Building for Photoshop

PC Build for Robust Photo Editing

Wrap-up

I’ve started ordering the parts and since I’m in no real hurry, I’m checking Amazon and Newegg daily to see if my choices are showing up on sale. I have already saved over $100 on two hard drives and 16GB of memory on Amazon deals-of-the-day and find that …refreshing. When the pieces are all in place. I’ll update this with assembly photos and my impressions of the overall performance. I’ll do a few file copy and big Photoshop filter renderings before and after to (hopefully) show that the update was justified. I feel pretty confident that it will. The research included a lot of benchmark tests that were based on real-world programs including PS.

With the number of possible combinations, I feel like I’m 90% done just having come up with a shopping list!

I hope this exercise had some value for a few of you. Preliminary pricing makes it look like I'll save about $900 over buying a custom ordered unit from Alienware or HP and about $2100 over a similarly-powered Mac. We'll see what little or not-so-little extras pop up as the pieces go together.

Happy computing!

Dave

Things change...especially when there's a sale!

My choice of the EVGA SuperNOVA 750G2 80PLUS Gold Certified 750W Power Supply Was replaced by fate with an EVGA SuperNOVA GS 80 Plus Gold Certified 850-Watt Power Supply.

Fate arrived in the form of a sale email from Newegg that included the 850W PSU at $10 more than the 750W unit. The email came with a $10 off promotional coupon and the 850W PSU offered a $35 mail-in rebate. I've had good luck with rebates but even if it falls through, I still spent the same money and got a little more power headroom.

This is kinda fun! I feel like one of those coupon clippers that always seems to be in line ahead of me at the grocery store!

Dave

Procurement and Assembly

Collecting the pieces - Part 1

The two Seagate 4TB SSHD SATA Drives arrived on two different days form separate Amazon warehouses. Both were well protected and the outer boxes were fairly pristine.

I mention this because I have found over the years that when ordering a delicate bit of hardware (cameras too), expedited shipping like Amazon Prime or the free-if-over-$xxx deals from most suppliers is worth the small extra investment. Less time in the pipeline means less handling and less opportunity for someone to accidentally drop or have a bit of soccer practice with your package.

They look like standard 3½” hard drives with no external evidence of their hybrid design. Unboxing was not particularly notable for that reason.

The first set of four Crucial Ballistix Sport 4GB DDR4 2400 arrived and the retail package left little to open or inspect until it’s time to install. I wish I had decided to install 32GB before I ordered this when it was on sale. I guess I’ll watch the sales and hope it comes around before assembly. I only saved about $25, but $25 is $25, right?

The Corsair Carbide Series 500R Mid Tower Case arrived via USPS on Sunday thanks to Amazon’s odd relationship with the Post Office. It came with a delivery label slapped on the bare product box but the box was sturdy and undamaged. The case was well-packaged internally. Another point for expedited delivery.

Opening up the case required no tools and the next big surprise was the finish of the case. The internal structure is all painted black and it had none of the razor-sharp, stamped edges common in budget cases. Drive bays offer tool-free installation for conventional hard drives and optical drives as well. 2½” conventional and solid-state drives require mounting them to the drive cages but the screws are provided. The drive cages also feature little shock-absorbing buffers to dampen the sound of conventional hard drives. The motherboard mounting plate has a gap behind it and the outer (removable) panel to route all of the cabling so it doesn’t interfere with air flow and all the routing holes have rubber grommets to prevent the wires from rubbing on bare metal.

One of the reasons I bought the new case was for the specific compatibility with liquid cooling radiators and cooling in general. The top of the case has a bay specifically for a 240mm long cooler with room for its two fans (or just fans if you are air-cooling). The power supply (PSU) mounts in the bottom rear of the case which is opposite the more conventional top rear position. This makes room for the top-mounted cooler and the design has the PSU’s intake fan pulling cool air through the bottom filter instead of the heated interior. Nice touch. The case came equipped with three nice 120mm cooling fans and one open position for an optional 120mm or 140mm intake fan. All intake fan locations have dust filters.

All of the case-specific cabling for the front switches, USB ports and power lights is high-quality and long enough to reach wherever the motherboard designers decide to put the connections. The screws, fan cable adapters and other hardware came in a small box exactly the size of a 3½” hard drive with four little holes right where the mounting screws would be. It was mounted in one of the tool-free drive bays so it wouldn’t just bang around during shipment. This little box spoke volumes about the manufacturer.

