Computer build

Greetings. I've decided to ditch my laptop for photo editing and build a PC.

What I have is a 3.6 GHz 2600k i7, 16 GB DDR3 1333 RAM

OS installed to 128 GB SSD on SATA III
Data/photos on 3x 2 TB 7200 RPM drives (only operates at SATA II speeds due to controller... ) in a RAID5

GTX 550 TI, 750 watt power supply.

Thing is, I got the RAM for free because the person did not ring it up, and my board supports faster RAM... Would I see any benefit in photoshop/Lr in using 24-32 GBs of 1600 DDR3 as opposed to a mere 16 GBs of 1333 RAM?

I've also gone ahead and set my page file down to just 1 GB in size, to save writes to the SSD and get precious little space back.

"mere" 16GB of RAM!?

That looks like a pretty badass build. I don't think you have anything to worry about.

SATA II speeds are 3Gb/s and there is no way you are going to get that kind of throughput from 7200RPM drives, so no worries. Running faster than 1333 RAM (which is the bus speed) is really only going to help for overclocking or for onboard video cards that feed off RAM.

The amount of RAM I cannot comment on, but the speed won't make much of a difference at all. Chk out this article on Memory Speed Scaling for Sandy Bridge CPU's. You make me feel small with my 8GB of RAM.

RAM speed makes very little difference. 16GB is HEAPS of RAM, no you won't see any increase in performance if you add more RAM.

I was kind of making that comment tongue-in-cheek, but I have not paid much attention to computer hardware/benchmarks for YEARS so I guess I'm just not too sure about to what extent the hardware is utilized in modern applications.

I may just save my money and stick with the RAM I have - it was free afterall

Over about 8GB of RAM it's just used as a disk cache. Batch processing 500 images with Bridge I barely hit the disk at all, other than creating output files, they're all in my ram cache.

Update:

WOW! I finally got done doing the overnight transfer of ~2 TB of photos to my RAID and it's UNREAL. Every time I open a catalog in Lr, it's INSTANT. This is unreal! Makes me wanna take more pictures just so I can blow through them on my computer super-fast

Is your catalog on the SSD or on the RAID array? I'd put the catalog on the SSD for fast low latency access to the cache, and the images on RAID. Well, I wouldn't bother with RAID, one disk is fine for me.

The catalog is on the RAID. It's fast enough I like to keep it all together just to keep things simpler.

This is very similar to the new build I am considering, sans RAID. Might have to consider that ... but spinny drives are so expensive these days. :\

One of the machine configurations I'm considering has USB 3.0 on the motherboard, and the case has enough extra 5.25" drive bays that I'm considering an internal card reader. Trouble is I have not seen too many available on the market other than this one:

http://www.amazon.com …B003OC9LZG/ref=​pd_vtp_e_2

Anybody have recommendations? Thanks.

Newegg has a few. I don't think there are many 5.25" ones, but there are cheap 3.5 -> 5.25 conversion kits. I was going to say make sure it is USB 3, but USB 2 goes up to 60 MB/s which is up there with the fastest cards on the market. So that is up to you. I'd probably just go usb 3 while I was buying.

5.25" adapter: http://www.newegg.com …aspx?Item=N82E1​6817994080

tkbslc wrote in post #13862124
Newegg has a few. I don't think there are many 5.25" ones, but there are cheap 3.5 -> 5.25 conversion kits. I was going to say make sure it is USB 3, but USB 2 goes up to 60 MB/s which is up there with the fastest cards on the market. So that is up to you. I'd probably just go usb 3 while I was buying.

5.25" adapter: http://www.newegg.com …aspx?Item=N82E1​6817994080

Thanks for the link Taylor - much appreciated .

I can see how my existing drive would just sort of "hang in" the slot, but then I'd have to add duct tape or customize a bezel of of plastic which I could do. I'll just have to keep looking around.

tim wrote in post #13857968
RAM speed makes very little difference. 16GB is HEAPS of RAM, no you won't see any increase in performance if you add more RAM.

but does wonders on vmware hypervisor 5!!!!


OP - nice build..

sapearl wrote in post #13862489
Thanks for the link Taylor - much appreciated .

I can see how my existing drive would just sort of "hang in" the slot, but then I'd have to add duct tape or customize a bezel of of plastic which I could do. I'll just have to keep looking around.

No, the adapter has risers to support the 3.5" drive centered in the drive opening. They work well. We used to use them to add zip drives to computers back when those were popular.