new desktop for photography

BACKGROUND: I shoot RAW with the Canon 5D MkIII and 7D MkII cameras, so files are in the 24mb size range out of camera. "m a PC and not a Mac guy. I have a first or second generation Dell Desktop I-7 machine with 16 gb ram and 2 1GB hard drives. I have a 27" Dell U2710 ISP monitor. Via ethernet, I store images on four 4GB HDD in a Synology NAS. Commonly, I run with both LR and Photoshop open. My image processing often has 4 to 7 layers and masks on an image, so files can get pretty big. With all of this, the computer is begging to really act slow on saving and even opening files.

I also use Photoshop Gold to make video slideshows of my work for presenting at camera clubs, etc. In the last two years, I've started shooting a bit of video on my cameras and these load slow on the computer.

GOING FORWARD: I'm guessing cameras to get in the 36 to 50 megapixel range and will want the processing power to handle this. I assume 4k video is also in the future.
I"m guessing you guys are going to recommend around a 240gb ssd along with the HD and 24 to 32 GB of RAM with the latest generation I-7. Budget is max of $2,000 but, of course less is better.

QUESTIONS:
- Should I try upgrading my existing machine, or is it the right time to change machines?
- If I'm upgrading to new machine, any suggested uses for the existing machine without a lot of techno internal changes as computers are not my thing?
- Do you have a recommended off the shelf computer suggestion?
- Are there any specific RAM or SSD recommendations?
- Any other general recommendations as I shop?

I have always been a PC person, although I did used to use a Mac in a university electronics lab for running Spice. This would have been back in 92/93, and they were old machines then with the integrated 10 or 12" monochrome monitor and 3.5" floppy. My computer is just about to give up the ghost so I am looking for a replacement. Much to my surprise, after looking at all of the options the new 27" iMac actually looks like the best bet at the moment. I want something that will be able to support at the minimum a wide gamut 27" 2550 display. Looking around that is at least a £600 monitor in the UK. Then I looked at video cards, to get a video card that would run the monitor at a 60Hz refresh means a fairly high end card, at around £300. Looking at the specifications of motherboards to run the video card takes you into a mid range card at the least. Then there is the processor, RAM, SSD, PSU and case and operating system to consider, as my current system is laptop based, so I have nothing to upgrade from.

By the time I have put that all together I have spent as much as I would spend on one of the new Skylake i5 powered iMacs with the 27" 5K display, 250 GB SSD and the mid version of the graphics card. Admittedly with the iMac you are limiting your upgrade choices down the line quite a bit. Still for a system to run LR, PS, Premier and Aftereffects CC on it seems like a good deal. The new 5K screens are wide gamut, although they are DCI-P3 gamut, which is a digital cinema standard, it is also very close to AdobeRGB, with the green apex skewed clockwise a little. Actually the only monitors with similar specs to the new Apple 5K screen are by NEC or Eizo, and start at over £2000. It's a bit of a shame you cannot drive the iMac screen as a monitor for a desktop computer. Anyway the new late 2015 27" 5K iMac's with Skylake i5 or i7 processors are a very interesting option right now. even if you have always been a PC/*nix person like me.

Alan

Are you working off the internal hard drive or off the NAS? If your working off the NAS, them that's your bottleneck and not the computer. Of that's the case, buy am external to work off before you've images to the NAS.

I save the initial import to the internal with a copy to the external. Everything is copied to the NAS as well and then also backed up the Crash plan.

flowrider wrote in post #17812585
Are you working off the internal hard drive or off the NAS? If your working off the NAS, them that's your bottleneck and not the computer. Of that's the case, buy am external to work off before you've images to the NAS.

I save the initial import to the internal with a copy to the external. Everything is copied to the NAS as well and then also backed up the Crash plan.

Steve, LR is accessing from the NAS; however, once I've opened the image in PS, I save a copy onto the HDD and do editing there. Once finished, I transfer back to the NAS.

BTW, I didn't note this before, but if I look at Task Manager and am merely surfing the web, the computer is running around 5.5 GB. While I'm working, it's hovering around 12 GB of RAM in use. After I close out of PS and LR, it drops down to around 505 or 6 GB, which seems high to me.

