# Another new PC question!



## quantum (Nov 3, 2011)

Hi all,

Am one of those PC guys who barely knows a thing about what's going on under the hood.:shock:

Am desperate to get new PC built here in UK and am befuddled about all the options. I want to spend up to £1000 to get a system with some good staying power. Mostly I see the need to speed up LR and PS as presently only on win XP 32bit. 
PLEASE can you advise me on specs available here in UK to get a moderately fast machine? I thinh I want Quad Core and about 6GB RAM what do you think? Unsure on Processors. Also what to use in terms of internal hard drives/ SSD and configurations for program files and catalogs.

Arrgh so much info..sheesh.

Ta

John


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## Jim Wilde (Nov 3, 2011)

This question probably belongs in the Equipment Talk forum, where there are lots of threads on this subject. Perhaps a Mod would be kind enough to move it over.

But trying to answer as best I can, I understand the confusion and uncertainty as there are indeed a wealth of options available. With a £1000 budget, you should find it quite easy to find a fast 'off the shelf' system, but if you want to define your own specification then I would have no hesitation in recommending PC Specialist. They have an extensive range of configuration options, and my own experience of them (we have two circa £1500 systems in the house) has been very positive in terms of their workmanship and support (and their prices are very competitive also).

So what do you need for speed in LR and PS and some longevity?

1. A fast CPU, the more cores the better. Intel i5 or i7 would be good.
2. As much RAM as your budget allows. 6gb should be OK, but more is better.
3. An OKish graphics card....you don't have to go overboard on this unless you're a serious gamer.
4. Preferably multiple internal disk drives, the more the merrier would allow you to separate the various LR components. I have 4 in my system. SSD would probably be good, though that has a big knock-on to the overall price....and then how many would you want/need, and how big would they need to be?
5. If you are specifying your own configuration, which PC Specialist allows you to do within the constraints of the options available, you also have to think about the PC case, power supply, cooling options, expansion ports, optical drives, etc.

Have a look at this configuration:




The i7-2600 is right up there near the top of the CPU benchmark data.
16gb of RAM
A good quality ATI graphics card 
Three internal hard drives, one for OS and programs, one for LR catalogs, previews and ACR Cache, and the 2tb drive for photos.
More than adequate PSU, liquid cooler for the CPU, internal card reader, optical drive, Windows 7 Pro 64bit, 3 year warranty.

Although over your budget by £124 (price included VAT and delivery is £1124), there are several places you could reduce the spec a little without compromising the whole thing. For example, reducing the RAM to 8gb and 'downgrading' the CPU to the i5-2500K (which is still faster than the i7-930 that I very happily have) brings the price down to spot on £1000.

A system like that would be very fast for LR and PS, and would I think last quite a few years.

Note that this spec does NOT include a monitor, I assume you would be using your existing monitor(s).


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## Effeegee (Nov 3, 2011)

I echo Jim's comments - lots of disks, lots of cores, enough RAM and configure LR components across several disks.  To the comparatively more modest spec was added an extra 1Tb HDD and two monitors - which I strongly recommend.  The transformation from 1 core XP 32bit 3Gb RAM was breathtaking.  There's still enough slack to not want to change a thing - but "I would sat that wouldn't I". This came in at under £800.

Antec 300 case
Card reader
500W Corsair power supply
Intel i7 2600 quad core processor
8GB Corsair 1600mhz DDR3 RAM
2 x 1TB hard drive
500GB hard drive
DVD RW
ASUS P8H67M Pro B3 motherboard
ATI 5450 graphics
Windows 7 Pro 64bit Installed and configured
1-year RTB warranty
http://www.easypc-uk.com/


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## Victoria Bampton (Nov 3, 2011)

Thanks for the PC Specialist recommendation Jim - my business partner's looking for a new machine and that's looking like a promising site.


