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Build Advice Photoshop dream machine

Discussion in 'Hardware' started by Lovah, 4 Nov 2012.

  1. Lovah

    Lovah Apple and Canon fanboy

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    Hi guys,

    I need some advice on a build. But first a little info about me. "Back in the day" I used to build my own computer with a lovely Lian Li case with some easy plug'n'play modding. In college I needed a decent laptop and went with an Apple Powerbook 12". No hating, but I have been buying mac ever since. (please no Mac-PC discussions)

    My main machine is a iMac 27" (2,93ghz i7, 8gb ram) and I use it for
    - photography (75%) Aperture (and now Photoshop)
    - internet, facebook, mail (15%)
    - old school FPS (RTCW ET) (5%)
    - watching movies, google earth, office, .. (5%)

    My photography workflow is moving away from Aperture, back to Photoshop and with my new highmegapixel camera, I think I'm starting to hit the limitations of my 'all-in-one' iMac. So I'm looking into purchasing a new computer just for Photoshop and as much as I love Apple, I don't think the Mac Pro is a reasonable investment for me. I will probably keep my iMac around for the usual daily computer tasks.

    So I turn to the bit tech collective to ask for your advice to suggest the components for a very capable photoshop machine. The requirements that I'm aware of:
    - not the super latest tech (always a bigger risk for issues and overpriced)
    - as much ram as windows/photoshop will allow me to use and is still sensisble
    - capable graphical card (this isn't gaming, so I have no idea how crazy this needs to be)
    - solid state hd for software (no need for a scratch disk with enough ram??)
    - massive mechanical HD's in some kind of redundant Raid system for fast secure access to store all the RAW's (have a NAS for backup).

    If anybody has any real idea about these, I would also like a suggestion for a decent graphical monitor (30"). Need something that will allow a decent color calibration, was looking at an EIZO, but my brother is trying to convice me the latest HP ZR30w is just as good as an EIZO.

    Thanks for any input on this!

    Concerning budget, no real limit in mind but keep it sensible. Rough estimate? The price of a new fully loaded iMac (so hopefully just under 2k euro without monitor).
     
  2. MSHunter

    MSHunter Minimodder

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    best consumer GPU at a decent price would be the GTX 480, otherwise we are talking quadro cards and a very high price tag.
     
  3. Lovah

    Lovah Apple and Canon fanboy

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    But, is that really needed for photoshop? I know it runs some filters on the graphics processor as it is more efficient at that kind of thing... but it isn't like it needs to be doing high end fps games. It's just one image for a few minutes at a time.
     
  4. MSHunter

    MSHunter Minimodder

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    OK if you are not planing on doing a lot of marco multi file editing then you do not need a high end card. though the 480 would fit in the budget.
     
  5. padrejones2001

    padrejones2001 Puppy Love

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    Well, EIZO will definitely be better than the HP, simply by virtue of it having a hardware LUT, but they no longer make 30" monitors. The largest they make in the ColorEdge series is 27", which will still be awesome, I promise.
    If you want to get the most out of it, use a graphics card that has a DisplayPort on it as it allows for a wider color gamut. Horsepower isn't as essential as gobs and gobs of RAM, so focus on that. Also, consider buying Lightroom as it will make your workflow a billion times faster compared to using Camera Raw.
     
  6. rollo

    rollo Modder

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    My own photo / vid edit machine

    3930k
    16gb ram
    256gb ssd
    2 x 2tb mech drives
    1 x 480 ( had this spare from a gaming machine it's a beast of a cuda card

    All can be had for under £1000 np then the rest of that budget is on a monitor.

    Brought a dell 30inch with premier colour, yes it costs alot( aprox £750 when i brought it from amazon probably gone up since then) but its worth it if you require what it supply's.

    eizo is nice but decent Rez cost a fortune there one you want from eizo is more than your total budget is for the build.cg270 IPS is aprox £2k

    Cg276 is out in january
     
  7. jrs77

    jrs77 Modder

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    CPU and RAM is way more important for Photoshop then the GPU, but I don't see anything wrong with your iMac tbh.

    I'm working as graphics-designer using PS and Illustrator for 90% of my work and look at my specs below. Never had any problems with larger files and some PS-files I work with are larger then 200 MB (multilayer 20MP images).

    If anything, then get a new i7 with 32Gigs of RAM. For a GPU you can grab anything in the 150-200 pricerange. And a SSD ofc.
     
  8. dullonien

    dullonien Master of the unfinished.

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    My brother works in Photoshop all day on high spec Power Mac's and hates it in comparison to his Intel 920 powered PC. He's convinced that Photoshop works better on Windows nowadays. Even with better spec on his work machine he claims that Photoshop can be sluggish in certain instances with large files, and the amount of Photoshop crashes he experiences is much higher.

    My advice, get lots of RAM. I used to run out of RAM in large documents when I was running 8GB on my S775 machine a couple of years ago, not had any issues with 16GB though. My GTX470 works well in Photoshop.

    I still use a scratch disc, but honestly not sure if it makes a difference. I had a spare HDD, so thought why not.

