Time for a new computer. Suggestions?

[Carol Heath]

Hubby was installing a new hard drive for me today and discovered the fan from my graphics card has fallen off! I have no idea how long it has been like this but it is looking pretty terminal.
My current machine is almost four years old so I figure it is now time to rebuild my entire computer. I'm a PC user and need 64 bit but not sure what other features I should be asking for. If you were to build your perfect computer, what hardware would you choose? eg. graphics card, ideal specs? etc.

[Tony W]

An interesting question for me Carol as I have been debating if I want/need upgrade.

Perfect computer is probably a difficult one to answer and I guess would be dependant on your interests and needs i.e. Games player, Video editing, 3d editing etc.

Four years old is fairly ancient in computer terms therefore anything you build now is likely to show a marked speed improvement.

Guessing that you will really want it for graphics/photo editing via Photoshop CS5. So this is my best guess of what would be useful for this application - of course I could be incorrect in my assumptions and if so hopefully someone will correct me

OS
Windows 7 64 bit without any doubt

Processor
Photoshop should run faster on a multiprocessor system so perhaps quad core i5 or i7 - but which one best 'bang for buck'?

Motherboard
Always been happy with offerings from either Abit or Asus - perhaps an Asus P6T Deluxe

RAM
Think this is crucial and you should cram in as much as your computer can hold. Speed, while important is one of those areas that highlight the laws of diminishing returns i.e. the highest speed RAM will not necessarily be noticed in the overall performance

HDD
At least a couple of large fast Hard Drives. SSD's appear to be startlingly fast and applications will load very quickly. Probably most benefit though would be from using SSD for your PS scratch disk.

Graphics Card
From what I understand there is going to be very little advantage for Photoshop using a high end card (at least for 2d editing) therefore many mid range cards should be more than adequate. My choice either nVidia or ATI/AMD Radeon series

[DiamondPlatinum]

Thank you Tony .. I am in the exact same situation as Carol is and i would like u suggest if I am looking to buy a MAC which is the best one to go for .. I am eyeing the imac series

[mistermonday]

Hi Carol,
I just finished putting a few new machines together so I will offer some suggestions.
- ASUS P8P67 Pro or Deluxe Motherboard. They are well designed and robust with lots of I/O including USB 3, and e-sata. Internally there are 3Gbps and 6 Gbps SATA bus interfaces. Well supported with good BIOS and lots of programability.
- i7-2600 Intel CPU. It has 4 cores / 8 threads and starts at 3.4 Ghz. I would not go witha faster spped as it is usually not worth the extra cost for the CPU.
- 16GB of RAM. Price has come down on the matched pairs of 2 x 4GB
- For Hard Drives I would recommend a 120GB Solid State Drive for the OS and applications only. Would recommend a conventional hard drive like Western Digital Balck Caviar 1 or 2 Terabytes 7200 RPM for storing all personal files, photos, docs, and for use as the scratch disk for PS. If you can't afford the SSD as your OS drive then get a 2nd standard hard drive, but I would recommend a 7200 RPM drive. You can have the fastest processor and MoBo but programs like PS are very disk intensive and having fast drives will make a big difference.
- Win 7 64 bit along with 64 bit applications will make a very significant impact on speed of processing
- Video card; depends on your usage. ATI and nVidia offer a large selection of cards. Almost a new video cards come with 1 GB of video ram. A mid range card is plenty sufficient for PS which is not that video intensive. Watch out for the high end gamer type cards. While they don't cost much more for all the extra performance, they suck extra resources as you will need a more powerful case power supply to feed these power suckers, and you will likely have a big fat fan mounted on the GPU which will add to the noise in your system and it may also cause you to loose the use of an additional socket on the motherboard.
- A computer case with a power supply sufficient to run everything and allow for some expansion. So min 500 watts preferably 600 - 700 watts. Antec Sonata cases are very good and a number of them come bundled with power supplys and they have front panel connectors (audio, USB, e-SATA). The new ones have 4 holes drilled in the bottom to accommodate a standard SSD so you can avoid trying to find a mechanical adapter.
- Optical drives: If you are not into blu-ray, a conventional CD-DVD-R/RW drives are about $30. Consider installing 2 of them.
Regards, Murray

[Jerryb]

hi,
I am going thru the same thing smiling... only have a few minor things to mentioned besides mistermonday suggestion... which is sort of close to what I am getting....

a few thoughts...
1. make sure you have enough usb ports... i suggest at least 6 , 2 on front and the rest in the back..

