What would you do with 2k budget?

Thanks for all the responses. So i think im going with the sandybridge i7 2600k. Looking to spend like some said around 1k-1.25K on the computer and place the rest into a monitor.

BeritOlam wrote in post #11573010
Haven't read much of anything on the 2700k i7's yet...but the 2600k i7's are pretty slick. In the tests I've seen, the 2600k's are pretty much the fastest of the quad-core processors to date.

Of course, the benchmarks are typically geared more for the gaming community, not photographers. I've been using an i7-860 (slightly OC'd and 12GB RAM) for a year now. And I'd be curious if these new i7's can run LR3/CS5 in noticeably faster ways than i7-8xx and i7-9xx chips. It's hard to judge specs on paper -- but from the data I've seen, the biggest gains over last year's i7 chips would seem to be of greater interest to gamers.

Once you've hit the 4-core/8-thread threshold, I personally would be looking at a 6-core solution as the next choice up in terms of performance. Of course, at a $2000 budget, you should have no problem getting the latest chip in a self-built box. So it's really up to you whether you want to spend the extra premium on what's new.

As for the 'switch to mac' option, that's really more of a user's choice. There are tons of Mac vs. PC threads in here that you can peruse, if you want the pros and cons. I use both on a daily basis....a 2-year old MacBook for work and a 1-year old i7 box for 'everything else.' I would stay away from a $2k MBP....unless you absolutely need a *mobile* editing solution. Laptops are certainly getting better by leaps and bounds, but they still don't come near the power of what you can get in a desktop. If you are willing to spend $2k on a Mac, an iMac would be a much better choice.

From what ive read the new chips do give a performance boost when using CS5. I know its not what one would expect but it does

This is just one example:

http://www.techspot.co​m …-corei7-2600k/page11.html

I also went back and forth on mac or PC. Value wise PC has it. If i went Mac the imac is a hard package not to consider.

1K on a computer? That seems reasonable. Are you overclocking?

vipergts831 wrote in post #11713074
From what ive read the new chips do give a performance boost when using CS5. I know its not what one would expect but it does

Actually, one typically expects the new chips to give a performance boost....and, sure enough, they do. Otherwise, Intel wouldn't be able to sell any! But like all of these benchmarks, the results often can vary....and only a few of the benches relate directly to interests of photographers.

For example, in the Radial Blur test you linked w/ CS5.....22.5 sec. (in last year's i7-920) vs. 19.8 sec. (in the new i7-2600k) doesn't exactly jump off the page in terms of a huge step up. Certainly a gain, yes....but not nearly the jump that the first i7's were over the previous Core 2 Quads.

So all things being equal, certainly the new Sandy Bridges are the way to go, especially if you are building your own. Costs differences there will be pretty minimal. But, in terms of pre-bought systems, Dell recently slashed some of their previous XPS 8100's (w/ the i7-930's) in price, sometimes as much as 30-35% less than the new Sandy Bridges. And at that kind of price point, I still think someone could opt for the 'cheaper' i7 route. You wouldn't be sacrificing that much, and then maybe you have an extra $250 to spend it on an IPS monitor!

iMacs are premium machines. As Maxxum has noted many times in here, it's not really fair to compare 'cheap' Dells & HP's that similar specs as an iMac. I learned the same thing with my now-3-year-old Mac Pro.

Enjoy your new Sandy Bridge!

Yesterday, I made 600 euro hackintosh with a i5sandy bridge, 4tb HDD, 8gb of RAM and a gigabyte motherboard.

I only use it as a download/Plex-server so I don't need a graphics card.

Spending $2000 I would get an i7 single-socket Xeon, a Supermicro single-socket/unregistered board, 12 or more GB of ECC unreg and as many Seagate ES.2 as I have money left.

Xeon and ECC are a total waste of money for a workstation. They're server grade parts that help reliability, not performance. Standard i7 and RAM are plenty reliable enough for 99.9% of people.

tim wrote in post #11757092
Xeon and ECC are a total waste of money for a workstation. They're server grade parts that help reliability, not performance. Standard i7 and RAM are plenty reliable enough for 99.9% of people.

99.99% of people are idiots

I wouldn't say never but I'm trying very hard (and spend) to always have ECC on main computer that is doing my important stuff. And I think I understand some of the implications. That doesn't mean I'll force buying expensive ECC solutions on casual users. But if you want to sped $2000 on a non-gaming computer then yes.

A $2000 budget is also high enough that you want to aim at more RAM, and hence the i7 board with 6 slots makes sense.

Yes six slots is definitely something you want. ECC is essential for servers processing high volume financial transactions, but for photos I really don't think it's useful.