    Finally, do you have a Wacom tablet of some kind? A must imo, and if you have the money the Cintiq is worth the money. I unfortunately haven't got the money, but I've used my brothers 12" one and that's nice, and also tried out the HD24" one he uses in work and it was an absolute pleasure and made me wish I had a few grand to blow on one!
     
    Last edited: 4 Nov 2012
  9. elAwesome

    elAwesome What's a Dremel?

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    Have you been thinking about a hackintosh? That might be ideal for you.
    Nowadays they run very stable, personally, I own a Mac Pro, but I'm on my way to sell it and build a hackintosh that is 3x as fast with the money I got from it.

    Photoshop can only use one core, so forget 2.xGhz 12core machines, they will perform worse than a i7 3770k (if you overclock it, you can smoke pretty much everything in Photoshop). Also be sure to get enough RAM. Since you're dealing with high-MP, I would recommend 64GB to create a scratch disk for PS. In theory, you could go up to 128GB if I remember right, but that needs dual CPUs. If that is too expensive, grab at least 24GB.

    And then, get a AMD GPU. Photoshop is mostly OpenCl, and AMD cards are way better acceleating OpenCl stuff as Nvidia cards. Nvidia have CUDA, that's awesome for video editing.
    If you want to install OS X on the machine, get a 5870 or a 6870. If you want to use Windows only, get a 7950.

    I'm a graphic designer and I use the Apple Cinema Display. It's just awesome. The colours on that thing are astonishing. EIZOs are also good, and you're borthers right, the HP ZR30w is pretty good too. I never compared these monitors, maybe you should visit a big electronics store and compare different monitors.


    By the way: I have a 2009 Mac Pro with a 2.66 Quad and 16GB RAM, and a GTX570 2560MB. But I'm also doing some video editing (thats why I chose Nvidia) and my RAM and my CPU are just enough to work with it. As I said, I'm going to upgrade to a i7 3930k hackintosh.
     
  10. Lovah

    Lovah Apple and Canon fanboy

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    I was thinking about getting an Wacon Intuos 5 medium sized tablet. Hadn't really considered the Cintiq before.

    The problem with this whole dedicated machine is that it will be very similar to my main system at the moment. I'm going try and find out how much RAM I could fit in my current iMac and see if that improves enough. Then maybe spend the money saved on one of this Cintiqs.

    cheers mate
     
  11. djzic

    djzic Bokehlicious!

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    One thing I would recommend is a 16:10 screen. They look so much bigger then their 16:9 counterparts, trust me :) I do a lot of photo work too. Lightroom is also very much worth the money. For photoshop, I'd say the Xeon E5-2620W (6 cores and lots of cache for a good price) paired with lots of RAM and an SSD, in a consumer board, would kick ass. Remember, 32gb of RAM per CPU is the architecture limit.
     
  12. TheDodoKiller

    TheDodoKiller Minimodder

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    Most of the people here have it right. You need to have a fast CPU, Loadsa RAM, and 16:10 screen.

    I used to not think that there was any point to 16:10, and that movies looked better, but 1920x1200 is a marvel.
     
  13. rollo

    rollo Modder

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    There is no real Cpu limits on ram, if you install 64gb it will work on the higher end intel cpus without issues.

    The limits intel set of 32gb can be ignored on any motherboard that states it has 64gb of ram support.

    Remember intels official limit for cpu memory is still at 1600mhz does not stop you installing 2100mhz ram and using it at that speed.

    Win 7 home premium can address 16gb
    win 7 pro / ultimate can address 192gb of ram
     
  14. mm vr

    mm vr The cheesecake is a lie

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    It's a chipset limitation. Z77 motherboards only support 32GB, no matter what. X79 supports 64GB.

    Windows Server 2012 supports 4TB of RAM. :rock:
     
  15. rollo

    rollo Modder

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    you aint gonna install windows server 2012 on your pc lol.
     
  16. Lovah

    Lovah Apple and Canon fanboy

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    Going to try to get 32GB to work in my current iMac and see how much that improves performance. If that isn't sufficient I will look more deeply in building a photoshop machine.
     
  17. mm vr

    mm vr The cheesecake is a lie

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    Huh? I'm running it just fine on my PC, and I even put it on my parents' computer. Before Server 2012 was released I ran Server 2008 R2. As a student I can get a free license for all Microsoft's Server products from Dreamspark.

    After following these tips (or rather, using the "Server Converter" tool), Server 2012 looks and feels exactly like 8. Except it doesn't have SuperFetch. But I'm not paying for a Windows 8 license just for that.

    Unfortunately it doesn't work like that. Old gen CPUs don't get price drops (instead they just go out of production and selling away old stocks is up to the retailers), so buying latest gen will almost always get you better performance for the same price. The stocks also run out pretty fast. You could of course buy second hand, but that might not be suitable for a dream machine. :)
     
    Last edited: 7 Nov 2012
  18. Pookeyhead

    Pookeyhead It's big, and it's clever.

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    LOL... Nonsense! Photoshop does NOT use one core at all. It's a fully threaded 64bit application.

