat means more noisey fans or the cost and/or hassle of water cooling. The i7 4790k is an 88w part and the Haswell E's are all 140w. Similarly the AMD R9 290x might perform better on the GPU-capable "openCL" filters but I left your Nvidia 960gtx because it consumes about 120w while the R9 consumes about 200w. While you can use a closed loop water cooler to cool a CPU more efficiently and quietly that's not really an option for the graphics card (There you need to BUILD the water cooling loop yourself, something that scares me to be honest). So yes a Haswell-E system like you showed at the start might run hot, and be quieter in a larger case; but a plain Haswell (Devil's Canyon or otherwise) could probably be just fine in a MicroATX mini-tower.</p>

[Mary Doo]

<p>I started with a configurable system that I liked and went from there: (1) Adding an additional 2TB drive and (2) Taking advantage of their free RAM upgrade from 16GB to 32GB for that particular system. (3) Requested an additional CD drive (but actually ended with no addition because there was no room to put it in!). Also, I asked for their opinion and recommendation if they knew better, etc. One thing I didn't know much about was SSD drives. I would have asked for a larger capacity if I knew its importance. </p>

<p>The liquid cooling system was quite special and it came with the configuration. I also took the $19 option to have the system "professionally wired" (not sure what the difference would be if I didn't take it). I can see all the cables are neatly tucked away. I think this may mean having a more experienced person to put it together?</p>

<p>I am not sure what it is, now they seem to have a lot of laptop systems. Their site used to be teeming with desktop configs. Anyhow, it may not hurt to give them a call. Also, don't forget your IT guy. He may do a great job too and would be closer to troubleshoot if you have a problem. The decision is yours. Good luck!</p>

[Dave410]

<p>Wow, this is great! I just decided to build a new rig after 7 years with my current machine and I logged in to Photo.net this morning to ask for advice and here was this thread with all sorts of great information. Is that cool, or what?</p>

<p>Randy's build looks like a screamin' machine to me and, except for the video card, could almost be a gamer's rig. I think I will overbuild a bit too in order to future proof the machine and, because, well, it's fun. I can't afford the best car or the best camera, but I can afford the parts for a really good computer.</p>

<p>Just a couple of questions that might be relevant:</p>

<p>What's up with overclocking these days? I just read in <em>Maximum PC</em> yesterday that most new Intel processors are locked so you can't overclock them or can only overclock with the multiplier. The bus is unavailable and therefore there was no point in buying extra fast RAM. Any truth to that? That might also argue for a faster processor.</p>

<p>I like SSD's for data because of the speed. (BTW, I saw an article saying new testing had revealed that even consumer level SSDs would last a thousand years of read/writes. Hope it's true.) So, would there be a marked increase in speed with two SSDs in RAID 0 compared to a single large SSD? I know that's true for HDDs, but how about SSDs? Still true or is there some other bottleneck?</p>

<p>Many thanks. I hope those questions are relevant to the discussion and won't be considered a thread hijack.</p>

<p>Cheers,<br />Dave</p>

<p> </p>

[steven_clark]

<p>Two SSD's in RAID 0 might actually be slower for certain operations: RAID usually doesn't pass along the Trim command that the OS uses to tell the SSD it's done with a set of disk blocks and it can erase them whenever it wants now. Without trim the system will just overwrite those addresses forcing the SSD to write to spare blocks and garbage collect the original blocks later. Generally SSDs are so fast you don't need RAID, and a larger SSD often has more channels populated with chips giving it faster speeds.</p>

<p>Only certain models of CPU generally have the multipliers unlocked so that you can increase speeds easily. In the case of Intel these are the models ending in K or X and the Pentium Anniversary Edition G3258 (which as a result of being a dual core may be able to achieve the fastest clock speed of all if overclocked enough).</p>

<p>Overclocking RAM does still serve a purpose: squeezing a little more performance out of the integrated graphics if you don't have a card.</p>

[EricM]

<p>Instead of raid o with two ssd's, I'd just get a pci-e ssd and live a simpler life.</p>

<p> </p>

[JRCrowe]

<p>I just bought a motherboard with an M.2 slot on it is there any advantage to using an M.2 SSD? </p>

[richard_george_herrmann]

M2 slot is fast if you have a PCIe SSD drive. Plexstor has a two lane drive and Samsung has a four lane drive.