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## Victoria Bampton (Nov 3, 2011)

Jim, can I ask you a question a minute.  It's not too far off-topic!  What are your thoughts on overclocking?  Pros and cons?


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## Jim Wilde (Nov 3, 2011)

I've personally never bothered with it, though it now does seem to be a far more 'mainstream' activity and less the 'dark art' of the techno-geeks. I know my own motherboard comes complete with detailed instructions and tools to enable over-clocking. It's certainly been in our minds (my son is a serious gamer and has a similar system to mine, less disks but better graphics), but so far neither of us have felt the need.

Certainly from a Lightroom perspective, with all the various tests I've carried out, I've never been able to red-line the CPU cores....in other words I need to upgrade my disk sub-system (probably by using SSD) in order to feed the data to the CPU quickly enough to run the CPU at maximum speed. So until I do that, I'm just not sure that over-clocking will buy me a great deal in relation to Lightroom, though no doubt some apps would benefit somewhere! I guess a lot would depend on how heavily a system was used, and thus being stretched. As I tend not to have a shed-load of stuff running concurrently, I don't think I've ever got near to the point of thinking "my system needs more power". Having said that, I fully expect that I'll give it a go one day....but possibly not until the system comes out of warranty! Though actually I'm not even sure that over-clocking would invalidate a warranty....having just re-checked the PC Specialist site I see that they do sell overclocked systems as well, so perhaps it's not an issue. 

The only downside to over-clocking that I can think of is that the CPU will run hotter, so definitely something to bear in mind. We've covered that base by having liquid cooling installed, which works great, though my son's PC was fitted out with a unit which turned out to be part of a faulty batch....it started to make some odd noises so we sent it back under warranty to have it checked and it blew apart in the machine room and wrecked a couple of components, but on the upside he ended up with upgraded components being installed for free.


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## quantum (Nov 3, 2011)

Thanks for all the info which I shall duly digest tomorrow as I'm done in today. I do already run two monitors as you can see from my profile (though I've gone cheap flat screen now with a Iiyama display for secondary monitor).
Appreciate all this guys.
John

ps sorry about the wrong forum.


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## Victoria Bampton (Nov 3, 2011)

Thanks Jim, interesting!


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## edgley (Nov 4, 2011)

I have over-clocked every PC I had. Some of them allowed an extra 1GHz in speed by doing so.
Its much much easier to do to day, especially if you have a motherboard that allows it, Asus where always quite good.

Getting an extra 20% should be possible, but might require upgrades of coolers and fans.


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## quantum (Nov 21, 2011)

Can I just ask, are SSD's best for operating system or to run Lightroom and programs through - Ive been told it's best to separate t OS from programs.

John


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## Victoria Bampton (Nov 21, 2011)

For an SSD, I'd put both OS and programs on there.


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## quantum (Nov 21, 2011)

Really I thought you'd advise OS and programs on separate ?


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## Hal P Anderson (Nov 21, 2011)

quantum,

I agree with Victoria. The thing you want to avoid putting on an SSD is _data_. SSD's can support a huge number of reads to them, but doing a lot of writes can evidently shorten their life expectancy. Data tends to be volatile, constantly being read and re-written, whereas programs and the OS are mostly written once and read numerous times. 

For the above reason, defragging an SSD can be harmful, not merely useless. 

Hal


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## b_gossweiler (Nov 21, 2011)

Hal P Anderson said:


> ... The thing you want to avoid putting on an SSD is _data_. SSD's can support a huge number of reads to them, but doing a lot of writes can evidently shorten their life expectancy. Data tends to be volatile, constantly being read and re-written, whereas programs and the OS are mostly written once and read numerous times. ...



IMHO, this is kind of a myth. This article (among others) demystifies the topic a little (of course, YMMV).

Beat


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## Hal P Anderson (Nov 21, 2011)

Beat, 

It's a myth, evidently, if you're using high-end SSD's (SLC memory, whatever that is), but farther down the page, the author replies to a comment, saying that the number of write cycles does become an issue with low-end devices. Thanks for the reference, though. I _was_ blindly quoting something I read in a forum somewhere. 