ECC = Error Checking and Correction (for people who don't know the term)

tim wrote in post #11757884
Yes six slots is definitely something you want. ECC is essential for servers processing high volume financial transactions, but for photos I really don't think it's useful.

Until a faulty memory module corrupts all your harddrive contents, including photos you didn't even look at for years (remember, filesystem metadata can also have it's bits flipped and hence can wipe out files unrelated to current activity).

Then you do the classic thing that Windows people do today, which is have a single USB disk with no snapshots as backup. You will overwrite that single backup with the now bad original photos before you discover the corruption.

Then you push it out to the cloud and now you have a copy that is safe even against a nuclear attack on your hometown, except it contains junk.

No thanks.

If you have 8 GB of RAM and half a terabyte of photo data you are way north of what a "transaction server" was a couple years ago.

That's true, however I rate the chances of that happening is practically zero. You'd notice very quickly if your ram was faulty, and run memtest or similar.

ECC is fine if you want to spend the money on that and the other server grade components to support them, but I just don't think it's worth it for most people. I guess it depends on your paranoia level.

tim wrote in post #11758007
That's true, however I rate the chances of that happening is practically zero.

Well, that's what people assume who don't have error detecting RAM and hence their system never tells them

Every time I look up one of the ECC (corrected) error logs there are a couple. And that's with hardware that's generally higher quality than desktop junk.

tim wrote in post #11758007
You'd notice very quickly if your ram was faulty, and run memtest or similar.

First of all, that's way too late. If the thing already starts crashing on you you have been living with bad memory cells for a while.

Then, memtest86+ is a no-load test and doesn't really detect everything. That is why the overclockers test with SuperPi, too. But then you have downtime. What you gonna do? Take the box down for 48 hours every time Firefox crashes?

tim wrote in post #11758007
ECC is fine if you want to spend the money on that and the other server grade components to support them, but I just don't think it's worth it for most people. I guess it depends on your paranoia level.

You don't have to. If you stay with unregistered RAM and single-socket platforms it can be quite cheap. In the Intel world Intel has now decided to screw you and with i5/i7 you must buy a Xeon CPU and a more expensive board to get ECC.

But any $80 AMD chipset made by Asus supports 4 slots of unreg ECC just fine, both AM2 and AM3 sockets, both DDR2 and DDR3.

The ECC unreg memory costs 50% more ($60/4GB instead of $40) but even for a 16 GB machine that doesn't kill you. The total machine price only goes up moderately, less than $100. As I said only in the AMD world as of now.

But at a $2000 budget you can pay what Intel wants for the Xeon CPU and what Asus has to charge for the ECC capable board, or a Supermicro board if you prefer Intel. Hence my post.

BTW, that argument "memory errors are way too rare in this generation of hardware released right this year" has been thrown at me every single year since 1992 when I started using ECC. It's getting old. And we have many more memory bits in a computer to flip now. And we push data onto harddrives much faster. And filesystems are more complicated and are easier to damage with randomly flipped metadata bits.

You make a compelling argument for ECC, at least for professionals jf not everyone. If it were $100 it'd be a no-brainer. On the inter side if you have to upgrade to a Xeon CPU and server grade motherboard then the extra money could start to be quite significant.

Another area of concern is hard drives, with ever increasing data density. I wonder if they have ECC or similar, like an encoding with error correction?

tim wrote in post #11758320
You make a compelling argument for ECC, at least for professionals jf not everyone. If it were $100 it'd be a no-brainer. On the inter side if you have to upgrade to a Xeon CPU and server grade motherboard then the extra money could start to be quite significant.

Right. That is a major reason why I used Intel with Core2 but then switched to AMD instead of i7. Full ECC capable CPU+board for $180 and even lower if you want to.

tim wrote in post #11758320
Another area of concern is hard drives, with ever increasing data density. I wonder if they have ECC or similar, like an encoding with error correction?

Yes, all harddrives always have checksumming on all the time, you can't turn it off.

Drives like Seagate's ES.2 series promise a 10 times lower read error rate than regular drives but I'm a little sceptical about that. It's the same drives after all, just tested differently and maybe a couple firmware hacks. I still run on ES.2s but I wouldn't hesitate much to pick regular drives for money reasons. A bad block on a drive will ruin only the file it's in and can't easily corrupt totally random blocks. Plus you will get the error message the first time the block tanks, so you can't wipe out your good backups with the bad version of the file without noticing. I use RAID on top, that offers a bit extra protection.

I guess the ES.2 series could overprovision, and keep copies of the data on different parts of the disk, kindof like in disk raid. But that's probably overkill, and too expensive, when you can raid between disks easily enough. Which I don't bother with btw.