Am considering the following PC specs to replace an aging machine which hopefully contains a bit of future bullet proofing.. Along with using Lightroom and Photoshop I am also into video editing. I would appreciate any comments i.e. sound OK, not enough future bullet proofing or over the top specs etc. Thanks.
Processor - Intel® Core™ i7-3820 (Four Core, 10MB Cache) 3.60GHz
Video Card - Dual 1GB GDDR5 NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 555 SLI
Memory - 16384MB (4x4GB) 1600MHz DDR3 Quad Channel
Hard Drive - 500GB (7200RPM) Solid State Hybrid + 1TB SATA 6Gb/s (7200RPM) 32MB Cache
Additional Hard Drive - 1TB SATA 6Gb/s (7200RPM) 32MB Cache
Windows 7/64
I would go for the fastest CPU you can afford.
Lightroom doesn't use the video card, but if you are doing the video editing outside of Lightroom, you would require a top-end video card.
Looks like a very good set of choices (although I honestly don't know what you mean by bullet-proofing)
The specs are good.
But I would split the 1 TB Sata into two 500 GB Satas. here's what I wote in another post:
In my experience sharing the workload between several drives will give a significant performance boost.
Naturally, faster hard drives (10K conventional or SSD) will speed up performance in any configuration. But as long as prices for 400 - 500 GB SSDs are relatively high and their life expectancy is somewhat iffy, it might be worthwhile considering the concept of sharing the work between several drives.
Here's my system: I have 3 internal hard drives (7200 RPM, 500 GB each), named C, D, E.
On C there is the OS and Lr.
D is dedicated only for paging file (I'm on Windows), Lr cache, Photoshop scratch disk.
E contains the Lr catalog.
Images are on external hard drives.
This setup avoids read- / write competition between OS paging file, Lr cache, Lr catalog, and image files and provides good performance in Lr.
In my opinion, the slow performance of Lr that some people complain about, might be due to
a) cache too small (I have set mine at 75 GB, Adobe recommends 25 GB, but the Lr default is 1 GB);
b) read-/write competition due to the fact that images, catalog, and Lr cache are on one hard drive. Keep in mind that Lr constantly reads from and writes to the catalog. If the images, the Lr cache and OS (with paging file) and Lr itself are all on one drive, the read-/ write cycles for this drive pile up and slow Lr down.
Certainly, a SSD has much faster read- / write times, so it will alleviate the problem of read- / write competition. But as long as they are expensive and have - maybe(?) - short life times, it might be worthwhile to install at least 2 - but better 3 - conventional hard drives and so that the workload can be shared between them
There's some good and bad points about your new system:
You didn't give us a budget, list a vendor preference, or mention if you're worried about power consumption. As such, our recommendations can't be complete. I assume too that you've looked at the regular Sandy Bridge and new Ivy Bridge platforms and decided to go instead with Sandy Bridge-E. In any case, good luck to you!
Thanks for the input Anger - much appreciated. What I know about PC's can be written on the back of a postcard so I appreciate all the help/advice that I can get. An application that I am currently using for video editing is Sony's Vegas Movie Studio Platinum version 11. At this time the Studio version is only offered in 32 bit but I am hoping that Sony will release a 64 bit version in the next update. I'm holding off on my PC upgrade until this is confirmed as I use this video editing app a lot.
I'm currently using an Alienware Desktop (Area 51) ourchased in 2008 which has been extremely reliable and I've been more than satisfied with it (specs below). With this in mind, I'm tempted to stay with Alienware/Dell despite them probably being somewhat expensive. Budget is open ended by which I mean that I'm prepared to pay for both quality of build and parts without throwing my hard earned away for nothing if you get my drift.
Operating System: Windows 7 32-bit
System architecture: Intel CPU Family:6, Model:7, Stepping:6 with MMX, SSE Integer, SSE FP, SSE2, SSE3, SSE4.1
Physical processor count: 2
Processor speed: 3000 MHz
Built-in memory: 2815 MB
Free memory: 1521 MB
Memory available to Photoshop: 1633 MB
Memory used by Photoshop: 60 %
OpenGL Drawing: Enabled.
Video Card Vendor: NVIDIA Corporation
Video Card Renderer: GeForce 8800 GT/PCIe/SSE2
Video Card Memory: 512 MB
ElliR wrote:
At this time the Studio version is only offered in 32 bit but I am hoping that Sony will release a 64 bit version in the next update. I'm holding off on my PC upgrade until this is confirmed as I use this video editing app a lot.
Just in case you weren't certain, any 32 bit app should run on Windows 64bit....it just isn't as efficient in its use of the system resources as a genuine 64bit version would be. But it'll still run OK, so no need to hold off waiting for a 64 bit version to be released...
I ran a trial of Vegas Movie Studio on W7 64 bit to compare its AVCHD editing with that of Corel Video Studio Pro and Avid/Pinnacle Studio. I saw no problems with it. I did stay with Video Studio (I am a longtime user of Medio Studio Pro/Video Studio Pro) after Corel upgraded its compatibility with AVCHD files.
ElliR wrote:
Am considering the following PC specs to replace an aging machine which hopefully contains a bit of future bullet proofing..
...
My personal observation is that "future bullet proofing" does not work. The problem is that future components don't exist in the present. Buy wht you want for now. There is no way to prevent the need for future upgrades.
The good news is that the future is rolling out a little slower than it was in the recent past.
Jerry
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