2. if you do a lot of backing up large files... i make sure you have at least either a esata port or if you do have usb 3.0 ports make sureyou use a usb 3.0 external hard drive... a lot faster than using a old usb 2.0 drive...

3. graphic cards . now always software will drive what you get for hardware ....
a. for example i am looking at updating my old photoshop to cs 5.... and for best performance out of it the graphic card needs to have opengl support and shrader support. a graphic card can work without them but it maybe slower ... not all graphic cards have that support...
b. unless your into heavy duty games... you don't need the sli/crossfire type graphic cards (these kind of cards cost more) ... there only good for games , they don't do anything for graphic or video editing performance.
4. the case, be nice to get a cpu case that has filters holders on it.. in my area, very dusty and hense that why i think of it...

[Tony W]

Originally Posted by DiamondPlatinum

Thank you Tony .. I am in the exact same situation as Carol is and i would like u suggest if I am looking to buy a MAC which is the best one to go for .. I am eyeing the imac series

Sorry but I have no experience with Apple Mac therefore am unable to make any suggestions.

Nice sounding spec Murray at a cost of components only approx £1,100 (around $1,818) build it yourself and supply your own Windows 7. Processor does sound pretty capable and if you do feel the need for speed I understand it is quite easy to overclock to 5ghz @ 1.35v

If it is not considered a rude question what is the cost in your part of the world?

One thing I am curious about is there any reason you did not spec an SSD for scratch disk?

[plugsnpixels]

New iMacs were released today!

[mistermonday]

Originally Posted by Tony W

Sorry but I have no experience with Apple Mac therefore am unable to make any suggestions.

Nice sounding spec Murray at a cost of components only approx £1,100 (around $1,818) build it yourself and supply your own Windows 7. Processor does sound pretty capable and if you do feel the need for speed I understand it is quite easy to overclock to 5ghz @ 1.35v

If it is not considered a rude question what is the cost in your part of the world?

One thing I am curious about is there any reason you did not spec an SSD for scratch disk?

Hi Tony, here in USA & Canada the prices are somewhat lower. Each system was about $1300.
As a general rule it is recommended that the scratch disk be on a physical drive which is different than the drive containing the OS.

Best regards,
Murray

[renata]

Hey Carol, I'm in Sydney and have recently upgraded my computer. My hubbie likes to build his own, but I want no such nonsense! I bought from Dell (online), everything went smoothly and it runs CS5 like a rocket.

I wanted to buy an XPS8100, but there was a big recall of Intel chips and it was unavailable. So I bought an XPS7100 (which has an AMD chip). Compared to the "standard", I selected an upgrade to the processor, an upgrade to the video card, more memory (8gigs), a second internal 1TB drive and 3 years of antivirus software. The final cost was AUD$1860, in case you want to compare what it costs to build. I've bought from Dell before and my personal experiences have been hassle free.

If you ever end up going with Dell, look online, but then call to ask about discounts. I got a discount (was it 5% or 10%?) for quoting my NRMA (road membership) number. There are also coupon codes which you can search for online, which some of my friends were urging me to use, but I ended up not needing to.

Have fun, I'm so glad to have a nice, new PC (and CS5 instead of CS2)!

[Tony W]

Originally Posted by mistermonday

...As a general rule it is recommended that the scratch disk be on a physical drive which is different than the drive containing the OS...

Hi Murray, sometimes envious of the prices you seem to enjoy on so many products
I do appreciate the rule that the scratch disk be on a seperate drive but was wondering why not make the scratch disk an SSD (apart from cost)? For those times when PS accessed this drive it would fly! On the other hand with 16Gb available perhaps the scratch disk less important?

[Carol Heath]

Wow! Thank you all so much for those suggestions. As usual a wealth of information here at Retouchpro. It will be a huge help.
The computer will be my main work machine, mostly for Photoshop CS5 and associated programs. I have a great computer guy who will custom build from scratch so will do some research and hand him a long list.
Renata, Thanks for the heads up re. Dell and the NRMA card. I assume the same would apply to RACV. This may be handy in future.