When I chose the case, I broke my own rule of "a case is a case" and took a serious look at the internal feature variations between budget cases and the mid-range units like the 500R. I'm still adverse to spending the extra $50-$150 or so above the 500R’s range for alien spaceship designs and lighting customizations but I found that stepping up from a $50 case to one like the 500R is actually worth the money.

Addendum: Since my case will be in the storage closet on the other side of the wall where my desk is located, I wanted to put together a small control panel to allow me to power on, power off and put the machine to sleep from the desktop. While researching momentary switches and the other bits and pieces needed, I ran across an item that would do exactly what I wanted. The Desktop Power Button Switch plugs into the motherboard where the power, reset, HDD light and power light connectors from the case front normally go and has a 67” cord that reaches to your desktop. The desktop piece is about two inches across and has buttons for power and reset along with power and drive activity lights. I realize not many people need one to reach into a closet, but if you have the PC sitting on or under your desk so you can reach the power buttons and like me, seldom use the optical drives, this would allow you to move it down or out of the way. Slick little device.

The rest of the stuff should be here by the weekend...here's hoping there's no DOA items!

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Dave

Procurement and Assembly

Collecting the pieces - Part 2

The EVGA SuperNOVA 750G2 80PLUS Gold Certified 750W Power Supply that I chose never arrived. That is good news because on the day I was going to order it, NewEgg ran a sale on its big brother (sister?) and I ended up ordering EVGA SuperNOVA GS 80 Plus Gold Certified 850-Watt Power Supply. It arrived in a shiny, suitcase-styled box inside an outer shipper and on opening it, I was immediate struck by conflicting feelings about quality. The solid feeling of the textured matte-black unit itself along with the cables, cable wraps and mounting hardware were all top-notch. The box, fabric case for the unused cables and the form-fitting fabric shipping cover on the PSU itself screamed a duet of “quality” and “why not sell it for $20 less and use paper and foam like everybody else?” Since I chose EVGA because of their excellent reported quality that caters to the enthusiast crowd, I guess I should have expected it. I would probably be ok with the typical shiny, stamped steel PSU as long as it performed but I have to admit, the fact that it looks like it could power Doc Brown’s DeLorean all the way back to the future doesn’t displease me.

In the same outer box was a fan I ordered to fill the optional intake grate in the case. $10 buys a lot of fan these days. 140mm computer–designed blades, fluid bearings and speed-adjustable by the motherboard are a sharp contrast to the little 80mm sleeve-bearing noise-makers (used to be $10 too) that manufacturers were fond of including in computers ten years ago. It is just a fan, but worth noting that like cameras, better and cheaper is going on all over the tech world.

A delivery later in the day caused a small panic (maybe that’s a little over-dramatic) when FedEx delivered a tiny box that was supposed to contain the CPU. I had forgotten that the 5820K doesn’t come with a heat sink and opening the box revealed a (relatively) tiny Intel box with the correct item. A quick look at the chip reminded me just how far technology has come since I built my first home-grown PC back in the early ‘90s. The CPU is about 2” x 1¾” but the two billion plus transistors take up a small portion of that real estate which has a lower surface covered with just over 2000 connections to communicate with the system. Some difference from the 275,000 transistors and 132 pins of the 80386 chip I started with.

The rest of the pieces should arrive today and I predict a busy weekend.

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Forgive the ramblings as I go about this process. It has been a while since I was up to my elbows in the tech and some of it is very different. I guess I'm thinking that my observations might provide some perspective on the workings of a piece of equipment that most of us take for granted.

Dave

Procurement and Assembly

Collecting the pieces - Part 3

Bonanza! Friday brought two more boxes with all the other pieces needed to put it all together just in time for the weekend. Unboxing was uneventful except for the SM951 256GB M.2 80mm PCIe 3.0 x4 SSD which just flat-out surprised me. You can read dimensions and specs but the reality was still a bit of an eye-opener.

SM951 256GB boot drive

The motherboard was unremarkable in that I was expecting the solid quality that ASUS always provides. It didn’t disappoint. At the last minute, I switched the ASUS X99-A for their slightly newer ASUS X99-A/USB 3.1 which is virtually the same but adds USB 3.1 support.