    Here's photoshop applying a full quality radial blur to a massive 16bit TIFF

    [​IMG]

    Count the working threads dude!! I count 12 so it's using all 6 cores and hyper-threading!

    One core my arse. Seriously.. where you getting this from? My 3960X will KILL a 3770 in any Photoshop test you care to mention.



    You do NOT need 64GB to avoid a scratch disk at all. I use 16GB and hardly ever see scratch disk use. I shoot on either a D800 or a Phase One IQ back. Even the D800 produces 200MB 16bit tiffs. Seriously... you do NOT need 64GB of RAM. The more the better obviously, but you do not need 64GB, and you do not need a RAM disk to get awesome performance and is an unnecessary expense that would be better spent on a high quality monitor, because where you like it or not the monitor is the ONLY piece of equipment that actually effects the QUALITY of images he will be producing.

    Photoshop doesn't need a powerful GPU of ANY kind. Any old piece of crap will be fine so long as it has enough VRAM to drive your display at the res you need with 32bit colour, what do you need a powerful GPU for a 2D bitmap image editing program for?? The OP may WANT one to use with other stuff or gaming, sure, but Photoshop doesn't need one. The recommendations from others on here for a 480 will be overkill if the machine is only used for photoshop.


    Well I'm a photographer, and I reckon you're talking out of your ass. Apple cinema displays are not even in the same league as a Eizo Coloredge and NEC Spectraview. Let's start with the design... Typical of Apple, it's form over function. Tilt only stand!!! WTF is THAT all about? No height, no rotate... really Apple? Limited inputs compared to others. If it's the new Cinema Display you're talking about it uses a damned shiny screen which is hell on earth for serious work. It's a white LED backlit display with a very narrow Gamut compared to the Coloredge or Spectraview screens which can each display at least 98% of adobe RGB 1998, where the Apple can't even get close. It has no ability to be hardware calibrated whatsoever, whereas the NEC and Eizo have at least 12bit use programmable hardware LUT. The Apple Cinema Display is complete piece of crap compared to a PROPER professional monitor.


    I don't think I've seen so much erroneous advice in one post for years. Well done!


    @Lovah:

    I'd seriously consider X79. Despite what elAwesome said, Photoshop IS multi-threaded and a SB-E really does make a marked difference when editing large images.

    RAM is cheap, so 32GB would be good, especially if you are going the X79 route, as you then have the extra bandwidth of quad channel, and there's lots going on in Photoshop that also benefits from RAM bandwidth. Also.. if you DO want 64GB of RAM then X79 supports it, whereas Z77 doesn't. 32GB will be utterly and completely fine however... but X79 is still a majorly desirable thing to have with Photoshop.

    Screens: Eizo no longer make 16:10 screens, which may or may not be an issues for you. However... what's your budget? Coloredge and Spectraview screens that are 30" are in excess of £2000 each. There's the NEC PA301W but it can't be hardware calibrated unless you use the US version of NEC's own calibration software. You'll not find a 30"screen that can be calibrated at hardware level for less than £2K but the Spectraview 27" is £1100, so dropping 400 pixels of vertical res saves you a LOT of money. The 23" SPectraview is only £500, but you're only at 1080P there.

    My best bang for the buck at the moment would be the NEC PA301W. It can't be hardware calibrated, but considering the sheer quality of the display, build quality, warranty etc, I reckon you could happily live without it. It will kick the crap out of the likes of Dell U3011 etc. and is £1100. Software calibration isn't the end of the world if the monitors gamma curves are nice.

    If you're prepared to drop to 1440P then you have the NEC PA271W at £900.

    The monitor is what you stare at for hour after hour after hour. It's the only part of your system that directly affects the quality of your images and should be your primary concern for image editing. EVERYTHING else is secondary to that unless you are a high volume professional where time is money... then you'll need both speed AND the best screen.

    I reckon a simple, but solid X79 board, with a 3930K and as much RAM as you can get.. but more than 32GB is serious overkill.

    A fast SSD for a scratch disk

    Any GPU that will also allow you to do whatever other gaming and stuff you want to do when not editing (almost guaranteed to be overkill for Photoshop).

    and the best possible monitor you can afford. Don;t however, forget to budget for a calibrator. I recommend the X-Rite i1 Display Pro.
     
    Last edited: 8 Nov 2012
  19. longweight

    longweight Possibly Longbeard.

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    Pook is one of the few members left on here who actually know what they are talking about!
     
  20. Guest-16

    Guest-16 Guest

    http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131855

    P9X79 LE - should be our cheapest X79, and has newer Win 8 features. I'm gonna point you at our PB278Q and PA248/9 series monitors too, just so you can price/performance them versus competitors ;) I now use the PB278Q as my daily Photoshop one but I'm only doing web-work not 200MB TIFFs. Even with an SSD and 2GHz quad core in this G53 laptop it'll still load all cores and chug when I export to web any large image.

    How does the '8 core' AMD FX series compare to the 3930K or 3770K? is it ALU limited, FPU limited?
     

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