[mistermonday]

Originally Posted by Tony W

Hi Murray, sometimes envious of the prices you seem to enjoy on so many products
I do appreciate the rule that the scratch disk be on a seperate drive but was wondering why not make the scratch disk an SSD (apart from cost)? For those times when PS accessed this drive it would fly! On the other hand with 16Gb available perhaps the scratch disk less important?

Hi Tony, yes, if price is no object, then a dedicated SDD for scratch would be nice, especially since prices of the smaller 60GB SSDs have come way down. Adding one certainly won't hurt. However, nothing is faster than RAM, and PS's use of scratch disk only impacts its performance of other tasks when it runs out of RAM.
Best regards, Murray

[Kraellin]

since no one has really covered it, i'll jump in with one more thing that one shld consider with any new rig... a backup plan and hardware! this shld be considered at the time of buying a new rig, not 2 years later when one or more drives have failed i'm not even going to talk about software for backups. choose your own there. i'm going to talk hardware. i am now using RAID5 on my system. this has already saved me countless hours of tearing out my hair trying to recover data off a failed disk. RAID5 is a configuration of harddrives. i have 3 terabyte drives in my computer. two are for a normal mirroring of data, such that if one ever goes bad you simply take that one out and pop another one in of the same size and rebuild the RAID array, which basically means you're copying the data over from the other good drive. but, RAID5 has one more feature over and above a normal mirror RAID array. RAID5 adds one more drive of the same size as the other two and keeps it hooked up, but not used. it's a spare. it's supposed to kick in when one of the other drives goes bad and rebuild everything pretty much automatically... at least that's what my tech guy says

i recently had a drive fail on me. i lost NO DATA! it did take a while to rebuild the array, but i lost NOTHiNG! so, that's one backup plan.

the other i recommend is having another drive, but an external drive, a usb drive. this one drive shld total whatever other drive space you have on your system. if you have two 500 gig drives, then get a terabyte drive for the backup. the beauty of this system is that you can simply turn the usb drive off when you're not backing up. this saves a little energy but more importantly it saves drive time. most drives are rated at about 10,000 hours, so you want to keep your actual platter spinning time at a minimum. most any software will recognize your drive and work just fine with it. i use an external drive that is the total size of my internals because i dont just back up a few files; i back up the entire system. so, if you're just saving data files, like pictures and music and videos and such, you dont have to have the external equal the internals.

redundancy is the key. i actually use both of the backup systems i just mentioned. i have the RAID5 and an external usb drive. i've even thought of using an off-site backup and if i had a bit faster and more reliable internet, i probably would. it only takes one time of thinking you've just lost 3 years work to make you start thinking more conservatively about backing things up. ok, for me it took several times, but the point is, you start thinking about back-up systems at the same time you're buying your new rig!

[mistermonday]

Craig, you raise a very important topic. Whether one encounters a physical drive failure or a system corruption caused by virus or malware, a strategic backup plan will avoid hours or days worth of misery. BTW, Craig, I used to run RAID but found that the mirrored drives usable life came to an end about the same time as the one that failed so I have an alternate approach.
- 1st physical drive in PC contains only OS and applications
- 2nd physical drive in PC stores all data files (docs, images, videos, music files, etc)
- External USB3.0 drive whose size is equal to or greater than the combined capacity of both internal drives.
- Install backup software that creates real drive images. The two most popular ones are Norton Ghost and Acronis True Image. These can be set to create images of the entire C Drive automatically at preassigned times. They can image a drive with 30GB of OS and apps in 15 mins running in background mode while you are still using your PC for other tasks. If you OS crashes, you are back up and running as you were before in 15 mins.
- There is a free utility called Synchback from a company called Minitools which allows you to set up simple or sophisticated backup or mirroring of all of the data files, It will do that incrementally, so if you have 300GB of photos and you add 10GB this week, the backup will only take a few mins instead of a couple of hours.
- Both the images and data files can be stored on the external drive.
- If you can not afford to take the 1 chance in 1 billion that internal and external drives will fail at the same time, add a 2nd external drive for a duplicate backup.
As someone aptly wrote "If it's worth doing, it's worth keeping". A robust backup plan is essential, whatever form it takes.
Regards, Murray

[Tony W]

A very important point about backup strategy and one that we should only overlook if we are prepared to take the risk. FWIW this is my take on the subject and of course your mileage may vary.

While I am no way knocking anyone that chooses RAID over conventional backup strategies i.e. storing to external drives using backup/imaging software. I have always had some concerns about RAID arrays due to added complexity and possible reliability issues. These may well outweigh any benefits over using reliable external storage for example 2Tb drives are now fairly common and inexpensive.