The Corsair H100i GTX liquid cooler was new ground for me but the kit was very complete and had good instructions. Having chosen a case from the same company made mounting it a breeze.

Another last minute sale prompted me to add a small 128GB SSD to the list to act as a temp drive for the system. I got the SanDisk SD128GX110 for less than $60 which was way within the bang-for-the-buck threshold.

Adding the second SSD instead of cannibalizing one from the old machine left me with a second fully functional PC which will be repurposed as a general guest user unit for visiting grandchildren and such.

Assembly

The attractive all-black motif of the case, motherboard and power supply is indeed attractive. It is also a huge pain in the butt to assemble because everything is light absorbing black making it dark and very hard to see the sometimes tiny details. Mounting all the parts was straightforward with the exception of the cooling radiator which took some further research to determine the best fan configuration. I spent the extra half-hour or so to route all of the wiring away from the air flow areas and was rewarded with not only an efficient cooling path, but a very clean-looking final assembly.

Tidy interior

Turning it on after everything is put together is always a finger-crossing moment of anxiety. This time was no different but I worried for naught. Lights, camera, action! It booted up and a tap on the Delete key brought up the UEFI BIOS screen. Let’s just say that things have changed. Gone is the keyboard only DOS blue and white menu. The new style interface is navigable with a mouse and offers annotations and help on just about everything. There’s a convenient EZ mode and a what-the-hell-is-all-this-stuff mode. Unfortunately, my choice of boot drive forced me into the latter. To my relief, it wasn’t as cryptic as it first appeared and a few settings later I could see the M.2 drive and was ready to start installing Windows. My last minute choice of the newer motherboard turned out to be a good one. The newer firmware displayed none of the configuration issues with the SM951 drive that I had read about during research and needed no workarounds to boot from a flash drive with the Windows installation files on it. From the install screen to registration took a ridiculously quick 6 minutes. This would have been less if I had a USB 3.0 drive for the installation files. I rebooted into the bios after installing the other drives and used the EZ menu to create the RAID 1 mirror with the two Seagate 4TB drives. It was truly “EZ”.

Thirty minutes after clicking on “Install Windows” I was up and running and copying data into the proper places from the backups. A day and a half of intermittent software installation followed.

Before and after benchmarking shows the new machine to be about 70% faster overall than the old one. The rendering speed in Photoshop and Lightroom is noticeably quicker and some operations like large exposure adjustment brushes now flow smoothly where there used to be a two or three second lag on a large file. Loading applications and images is perkier as well. Drive performance is one area that highlights the change in technology as seen in the benchmarks below:

Notice the 31K worth of bad sectors in the four-year old temp SSD. Newer ones have a much longer life expectancy.

All in all, it was a good and educational experience, though not a particularly inexpensive one. As far as cost goes, I went to HP.com and the Apple site and configured similar machines.

The HP desktop had an SSD boot drive option but didn't have the faster PCIe option. It also came up short on additional storage options with two 3TB drives that could be configured as RAID. No option was given for a second, smaller SSD for temp the drive. The Graphics option was an older 770 GTX but it is almost identical in performance to the GTX 960. Cooling was a standard air cooled system. All in all it came out to about $580 more than the home build.

The Apple store illustrated again why I have been a Windows user since v3.0. I configured a Mac Pro with a single E5 six-core Xeon (about 90% of the performance of the 5820K) and dual AMD FirePro D300 graphics cards. They offered a PCIe SSD boot drive but it is an older version 2.0 drive. Fast, but not like the SM951. No additional storage is available internally so I added a LaCie Thunderbolt RAID enclosure with two 4TB drives. Again, no option for a second SSD for a temp drive. I added an external SuperDrive DVD/CD burner which is about the same price as an internal BluRay burner for PC. After subtracting about $210 for the second graphics card (what it would cost me for a second card), the difference was $3,470. :eek: But hey, it’s really smooth and round!

Well, that’s it for this bit of excitement. I’m sure I’ll be installing bits of software here and there for the next couple of weeks as I find stuff that is used occasionally but that is more than offset by the tons of junk I got rid of with the fresh install.

Case closed!

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If anyone dares a home build or want's to know what would give their current machine a worthwhile boost, feel free to post questions.

Happy post-processing!