Hal


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## b_gossweiler (Nov 22, 2011)

Hal,

Of course, there's a big difference between SLCs and MLCs. But, SLCs are very expensive ($/GB, approx. 3x more) and not really consumer (but rather  server-) products (at least when I last evaluated mine half a year ago).  

But even for MLCs, Intel, for example, states 





> a minimum of five  years of useful life under typical client workloads with up to 20 GB of  host writes per day


 and Kingston states 





> Kingston rates  its SSDs for Client systems (The V+ and V series SSDs) at  20GB in mixed  Random/Sequential writes per business day — for 3 years.  So, there is  no cause for great concern for typical users, as studies  have shown  that even power users are typically under 10GB of mixed  writes — and  then only on specific days.



So I'm quite confident that my SSD's (one in my desktop machine for caches and previews and the only one in my notebook) will hold until I'll replace them with bigger ones anyway.

But of course you are right in your point that SSDs will endure longer in a read-only (or write-little) environment, and that SSDs should be excluded from de-fragmantation (which they are by default in Win7).

Beat


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## Hal P Anderson (Nov 22, 2011)

Beat,

Thanks. I'll not perpetuate the myth any more.  And you're right, who keeps a disk for even four years? 

Hal


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## quantum (Nov 22, 2011)

*..errrrr...*



b_gossweiler said:


> one in my desktop machine for caches and previews
> Beat



So Can I clarify how you would ideally have a NEW system built? 
SSD caches and previews
Sata for operating sytem?
Where for programs?

I'm trying to get my head around a new appx £1k system.

Thanks

John


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## Jim Wilde (Nov 22, 2011)

To be honest, this isn't the best time to be buying a new PC if you're on a budget as hard drive prices are very high at the moment following the floods in Thailand (and are likely to remain high for a few more quarters according to Seagate).

So I'd start with getting a powerful multi-core CPU (i5 or i7 quad core), with plenty of RAM (maybe 16gb to start with), with a good motherboard, good but not great graphics card, and a case and power supply with room to grow. *Then *I'd turn my attention to hard drives, and if I was buying today I'd probably get one SSD which I'd use for OS and programs (as that's where I think I'd get more bang for the buck)....so 120gb would suffice for that.

But what other drives? That's the problem today with the prices the way they are. In an ideal world I'd have three more internal drives: catalog/previews, ACR cache, image folders.....but all that would blow the £1k budget. I've just run the configurator at PC Specialist and arrived at a delivered price of £1193, for which you would get the following in a Coolermaster CM690 Case (though you could choose a different case if desired):

  

But there would be plenty of scope to tweak the configuration to get it nearer to the £1k budget.

And the really great thing about this forum is that there'll soon be somebody else along with an even better suggestion!!


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## b_gossweiler (Nov 22, 2011)

John,

I agree completely with everything Jim has layed out. Maybe you want to have a look at this blog post of Ian Lyons about the influence of CPUs vs. SSDs on LR performance.



quantum said:


> So Can I clarify how you would ideally have a NEW system built?
> SSD caches and previews
> Sata for operating sytem?
> Where for programs?
> ...



In my case, I was in the market for a system in the £3-4K range, which is an entire different story.

 The reason I did not use SSDs for OS/Programs (and not even permanent  data) is the fact that I wanted to have my entire non-volatile data  under hardware RAID1 and that (at least half a year ago) none of the  RAID controllers supported TRIM and SSDs.

 So I was left to use the SSD with volatile data, which in my case, is ACR cache, previews, PSE swap file and other data I don't care about loosing. For the rest of my OS/programs/data, I use 4 WD Velociraptor 10K drives in a RAID10 array.

So as Jim suggested, if you're not concerned about HW RAID, I'd go with a relatively small SSD for OS/Programs, and fast HDDs for the rest, besides a fast processor and plenty of memory.

