Advice on where to spend money on an Editing workstation.

zerovision wrote in post #17609028
You are correct that the 750 is PCIe, but it requires a connector that connects to the M.2 slot on the MB to run at full potential.

M.2 is PCI-E but PCI-E is not M.2... Well, to put it simply, these types of SSDs need four lanes of PCI bandwidth, regardless of how the drive ultimately connects to the CPU.

The first variant, called the AIB or add-in-board looks kinda like a GPU and slots in basically the same way, into one of the PCI-E slots that provides 4x lanes of bandwidth, and that's all that's needed.

The second variant connects via SF8639 connector aka "U.2" as of April this year, but there are currently no motherboards with this connector outside of the server space, however conversion cables are available to M.2 type.

M.2 is a format initially developed for SSDs for compact devices, but in a full-size PC it's not recommended to use them due to heat issues, the Samsung XP units in particular can easily reach over 90°c.

I'm going to say it again, i7, 16GB RAM, 2xSamsung 850 SSD (120GB for OS, second 120GB if it's just cache or 240GB if you want to store a lot of images), this will be good value and probably 95% as fast in real world performance as a dual Xeon with a bucket of RAM and a PCI-e SSD. Don't spend twice as much for 10% more performance, just upgrade again in 3 years.

Agree with what Tim is saying.

I agree with what Bobbyz is saying.

I don't know if i should listen to Bobbyz or Tim.

Bleufire wrote in post #17609503
I don't know if i should listen to Bobbyz or Tim.

"I have no idea what I am doing but..."
...I have money burning a hole in my pocket - any PCI-E SSD
...I have a nice budget - Samsung 850 Pro or SanDisk Extreme Pro
...I'm on a budget - Samsung 850 EVO or Intel 730
...I'm strapped for cash - Crucial MX200 or Mushkin Reactor
...YOLO - anything manufactured by OCZ


I want to add that while a faster SSD is nice, it's not as big as going from a spinning disk to any SSD, plus you actually need to be working with files large enough to notice the difference; The biggest impact is the lack of latency on SSD drives - which is pretty low on any model.

Kolor-Pikker wrote in post #17609966
"I have no idea what I am doing but..."
...I have money burning a hole in my pocket - any PCI-E SSD
...I have a nice budget - Samsung 850 Pro or SanDisk Extreme Pro
...I'm on a budget - Samsung 850 EVO or Intel 730
...I'm strapped for cash - Crucial MX200 or Mushkin Reactor
...YOLO - anything manufactured by OCZ

That was beautiful man.

Hi
I am only going for the single CPU variant. It is also only the 6 core version; as from what I can see what I do benefits from a single CPU with a higher clock speed, and after 6 cores their seems to be no performance increase.
If they had a 4 core with a higher CPU I would have gone with that. But they dont. The 6 core variant may help moving files around.
Sorry I have no clue how to configure or manage RAID - so decided on the Intel 750 - basically , drop my entire shoot onto that. Edit those I want to, on the Sata SSD, then copy the result to the Intel. And backup to the removable HHD and leave It transfering whist I have supper.

It all depends if I get the whopping discount promised!
Hopefully I do,so will have a relaible solution with full support. And at 3.9 GHz with 16 MB ( maybe even 32 GB RAM DDR4 2133, and the Intel should be pretty quick. Plus the Xeons wont be replaced until 2017.
Albeit I may feel a little pissed if a SkyLake i7 4790K replacement emerges in a few months.

If once I have decided on the final config (which to a large extent itself will depend on the final discount offerred) I Will have to see how I feel about getting a system now,mthat has "current" technology.

However if the promised decent discount does not appear, then I will be torn between overpaying for current technology but getting a system now. Or say upgrading my Laptop with a Samsung £153 500GB SSD, and struggling with a 4K monitor running at 2560 x 1600. At least I Would hopefully be able to migrate the possible SATA III SSD DRIVE to a new system later.

Submariner wrote in post #17610429
Hi
I am only going for the single CPU variant. It is also only the 6 core version; as from what I can see what I do benefits from a single CPU with a higher clock speed, and after 6 cores their seems to be no performance increase.
If they had a 4 core with a higher CPU I would have gone with that. But they dont. The 6 core variant may help moving files around.
Sorry I have no clue how to configure or manage RAID - so decided on the Intel 750 - basically , drop my entire shoot onto that. Edit those I want to, on the Sata SSD, then copy the result to the Intel. And backup to the removable HHD and leave It transfering whist I have supper.

It all depends if I get the whopping discount promised!
Hopefully I do,so will have a relaible solution with full support. And at 3.9 GHz with 16 MB ( maybe even 32 GB RAM DDR4 2133, and the Intel should be pretty quick. Plus the Xeons wont be replaced until 2017.
Albeit I may feel a little pissed if a SkyLake i7 4790K replacement emerges in a few months.