Dave

Sorry no post

Your project is vey interesting. Today had a email from PC magazine with this interesting article, along the lines of what you are doing.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2485172,00.asp?mailing_id=1271285&mailing=whatsnewnow&mailingID=19625B4D911237C139CD9074A70D51BE

Tom :cool:

Your project is vey interesting. Today had a email from PC magazine with this interesting article, along the lines of what you are doing.

http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2485172,00.asp?mailing_id=1271285&mailing=whatsnewnow&mailingID=19625B4D911237C139CD9074A70D51BE

 

Tom :cool:

I feel sort of plagiarized... :

Dave

My classes go through this exercise every semester.

My classes go through this exercise every semester.

You school must have a hellacious budget! :)

Dave

Just an update to say that using quality parts from recognized manufacturers and vendors is a highly recommended practice! A month in and there have been zero issues with any of the components. The system runs cool even when the ambient temp climbs above my personal comfort level and the system has yet to shift into high cooling mode, which means it is virtually silent. Photoshop and Lightroom run smoothly and the disk space notifications are banished to some point fairly far into the future. Even opening a dozen full-sized images as layers for focus stacking is snappy and there is no drag or stutter when working on them.

Performing a clean install of Windows 8.1 was a good choice. The old machine ran fine with all the collected crap installed but if I haven't needed in the month since I started using this machine, there's little chance I'll miss it and the expanded menu is manageable now.

One bonus result from building a whole new machine is that I have a second, fully functional PC to play with the Windows 10 beta. It is pretty cool so far. the Project Spartan/Edge browser (Internet Explorer replacement) is reminiscent of the early days of Chrome, back when it was speedy and uncluttered. The new hybrid start menu is actually the "best of both Win 7 and Win 8" as has been described in the preview articles. I haven't set up audio yet but having Cortana sitting there waiting to answer questions like she does on my phone is reason enough to fire up a headset. Not everything works yet but the things that do work well and it just feels polished. Kudos to Microsoft for listening to users for a change.

This will probably be the last chapter in this thread since the 30-day "danger zone" is over and all is well. If anyone has questions, feel free to post and bump this up to the top. I'll be happy to answer if I can.

Dave

Just an update to say that using quality parts from recognized manufacturers and vendors is a highly recommended practice! A month in and there have been zero issues with any of the components. The system runs cool even when the ambient temp climbs above my personal comfort level and the system has yet to shift into high cooling mode, which means it is virtually silent. Photoshop and Lightroom run smoothly and the disk space notifications are banished to some point fairly far into the future. Even opening a dozen full-sized images as layers for focus stacking is snappy and there is no drag or stutter when working on them.

 

Performing a clean install of Windows 8.1 was a good choice. The old machine ran fine with all the collected crap installed but if I haven't needed in the month since I started using this machine, there's little chance I'll miss it and the expanded menu is manageable now.

 

One bonus result from building a whole new machine is that I have a second, fully functional PC to play with the Windows 10 beta. It is pretty cool so far. the Project Spartan/Edge browser (Internet Explorer replacement) is reminiscent of the early days of Chrome, back when it was speedy and uncluttered. The new hybrid start menu is actually the "best of both Win 7 and Win 8" as has been described in the preview articles. I haven't set up audio yet but having Cortana sitting there waiting to answer questions like she does on my phone is reason enough to fire up a headset. Not everything works yet but the things that do work well and it just feels polished. Kudos to Microsoft for listening to users for a change.

 

This will probably be the last chapter in this thread since the 30-day "danger zone" is over and all is well. If anyone has questions, feel free to post and bump this up to the top. I'll be happy to answer if I can.

 

Dave

Thanks for taking us on the journey with you.

The last phase of the computer project is finally in place. Over the last few days, I moved the old desk out and built the new one. All the computer guts are now located in a closet behind the wall and only the monitors, keyboard and mouse live on the desk with the wires bundled and wrapped to the stand. The desk is attached to the wall with a cleat and supported by one leg, leaving the area underneath completely clear of equipment and wires. This has had a devastating effect on the dust bunny population and with weekly Swiffer treatments, they may just go extinct.

In the words of Hannibal Smith...."I love it when a plan comes together!"

Forgive the phone image...the A6000 had the 50 on it and the camera bag seemed far...

And yes, that is a 22oz bottle of Arrogant Bastard Ale that I by God deserved after finishing this thing off this morning! :)

Dave