BigAl007 wrote in post #17812573
I have always been a PC person, although I did used to use a Mac in a university electronics lab for running Spice. This would have been back in 92/93, and they were old machines then with the integrated 10 or 12" monochrome monitor and 3.5" floppy. My computer is just about to give up the ghost so I am looking for a replacement. Much to my surprise, after looking at all of the options the new 27" iMac actually looks like the best bet at the moment. I want something that will be able to support at the minimum a wide gamut 27" 2550 display. Looking around that is at least a £600 monitor in the UK. Then I looked at video cards, to get a video card that would run the monitor at a 60Hz refresh means a fairly high end card, at around £300. Looking at the specifications of motherboards to run the video card takes you into a mid range card at the least. Then there is the processor, RAM, SSD, PSU and case and operating system to consider, as my current system is laptop based, so I have nothing to upgrade from.

By the time I have put that all together I have spent as much as I would spend on one of the new Skylake i5 powered iMacs with the 27" 5K display, 250 GB SSD and the mid version of the graphics card. Admittedly with the iMac you are limiting your upgrade choices down the line quite a bit. Still for a system to run LR, PS, Premier and Aftereffects CC on it seems like a good deal. The new 5K screens are wide gamut, although they are DCI-P3 gamut, which is a digital cinema standard, it is also very close to AdobeRGB, with the green apex skewed clockwise a little. Actually the only monitors with similar specs to the new Apple 5K screen are by NEC or Eizo, and start at over £2000. It's a bit of a shame you cannot drive the iMac screen as a monitor for a desktop computer. Anyway the new late 2015 27" 5K iMac's with Skylake i5 or i7 processors are a very interesting option right now. even if you have always been a PC/*nix person like me.

Alan

I will try to be open minded re: MAC, but an hoping to minimize the learning curve with any changes I make (yes, I'm an old fart)

buddy4344 wrote in post #17812594
I will try to be open minded re: MAC, but an hoping to minimize the learning curve with any changes I make (yes, I'm an old fart)

Even for an old fart I don't think the change from Win 7 to OSX would be any harder than the change to Win 10. All the Adobe Creative Cloud applications will work pretty darn near identically in either OS, the biggest difference I can think of is the mouse, and the alt/opt key thing. Actually I would rather sit down at my friends iMac than I would sit down with a computer running a standard install of Win 8, been there and tried that. People make a lot of fuss about the differences but really there is very little difference in the day to day use of either of the modern Apple or MS operating systems.

You should be able to easily plug your Dell monitor into one of the new 5K iMacs to use a dual 27" setup.

Alan

buddy4344 wrote in post #17812546
... 2 1GB hard drives. ... I store images on four 4GB HDD in a Synology NAS.

I'm assuming you meant to type TB where you typed GB.

As to your question, IMHO i7 with 16GB Ram,. what's to upgrade?

Flowrider already said it, I'll reiterate and clarify
I'd look at the bottleneck, ie: Storage subsystem and access times.

IMHO all you need to get that system to feel more speedy is to swap out some hard drives. You current set up of keeping everything external means you taking what is already the slowest aspect of a computer, ie: storage, and making it slower.

Move OS and apps to an SSD, and maybe dump the old 1TB drives for an/some internal drives @ 3 or 4 or more TB for increase in storage and speed. Work from the internal drives for speed during post processing, and continue to back up to your NAS. At least two copies of everything locally.

Although I can see some vague logic to this method, likely created due to the small internal drives you have to work with, I agree that this is really what's slowing you down. It's putting needless steps into the process, and limiting your redundancy at the same time. Think how much easier faster and fluid your work flow would be if there wasn't all this back and forth copying and working over Ethernet cable!

Other upgrades? Swapping your 16GB for 32Gb of RAM might offer some cheap upgrade advantages.

Add an off site back up solution. Cloud or better, just an external that you keep off site.


You have a very powerful PC that is being hampered by storage, I do not in any way see why this would precipitate and switch to another platform.