Beat


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## quantum (Nov 25, 2011)

*My new PC is ordered..*

Thanks to all for your advice. I have plumped for something along the lines suggested by Jim & Beat from PC specialist. I know I may have been a little hasty in some ways to order right now, but am worried that prices my continue to rise over coming months until production has started again. I may well come back for further advice. 
The next task is to get all my software sorted out with registration codes ready to load up. I'm considering actually cloning my present hard drive over to the new one, but not sure if that is possible from Sata to SSD..? 
Part of me though suspects a clean install is much the better idea, if a lot more hassle. Not actually that sure how I will manage the transfer to new machines. A royal pain in the *ss for my Photoshop as I go back to PS5 as my 1st full software, then all the rest are upgrades. Hope I don't have to load all up again. Does anyone know whether I can actually delete older versions as they are all on my laptop clogging up space. Some seem to say it mucks things up to delete older PS versions...
Thanks for all  your help. Here's what I have gone for:

*Case*
COOLERMASTER CM690 MKII ADVANCED CASE
*Processor (CPU)*
Intel® Core™i7-2600 Quad Core (3.40GHz, 8MB Cache) + HD Graphics
*Motherboard*
ASUS® P8Z68-V LX: USB 3.0, SATA 6GBs, ATI®CrossFireX
*Memory (RAM)*
16GB SAMSUNG DUAL-DDR3 1333MHz (4 X 4GB)
*Graphics Card*
1GB AMD RADEON™ HD6770 - DVI,HDMI,VGA - DX® 11
*Memory - 1[SUP]st[/SUP] Hard Disk*
120GB INTEL® 320 SERIES SSD, SATA 3 Gb/s (upto 270MB/sR | 130MB/sW)
*2[SUP]nd[/SUP] Hard Disk*
1TB WD CAVIAR GREEN WD10EARX, SATA 6 Gb/s, 64MB CACHE
*1[SUP]st[/SUP] DVD/BLU-RAY Drive*
24x DUAL LAYER DVD WRITER ±R/±RW/RAM
*Memory Card Reader*
INTERNAL 52 IN 1 CARD READER (XD, MS, CF, SD, etc) + 1 x USB 2.0 PORT
*Power Supply*
CORSAIR 750W ENTHUSIAST SERIES™ TX750 V2-80 PLUS® BRONZE (£86)
*Processor Cooling*
COOLIT ECO II A.L.C (ADVANCED LIQUID COOLER) (£59)
*Sound Card*
ONBOARD 6 CHANNEL (5.1) HIGH DEF AUDIO (AS STANDARD)
*Network Facilities*
ONBOARD 10/100/1000 GIGABIT LAN PORT - AS STANDARD ON ALL PCs
*USB Options*
2 PORT USB 3.0 INTERNAL PCI EXPRESS CARD
*Firewire & Video Editing*
3 Port IEEE 1394a Firewire PCI Card (£9)
*Operating System*
Genuine Windows 7 Professional 64 Bit - inc DVD & Licence (£109)
*Office Software*
FREE Microsoft® Office Starter 2010 (Limited functionality Word & Excel)
*Anti-Virus*
NO ANTI-VIRUS SOFTWARE
*Warranty*
3 Year Silver Warranty (1 Year Collect & Return, 1 Year Parts, 3 Year Labour) (£5)


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## quantum (Nov 25, 2011)

Whoops I understand the motherboard doesn't support Esata. I trust the format of usb 3.0 is the way forward..?


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## Jim Wilde (Nov 25, 2011)

Sounds good, John.

Yes it does seem that USB3 is taking over from eSata, this is evident in the decreasing number of external drives with the eSata interface in relation to the ever-increasing number of drives with USB3.

Regarding setting up the new PC, you can of course use the Windows Easy Transfer tool to transfer your user data and settings from your old PC to the new. I've personally not used it, as I prefer to have control over what settings get transferred, but it is certainly well worth considering.