 

http://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Samsung-XP941-Plextor-PX-G256-M6e-M-2-Qualification-575/

 

Is a good explanation of whats up with M2 drives

[steven_clark]

<p>If you have an M.2 (or SATA Express) SSD with NVME support it can use a communications protocol that's designed for SSDs rather than mechanical disks. The NVME protocol allows faster responses from the disk. This might not actually matter for photography which has many largish files instead of an enormous number of tiny files. Unfortunately NVME disks are still missing or rare in the consumer space. The M.2 and SATA Express interfaces are both faster based on the same PCI Express bus used for expansion cards like graphics cards, even without the new NVME protocol. It's kinda like having a disk which is it's own storage controller.</p>

<p>It's also worth mentioning that the consumer PCIe SSDs that plug into full slots are generally the just a RAID 0 chip with two SSD boards soldered to it. They have the same lack of TRIM problems making them great for transferring positively enormous files fast and slower for many smaller operations. The exceptions being M.2 drives in an adapter.</p>

[JRCrowe]

<p>Richard and Steve thanks for the info. If I was building a new computer I think I would incorporate an M.2 drive into the build. It may not be useful now but in the future it may help extend the useful life a couple of years. The drives themselves are not expensive at all. It seems it might be a good choice for a video editing setup</p>

[randy_myers3]

<p>Thanks for all of the additional responses. I appreciate it !<br /><br />Steven,<br>

Please check your private messages and or email.<br>

THANKS !</p>

[randy_myers3]

<p>Eric,<br>

What do you do for backup with only one mass storage hard drive?</p>

[EricM]

<p>At the moment, not enough Randy. What I have done in the past, what I am doing now, and what I will be doing, are three very different things! The nas system is new to me. I used to have duplicate drives of everything and then it occurred to me that I almost have enough red wd 3tb drives to build a nas. A 5 bay synology came up on ebay so I bought it and set it up as raid 5. At the time that I built it, I had everything duplicated on other drives. But the files I have made since owning the nas, I've gotten lazy and do not have them on duplicate drives. I'm breaking my own rule. However, I still burn dvd's before moving files through my backup regime and I use Crashplan for cloud backup so technically, I'm covered with optical and cloud if something should happen to the nas. But foremost, I do like to have two hard drive copies and will work on getting that accomplished.</p>

<p>What I am thinking of doing, is using the nas as a mirror copy of local storage. Soon, I might buy a few of the red WD 6TB drives and put them inside my 500r case, and copy the data from the nas to them. I'd then use a clone/mirror software like SyncBack and set it to replicate files on my local storage with the nas storage. These two copies along with dvd and Crashplan will cover my bases like I am used too. Another option is, but I haven't looked into it yet, is that Microsoft supposedly gives unlimited cloud storage with Office subscriptions. So, for $90/year, I'm hoping to send 10TB's to OneDrive and if it works for cloud storage like I hope, I'll then cancel Crashplan</p>

<p>Film was much simpler</p>

[randy_myers3]

<p>Thanks Eric.</p>

[EricM]

<p>You're welcome </p>

[randy_myers3]

<p>OK, just to put a stamp on this thread, let me show you what I went with in regards to the build.<br>

For the most part, this thing is WAY faster than my old system. There are a few things in Photoshop CS5 that are still not happening as fast as I would have expected but I'm hoping those few things will iron themselves out once I move from CS5 to CC. I have a separate thread about this here.<br />http://www.photo.net/digital-darkroom-forum/00d7ig<br /><br />Everything else I do on this is way fast though.<br /><br />I did not go with a liquid cooled system but much to my surprise, this thing runs cool as a cucumber and is dead quite and I DO mean DEAD quite. Since it has fans, I don't know how they do it but I LITERALLY have to almost lay my head right on the case to hear ANYTHING WHATSOEVER. You can't even tell it's running. The guy that built it says it's because the much larger fans that they use now are much quieter than the older, smaller, more whiny fans.<br /><br />Thanks for all of your help !<br /><br /><br /></p><div></div>

[randy_myers3]

<p>`<br /><br /></p><div></div>

[randy_myers3]

<p>`</p><div></div>