There is a saying I believe in IT along the lines of data does not exist unless it is in 3 different physical locations

For some reason motherboard manufacturers all started to include RAID controllers on their boards and most users seem to think that this was the answer to all potential threats of data loss.

I believe that RAID was/is mainly intended for large enterprise use. My own experience in an environment where the storage requirement was to have 24/7 access to medical images to potentially hundreds of users. In a four year period the number of images exceeded 12 million and yes RAID 5 systems were deployed. And yes there were failures although non catastrophic.

It is my understanding while RAID 5 can survive 1 disk failure by reconstructing data it cannot survive 2 disk failures consequently all data will be lost. Perhaps if RAID array is preferred then RAID 10 may offer a better solution.

We have to accept that all drives at some time will fail it is not a question of if but of when. Then the question is how long will it take to restore data when a HDD fails? With a RAID it may be as simple as a hot swap or more complex needing to rebuild data. While a restore from backup may not be as convenient or quick? it may be all you need for average to high volume user.

So my preference is a seperate image backup of the system

Final thought on this, all drives will fail at some point the more drives you have e.g. RAID array the more your chances of encountering a HDD failure ?

[Boneappetit]

Wow, nice info in general guys... The backup talk is just way too cool. Gotta luv this site... My 2 cents here are; something I read a long time ago on a Windows or Mac issue... If your main work is Art (music, paint, retouch etc, Mac is the way to go)... I personally prefer Mac for anything... But that's me... If your main work is Office stuff, or commercial, go for Windows.

I made the move to Mac a couple of years ago, and will never go back. Since then I haven't got a virus, crash, or patch problem, that were regular stuff while using Windows... Only had some small cons when I started, due to the availability of some programs, those can be found nowadays with no hassle.

[RobertAsh]

Hi,

Quite a lot has been covered already but I'd just add a few other points regarding my own computer setup:

• RAID-0. You get the best performance at the lowest cost. RAID-5 like Kraellin's is great if you have the budget to buy that many disks - I would never say "don't do that". But I'm running RAID-0 across 2 drives and the speed is 2x that of a single drive or a RAID-1. Running big files like images really needs high performance reads/writes, and a single disk is not going to give you that.

• I'd stay far away from a single drive for your image files, it's too slow now, and will get even worse as files get even bigger -- and they certainly will.
• RAID-0 Backup. Again, if you go RAID-5 you don't have to do this part, although you do need a backup. If you lose 2 RAID-5 drives at once then you lose all your data. Also, the faster your backup runs, the faster you can restore if you need to. I use a G-RAID connected with eSATA. It's pre-configured RAID-0 and is made for Mac so you know it works I run mine on a PC so I had to use Disk Manager to reformat it from Mac to PC format, but my G-RAID is trouble-free unlike my last eSATA array (a no-name one).
• HP instead of Dell. Dell has been my brand for 10-12 years but HP's passed them nowadays from what I can see. My Dell 9100 came with 1.5 TB RAID-0 1-2 years ago, now Dell sells 1 TB as their largest RAID-0 and charges more!
• Hexacore. 6-cores are available now and will replace quad-cores soon, no doubt. Dell charges $1000 more for a 6-core, HP only charges $500 more or so. I just priced out a 6-core HP with 2 TB RAID-0 that cost about the same as a Dell quad-core with 1 TB RAID-0. I plan to replace my computer this year I hope, so looks like it's likely to be HP this time.

All the best, whichever way you decide to go

[ashphotoart]

well, my quesion is as well :

what about apple i-mac 21.5" for serious photo retouching ?
it has system and monitor.

[DiamondPlatinum]

Could anybody suggest which Mac is the best if I am retouching in photoshop and rendering 3d images ..

[Boneappetit]

Hi DP:

If i understand your question well, I guess it is a matter of which is the best one you can afford. On the other hand, it also depends on the target you are after; work in the house, a laptop if you want to easily move your works, etc... Certain computer won't make you a better retoucher, but as a rule of thumb the huskier the elements of the computer the better... I mean a nice husky processor, video card, memory and disk, will surely work better than the smaller ones specially, if you often work with 3D images.

[RobertAsh]

Originally Posted by DiamondPlatinum

Could anybody suggest which Mac is the best if I am retouching in photoshop and rendering 3d images ..

