A Massive thanks to all those who helped me resolve the issues - its finished :):):):)

Finally got a Supermicro MB that worked and the dreaded workstation is finished. Well still got to put in the 3rd SSD ( a Sammy 850 EVO) when I canibalise the laptop for sale. And add another HGST as a backup drive ( the timesaving of dumping off a back up, compared to using WD USB 3.0 passports is dramatic. Well worth £128! For 4TB.

Overall I am extremely pleased will all aspects except one.
It goes like the wind and the 4K screen is a dream to edit.
It also runs cool and quietly.

The slight negative, which I knew would be there, but honestly thought it might be better - is the fact that PS Elements 13, seems to only use 1 core for the majority of tasks. Seeing it in XTU in monitoring mode, is quite revealing. Bluntly Clock core speed is definitely king.
That said its still 4x faster than the old laptop. And for other areas appears like its 10x faster.
I had been warned that there was negligible performance increase from over 4 cores, but stuck on one core most of the time! thank goodness I went for the Intel 750 PCIe , which with the Intel driver is like lightening.

I Was told the first 2 cores really mattered and the 3rd and fourth provided diminushing returns, but that was tested on the proper Photoshop & I think LR , and I only use Elements 13 ATM. Maybe there is a difference? And hopefully Adobe will address the potential of multiple cores.

Dont get me wrong its still super.
But when you see 5 cores virtually idle, it makes me wonder if there is a way to tune it to use them - I think not.
So its a bit surprising, PS E13 is so nadly written.

If I dab say the healing-brush frantically, I Can get ahead of it, but not painfully - like say with the old laptop.

I am sure it will come into its own editing 4K video. But thats for the future.

Apart from the 3 month nightmare just getting a MB that worked with its BIOS, everything was fairley painless, but a huge learning curve.

Yes, I would do it again. As its so nice understanding what is doing what, and knowing how I Could upgrade the various element if that was needed ( but really doubt it ) ..... is a big plus point.

Pretty much confirmed 16GB Ram is enough, but would still go the 2x16GB for expedient future upgrades.

Apart from re-writng Photshop Elements I wonder if there is a way to unleash the 5 virtually unused cores, in 80% of what I do with Photoshop?

Perhaps the full Photshop does a better job, and if so would incentivise me to move up,to that later ( but not needed at the moment).

Anyway thanks to all the contributors ... And sorry its been painful.

I will post some pics later.

A project akin to building of the pyramids, but you got there Lightroom / Bridge use more cores during export, as does video conversion, but a lot of stuff is single core limited.

tim wrote in post #18012252
A project akin to building of the pyramids, but you got there Lightroom / Bridge use more cores during export, as does video conversion, but a lot of stuff is single core limited.

Thanks
I Spoke to Photoshop CC sales and they put me through to Tech Support, finally she understood I wanted to know if full Photoshop supported more than one Core and she went away and came back and said it did. When I asked her should PSE 13 support more than one core,mshe said she was not in that department so could not answer that.

So on the surface it looks like PSE is not just a cut down feature product but actually a different product architechture?

The question is ... Is it worth £8 pm more. For me probably not as this workstation is acceptable but a tad irritating that their is a ton of unharnessed power sitting idle.

Useful for any PSE users to realise that for max photo editing every once of investment should be in pure CPU clock speed. MayBe the for them the best will be the sucessor for to the i7 6700K due out very soon.

I would still have gone the Intel Xeon route due to future video editing requirements, and I prefer an understressed, cool running, CPU ticking over at 3GHz rather than plus 4.2Ghz.
But then thats just a personal thing.

^ Glad to hear it's resolved, I recommend going back and changing the thread title back
to the issue and the answer to save future searchers time.

tim wrote in post #18012252
A project akin to building of the pyramids, but you got there Lightroom / Bridge use more cores during export, as does video conversion, but a lot of stuff is single core limited.

Yep the Intel XTU used as a monitor quicky exposes every task you are doing and the individual core speeds, volts, and temps.
TBH I am pretty shocked just how much stuff is single core! So much I find myself running something that does use multi-core just to "pinch myself" that the CPU is still able to fire on all cylinders!

Multi-core programming is relatively difficult, requires smarter more expensive more experienced developers and takes longer. Some tasks can't easily be done in parallel. Though for things like batch exports you'd think they'd just export multiple images at a time to get a speedup, but that could be impacted by cache size and thrashing/swapping cache/ram/etc.

tim wrote in post #18015858
Multi-core programming is relatively difficult, requires smarter more expensive more experienced developers and takes longer. Some tasks can't easily be done in parallel. Though for things like batch exports you'd think they'd just export multiple images at a time to get a speedup, but that could be impacted by cache size and thrashing/swapping cache/ram/etc.

Yes moving say a days shoot 32GB is now instantaneous