BigAl007 wrote in post #17812573
I have always been a PC person, although I did used to use a Mac in a university electronics lab for running Spice. This would have been back in 92/93, and they were old machines then with the integrated 10 or 12" monochrome monitor and 3.5" floppy. My computer is just about to give up the ghost so I am looking for a replacement. Much to my surprise, after looking at all of the options the new 27" iMac actually looks like the best bet at the moment. I want something that will be able to support at the minimum a wide gamut 27" 2550 display. Looking around that is at least a £600 monitor in the UK. Then I looked at video cards, to get a video card that would run the monitor at a 60Hz refresh means a fairly high end card, at around £300. Looking at the specifications of motherboards to run the video card takes you into a mid range card at the least. Then there is the processor, RAM, SSD, PSU and case and operating system to consider, as my current system is laptop based, so I have nothing to upgrade from.

By the time I have put that all together I have spent as much as I would spend on one of the new Skylake i5 powered iMacs with the 27" 5K display, 250 GB SSD and the mid version of the graphics card. Admittedly with the iMac you are limiting your upgrade choices down the line quite a bit. Still for a system to run LR, PS, Premier and Aftereffects CC on it seems like a good deal. The new 5K screens are wide gamut, although they are DCI-P3 gamut, which is a digital cinema standard, it is also very close to AdobeRGB, with the green apex skewed clockwise a little. Actually the only monitors with similar specs to the new Apple 5K screen are by NEC or Eizo, and start at over £2000. It's a bit of a shame you cannot drive the iMac screen as a monitor for a desktop computer. Anyway the new late 2015 27" 5K iMac's with Skylake i5 or i7 processors are a very interesting option right now. even if you have always been a PC/*nix person like me.

Alan

you can use the iMac as a monitor for another computer (as long as its another mac)

To OP. Your problem is need for speed. PC or Mac or Linux is irrelevant. If you think your PC is slow following checklist will help.
1. Check if you have power saving ON if so turn it OFF (high-performance). My LR was running slow until I peeked at CPU speed and it was 1.7GHz due to power-saving.
2. Thermal performance: Open up the case and see if the CPU fan is covered in dust. CPUs do auto throttling when temp rises beyond certain value. Improper cooling is one reason.
3. Overclocking. I overclocked my i7-920 (of 2008) from 2.67GHz to 3.2 GHz without changing anything. This might void warranty, however if your PC is old, its possible its out of warranty. You might need a better cooling for this.
4. SSD.. Put the OS in SSD. Samsung Pro is a good one.
5. RAM if 16 GB is not enough increase to 32 GB

Thanks for the comments. I will immediately look to see if power savings is on. Probably is. I will also check for dust; however, I did this a few months back. The SSD has been something I've considered previously and seems worth it even if I get a new computer as the existing box is still a sound machine.

A lot of other comments on larger drives, etc. I need to way as I don't want to put a ton of money into upgrades and not see a ton of difference.

Buddy

I have to agree that IO is likely the issue, and an SSD could make things a fair bit faster - I recommend Samsung 850 evo or pro - 250GB is plenty big enough. I have a second generation i7, the 2600K, it's still fine for 12MP files, but slow for 36MP files. The i7 6xxx series isn't all that much faster - 25 to 50%, it's not like the days where you upgrade every 2 years and it's twice as fast.

Try the SSD first, if it's not fast enough you can always move it to a new machine. Put cache/catalog/swap/wor​king files on the SSD to start with. Putting operating system on it is more effort but makes the whole computer feel snappier, but won't help image processing speed much.

Computer recommendations if you need them in this thread.

itsray wrote in post #17812671
you can use the iMac as a monitor for another computer (as long as its another mac)

Not on the just released 27" 5K iMac you can't. The single Thunderbolt port cannot manage the necessary data throughput needed to run the 5K screen. The other issue is a lack of video cards that will actually drive a 5K screen. These machines are stuck with a Radeon R9 based graphics card (of an undetermined model, there seems to be no technical information about the graphics system available, either from AMD or Apple) as Nvidia do not have a 5K capable video card at the moment.

Alan