Computer Build

A guy saw I was having issues from my 1TB internal hard-drive (unplugged here) and that when I work with 4K videos I'll get a warning saying CPU can't process then locks up. Plus my optical drive has never worked. He's wanting to build me a new setup since he claims my stuff is outdated. This is my setup now.

Windows 10 Pro 64-bit
CPU - Intel Core i7 4770 @ 3.40GHz Haswell 22nm Technology
RAM - 16.0GB Dual-Channel DDR3 @ 666MHz (9-9-9-24)
Motherboard - MSI H87M-G43 (MS-7823) (SOCKET 0) 35 °C
Graphics - S22F350 (1920x1080@59Hz) Intel HD Graphics 4600 (MSI)
Storage - 238GB Samsung SSD 840 PRO Series (SATA (SSD)
Optical Drives - HL-DT-ST DVDRAM GH24NS95
Audio - High Definition Audio Device

I'll be honest, I don't know computers well. Should I just add 16gb more of RAM and buy a 1TB SSD or let him build a new setup? He's yet say what he's wanting to do but I told him it needs to run my lightroom, photoshop and video software seamlessly. What would you recommend on a $700-800 budget? I was also looking at this and calling it a day. https://www.newegg.com …46943?Item=9SIA​A0SEV82625

Based on your threads, I would think having a good redundant system for storing your digital media would be paramount right now, rather than building a new system and perhaps lose data again to yet another crash or something.

Your current system is probably fine for photo editing. You could spend $800 and probably not notice a meaningful increase in some kind of speed outside of a few specific instances in lightroom/photoshop; but you may notice some improvements with video with a newer higher tier CPU and faster memory.

Sad to say you won't get much for $800 right now; the market is awful for components.

Instead, get a 1TB SSD or even a 2TB SSD and a 4TB to 8TB hard disk that you can keep two physical copies of your data spanned across so that if a piece of hardware fails, you're not losing data completely and can recover. Or, just look into a much more robust system for having 3+ physical copies of the data separated onto different media to avoid total loss like you did again. I would think this far more important than a few seconds or milliseconds of performance difference on what you're doing currently with photo editing.

Very best,

I normally keep a copy on my ssd, hhd and then two external hd's after editing is done but for some reason I only put everything on the one hhd last month and it bit me. If I stay with this tower how's a 1TB SSD to replace the dead hhd, another 16GB of RAM and I saw where people like the AMD RYZEN 7 3700X if that'll work on it?

showtm490 wrote in post #19269943
I normally keep a copy on my ssd, hhd and then two external hd's after editing is done but for some reason I only put everything on the one hhd last month and it bit me. If I stay with this tower how's a 1TB SSD to replace the dead hhd, another 16GB of RAM and I saw where people like the AMD RYZEN 7 3700X if that'll work on it?

All of that is just random.

Do you even know if you're using the 16Gb of RAM you have? Load up your normal stuff, how you normally do things, do some editing with everything like you normally would towards the finished product and then look at your system resources and see how much memory you're actually using. If you want performance, speed and latency of memory and memory handling is more important than just having "more RAM" which doesn't mean anything if you're not even saturating the RAM in the first place. DDR3 is fairly long in the tooth now; moving to DDR4 and newer memory handling would increase performance, but we're talking milliseconds maybe at best.

A 1TB~2TB SSD to replace your old spinning hard drive is a good way to go for editing and use, regardless of what you're doing. But not a great place to just leave files long term (no redundancy). So you may want to still explore whatever your redundancy plan was and automate it so you can't just forget or lapse on it and end up losing data. But a fast SSD is a good idea because the speed of the SSD is limiting factor to putting things into memory (RAM) to be worked on.

The Ryzen 3700x is a good CPU, but it's not worth rebuilding an entire system around at this point; its' AMD and AM4 and your current system is Intel. You'd have to do a total rebuild just to do this. Also, most of your software simply doesn't benefit from having copious cores and instead will perform better with faster single core/thread performance. The AMD 3000 series is already old now. The 5000 series is out and mature. If doing a total re-build with AM4, look to the Ryzen 5600X instead (6 core, 12 threads).

Not trying to be harsh; just giving you the reality of things so you don't just throw your money away.

If I were re-building a budget desktop for photo and potentially some video editing; it would be an AM4 system with Ryzen 5600x and 16Gb of DDR4 3200mhz memory on a fast 1TB~2TB SSD. Unfortunately budget right now isn't budget since prices are higher than normal for lots of components. And if you're not used to building your own then you're either having someone do it or getting a pre-made and I'm not sure what overhead comes with that for your budget. This is a lot to squeeze into a $800 budget right now with this current market.

Very best,

For 4k video, you not only need a contemporary gpu with built-in hardware encode (e.g., h.265), but also software that can leverage it. The HD 4600 really isn't one to do 4k; however, gen 9 and up cpu with a UHD630 will handle 4k just fine (though not as fast as a dedicated gpu with hardware encoding).

Referencing https://photography-on-the.net …/showthread.php​?t=1522481

In your previous thread on this PC, Choderboy, in response #23 stated "Whether or not you sort the current problem drive, you have another problem: 7% free on your C: Drive."

Has anything been done to alleviate that problem? Choderboy further stated "I'd consider it a wipe drive, reformat, re install windows situation". However, I took exception to that drastic approach, stating "Good point on the 7% free space issue and a recent article at https://www.online-tech-tips.com …disk-space-in-windows-10/ discusses some methods of cleaning things up."

Again, what is your free space at present? You've got to get the free space up to about 20% to 25%. Do you know if this drive, a 238GB Samsung SSD 840 PRO Series, is over provisioned, and to what extent?

I bought a 1TB SSD today but it says unallocated. I right clicked on it to add a New Simple Volume but it's grayed out. My boot drive SSD is set to MBR, I was told it needs to be changed to a GPT. Has anyone used this program to do that? https://www.diskpart.c​om

John I found out my dropbox was taking up most of that space. Once I get this drive going I'll figure out how to swap my dropbox to it.

I spoke to the computer store about trying to recover my old HHD but it would be $165+ and if they couldn't do it a sister company could try. $900 if some/all recovered or $650 if none. I passed.

Got it working

A SSD HD alone will speed you up by leaps and bounds!! I’ve installed SSD on old laptops very old! Running windows 7pro. Sped them up