I can't be definite about all the prior Photoshop versions, though I would be extremely surprised if you can't just install the latest version. You may need earlier serial numbers, but I doubt the application itself needs to be installed.


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## Victoria Bampton (Nov 25, 2011)

Yep, Jim's quite right - latest version plus an older serial number should do fine.

Congratulations on the new PC!


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## quantum (Nov 25, 2011)

Thanks Guys and Gals


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## b_gossweiler (Nov 25, 2011)

Congratulations on the new PC, John, I'm sure you will be pleased with performance.

As far as the USB3 goes I agree with Jim that USB3 seems to establish itself as the new standard for external drives. I'm very pleased with my USB3 externals.

Cloning your current SATA drive to the SSD should not be a problem, but the new system will not run with a cloned system drive of your old PC anyway (different HAL). If you don't want to go for a clean install of Windows7, you could - AFAIK - either

Save your current system using NTBACKUP and restore the backup using NTBACKUP of a fresh XP-installation of XP on the new machine, then upgrade the new system to Windows7
Clone your current system and run a repair install from the XP installation CD before starting the new system, then upgrade the new system to Windows7
But if I were you, I would go through the additional effort and perform a clean install of Windows7 on the new system, followed by installing all your applications. I know this is a lot of work (I just performed it on my 2 systems this year), but once every so many years it's worth to get rid of all the leftovers in your windows system (-registry) that slow down your system and make it instable. Using WET to transfer the user data and certain settings is what I would consider.

Beat


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## Norfolk Lad (Jan 20, 2012)

I am now looking at getting a new PC very much along the lines discussed here so far as CPU, motherboard and RAM go. My existing PC came from PC Specialist and I have been very happy with their service. In an effort to keep down the cost I am wondering if I really need a graphics card. I see that the Intel chips come with HD graphics and the motherboards have DVI output. Will a graphics card make any significant difference? If I have 16 gb of RAM I guess the graphics will not be using very much of it.

JW

PS Since posting, I have seen some other threads on the subject but I am still not clear.  I should mention that I also run Photoshop CS5 and that might make a difference.


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## Hal P Anderson (Jan 20, 2012)

NL,

The graphics card will make no difference for LR, and while PS uses it, it doesn't seem to use it for much that is truly useful (that I've seen). 16 GB will be plenty, and your video won't take much of that. I reckon you could do without the card and maybe spend the money on more disk. You can never have enough disk. 

Hal


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## Jim Wilde (Jan 20, 2012)

Except that the OpenGL feature in PS uses the GPU to offload some CPU activity, and apparently is very beneficial (don't know myself, I have it enabled but have never tested the effect). However, lots of people over at the LR4 forum keep asking for the same capability in Lightroom.....maybe they know something I don't.

Personally, I would always have a dedicated graphics card. It doesn't have to be top-notch, certainly less than £100, maybe as little as £50....something like the ATI 6770 should be way plenty good enough, and would add less than £100 to the total cost.


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## Norfolk Lad (Jan 20, 2012)

Thanks both Hal and Jim.

I'll go for a fairly low end graphics card.  The Nvidia GT 520 seems to be quite adequate and is only £40.  I have no interest in gaming.

How about the processor?  Is there any great advantage in having an i7 2600 over an i5 2500?  Would I notice any difference?


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## Jim Wilde (Jan 20, 2012)

There's a bit of difference between the i7-2600 and the i5-2500, as the attached extract from the CPU Benchmark site indicates. But would you notice the difference? Probably not.....put into perspective, even the i5-2500 is equivalent to the first gen i7-960. I have the lower performance i7-930, and I've never been able to red-line it as my disk sub-system isn't quick enough to keep the CPU running flat out.

So either would be fine, IMO.


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## Norfolk Lad (Jan 20, 2012)

Many thanks Jim.  I can get more discs then!


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