If you're rendering 3D images and have the budget I'd recommend looking at a Mac that has dual-quadcores or dual-hexacores. Rendering eats up CPU like crazy so you need as much CPU as you can reasonably afford. Also, would look into a RAID-5 or RAID-0 configuration so your computer can read and write files to and from disk as quickly as possible as it needs to while the rendering is going on (depending on how much memory you have, the more the better).

[DiamondPlatinum]

Originally Posted by Boneappetit

Hi DP:

If i understand your question well, I guess it is a matter of which is the best one you can afford. On the other hand, it also depends on the target you are after; work in the house, a laptop if you want to easily move your works, etc... Certain computer won't make you a better retoucher, but as a rule of thumb the huskier the elements of the computer the better... I mean a nice husky processor, video card, memory and disk, will surely work better than the smaller ones specially, if you often work with 3D images.

Thanks Boneappetit .. However if I am eyeing the I mac series what configuration should I go in for in terms of processor
http://www.apple.com/imac/specs.html
Also Is I5 enough or one really needs the I7 to render jewellery images

[RobertAsh]

Hi Diamond,

I really apologize BoneAppetit is right in what he's saying. I was thinking something a lot more giant when it came to rendering requirements, not everyone needs dual-quad or higher

[DiamondPlatinum]

thank you Boneappetit and Robert Ash but no need to apologise . Yet i am still confused .. Can either of you give me specs for a pc or mac which can be used for rendering mainly jewelry images and further retouching them.. If my budget is 1500$ ... Also I do agree tht spending a bomb wont make me a good retoucher however i need something good to start with to get fast and good renders

[RobertAsh]

Hi Diamond,

I don't know of how much help I can be. I don't do 3D or 2D animation rendering, which is what comes to my mind personally when I hear that word "rendering". I do know that animation rendering uses lots of CPU..... The only rendering I do is using a few Photoshop filters (like Smart Sharpening using High Radius, Low Amount) which take up CPU.

But honestly I'm not a retoucher, I'm a photographer who uses Photoshop a lot. My budget is a bit higher than $1500 (it's typically $1800-2200) but I buy Microsoft Office Business Edition and Windows 64-bit Ultimate, which together boost the price several hundreds of dollars.

For $1500 I'd recommend going to the Apple, HP and Dell sites and seeing what you can buy for a comfortable budget. I only use PCs myself, and with PCs you get more for your money (RAM, cpu, disk, etc.), and recently HP seems to give you more for your dollar than Dell does (I've been on both sites in the past few weeks comparing).

But Macs seem to use resources more efficiently nowadays than PCs, and are easier to use and work better right out of the box. PCs can take a lot more work to get them working smoothly.

For what you'll be doing I don't know enough to help you make tradeoffs like RAM, disk, memory, graphics cards, your familiarity with computers and software, and your need for ease of use. As a starter I'd make a blind guess and say (for a PC):

• quad-core cpu (hexacore would be 50% faster but would probably add too much cost right now).
• 12 GB RAM if you can (8-10 GB if you can't)
• 1 GB graphics card (nVideo or ATI)

But again, that's a blind guess. Someone else here could probably guide you better.

Regarding CPU, don't worry too much about getting the fastest gigahertz (GHz). Manufacturers can charge large premiums for those last few MHz (megahertz, 1/1000 of a GHz).

For instance, 3.4 GHz can cost a lot more than 3.0 GHz but it's only 13% faster. So subtract that from your expected rendering time. If your rendering time is 10 hrs, then 13% makes a big difference (over one hour). If your rendering time is 10 minutes or 5 minutes, then 13% makes little difference (just over a minute or half a minute) and is likely not worth the extra cost. Unless you really do a lot of rendering jobs back to back - then that 30 seconds or 1 minute can add up over time. But only you know what your workload will likely be.

My filter renderings take a couple/few minutes at most, never as long as 10 minutes that I remember. So I buy 1-2 steps down from the top of the CPU scale -- and use the extra money to buy more memory or a RAID-0 disk configuration or Microsoft Office or a better graphics card.

Hope that helps some, and hope others here can weigh in with better specifics of what you really need (my intuition says more memory and a better graphics card but others here who do more of that work can guide you better).

Sorry for the long note but I try to be really careful when people are spending hard-earned money on a limited budget.