If once I have decided on the final config (which to a large extent itself will depend on the final discount offerred) I Will have to see how I feel about getting a system now,mthat has "current" technology.

However if the promised decent discount does not appear, then I will be torn between overpaying for current technology but getting a system now. Or say upgrading my Laptop with a Samsung £153 500GB SSD, and struggling with a 4K monitor running at 2560 x 1600. At least I Would hopefully be able to migrate the possible SATA III SSD DRIVE to a new system later.

I still don't get why you think you need a Xeon... or a $400 SSD. It's your money though, burn it how you want to, personally I'd rather put that money toward more camera gear. My $400 PC does everything I need it to without lagging, the simple fact is that photo editing isn't a taxing process for a modern PC, you don't need a supercomputer to do it well.

It won't matter if you build the system with an i5, an i7, or a Xeon processor; the thing will be effectively outdated in 2 to 3 years time, and a similar amount of investment will get you a far more powerful system in six months than what you would have if you bought it today. And maybe in nine months AMD will pull some rabbit out of its hat and announce 512 core consumer CPU plans that are going to leave intel (and programmers) scrambling to respond.

Worrying about your computer becoming 'outdated' does you about as much good as worrying whether or not it is going to rain on a given Tuesday five years from now, except we can guarantee that the computer is going to become outdated, and it may or may not rain on that random Tuesday.

Set yourself a reasonable budget, say $800 for the new kit, and give yourself a stretch margin up to $1000 or $1100 and start looking at what you can get in your area (Don't forget to include shipping costs, which can make it hard to advise someone what to order when you don't know where they are). From there work towards a final decision and place your order.

After you get your parts together and have a system up and running, unsubscribe to all your hardware retailer newsletters and don't look at prices for a year or two and you won't have to worry about whether or not the prices crashed.

Also do remember that there could be some massive natural disaster or civil uprising in the next few weeks that could take a majority of the fabrication plants out of commission for weeks, months, or even years, and cause PC part prices to skyrocket. Trying to predict what you can get for your money beyond more than a few months is possibly less effective and reliable than herding cats.

You're spending far more than is required, and your performance will be no better than a config half the price that plenty of people have suggested. You seem to have asked for advice then ignored it, not even saying why you're ignoring it. I'm out.

Why do you keep mentioning HP?

Do you all not have anything like a Newegg in England?

I honestly think you can do a i5 CPU, 16GB RAM, 500gb Samsung 840 or 850 SSD, get a good 2-3TB Platter drive setup and you are good to go.

Pick a good vid card and you are good to go. You don't need a massive system to edit photos.......best bang for your buck will be a killer monitor and something to run it. I have a GTX970 4gb card and a Dell U2715h running at 1440p and theres nothing I can throw at it photo wise that makes it even blink.

Brules wrote in post #17610782
Why do you keep mentioning HP?

I have a GTX970 4gb card and a Dell U2715h running at 1440p and theres nothing I can throw at it photo wise that makes it even blink.

Did you read the thread?

Submariner explained why he is looking at HP, and the relevance (or irrelevance) of GPU's to photo editing was discussed.

Bearmann wrote in post #17604562
.

An 1100 watt power supply is crazy with only one video card.

My 750 watt supply is happily powering;
4 x 3TB hard drives,
2X 2TB hard drives,
2X 256GB SSD drives,
32GB RAM
Adaptec 8 channel RAID controller
Gforce card
DVD Drive fans, lights and room to grow.

With 750 watts I also was given cabling to power 4 count them FOUR high end graphics cards!

And Old "Skynet III" with the multi drive SCSI chain and dual Opteron dual core processors in a server board (talk about power hungry CPUs,) was also powered with 750 watt.

IMHO 750 is the sweet spot Overkill with room to grow, but the next size up is really pricey, and the next size down is only a little more affordable.

zerovision wrote in post #17609028
You are correct that the 750 is PCIe, but it requires a connector that connects to the M.2 slot on the MB to run at full potential. This is just information that I have read. I have seen, on youtube, where ASUS did benchmark testing on 4 or 5 of their ASUS ROG RAIDR 240GB PCIe drives and reached speeds around 5GBps read and 3-4GBps write.

Here is the info on the Intel 750 on their website under "before you buy"

http://www.intel.com …-035496.htm?wapkw=750+s​sd

This is cool, but whats cooler is the adapter they are going to make that will allow you to plug FOUR of those x4 cards into 1 x16 PCIe slot in RAID 10!

that and SkyLake will be in SkyNet V