Looking to Upgrade My Workstation - Need guidance!

[Daniel Browning]

Does anyone see any problems with my planned set up?

Looks good to me, Bob. If it were me, I probably wouldn't bother with the old 250 gig 5400 RPM drives -- I'd save them for external backup drives. (I use a $30 docking station rather than buying enclosures for each drive).

Is there any need to consider two graphics cards, if your not a gamer?

If you use software that takes good avantage of the video card for processing, that would be one reason. It can be a very big deal for video editing (e.g. Adobe Premiere Pro with certain CUDA graphics cards), but I'm not aware of it having a similar benefit on still photo software. (Photoshop does some things with the graphics card, but not enough for it to matter to me.)

[bob williams]

Thanks for the Comments Daniel

If it were me, I probably wouldn't bother with the old 250 gig 5400 RPM drives

In fact, I did just that. I decided to leave my old box as intact as possible, in the event the new one crashes or I have to return parts. So I will be using two WD 7200 RPM 1 TB drives in the new box for data , mirrored of course---And I am strongly considering a 120gig SSD to run programs (but haven't decided yet. For some reason I don't trust them, I just don't know why+ they are expensive)--If I decide to go with a mechanical drive for programs, it will definitely be a SATA III version.New Egghas a WD 7200 RPM 1 gig SATA III for 89 bucks. Hard to beat that.

If you use software that takes good avantage of the video card for processing, that would be one reason. It can be a very big deal for video editing (e.g. Adobe Premiere Pro with certain CUDA graphics cards),

All I have (or need for the moment) is Premier Elements, So I will see how that runs with my current graphics card (Nvidea GTX 260) before conisdering a second or an upgrade. But this one seems to be running pretty good and it peaks performance at 7.2 on the windows scale. Good enough for my needs---I think


SInce I last wrote on this subject, I also Decide to add another 6 Gig of triple channel memory--for a total of 12 gig--I know, Its probably overkill--But memory is cheap, so why not..


Final Build should look like this:


I7 950 quad core processor


ASUS x58 MB


12 Gig triple channel memory


Nvidea GTX 260 Graphics Card


801N wireless adapter


120 Gig SSD (or 7200 RPM 1 TB WD drive)--for programs


2 1 TB 7200 RPM WD data Drives (mirrored)


1000W modular power supply (have to consider future upgrades)


1 combo optical drive


1 internal card reader


1 well venitilated case (5 Fans)


$1100 ( I love NewEgg)---


of course I had the optical drive, reader, graphics card and 2 hdsalready.


Total cost/value for one hot running box about 1500. MacPro($4k) ---top that.[:P]


Additionally, I just subscribed to MOZY for offsite backup---Thanks John for the recommendation


I should have all of my pieces and parts by the end of next week---so hopefully I can provide actually performance numbers and an opinion sometime shortly after new years.





Bob

[Daniel Browning]

And I am strongly considering a 120gig SSD to run programs (but haven't decided yet. For some reason I don't trust them, I just don't know why+ they are expensive)

Yeah, I don't fully trust them either, there are a lot of reports of DOA and units dying after just a month. MTBF is 2 million hours, but they still only give you a 1 year warranty on a lot of them. Plus, they certainly are expensive on a per-gigabyte basis, but I think they are worth it for the extremely low latency doing random access. The SF-1200 units are very well-rounded for performance and cost $235 for 120GB (http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231378).

If I decide to go with a mechanical drive for programs, it will definitely be a SATA III version.

I don't think the drive interface really matters for disks. Even in the very best circumstances (sequential IO, large block sizes, etc.) with the very fastest ($200) 7200K hard drives, using the very fastest (outer) portion of the disk, you still wont get faster than 129 MB/s, which is still within the SATA-I spec.


In more normal circumstances, the cheaper drives that are half-full, you're looking at more like 30-45 MB/s sequential. For more typical random I/O, it's more like 5 MB/s, which is an order of magnitude smaller than the capcity of SATA-I.If you go up to the $500 15K hard drives (for only 600 GB), then you would need SATA-II to handle the sequential IO speeds.


That said, for the small amount of I/O between the host and the drive's onboard cache (e.g. 64 MB), the higher speed is utilized -- but I don't think this has any significant benefit in real life.


For SSD, however, SATA-II and SATA-III can be highly valuable -- many SSD can saturate SATA-I even with random I/O.

New Egghas a WD 7200 RPM 1 gig SATA III for 89 bucks. Hard to beat that

It always amazes me how fast the prices drop.

a total of 12 gig--I know, Its probably overkill--But memory is cheap, so why not..

I definitely think 12 is the right choice. I make a lot of use of VMWare virtual machines, and the more memory the better.


Looks like a great build to me. I would probably go with lower wattage on the power supply in order to save a few bucks on my electric bill (and get more time from my APCC U.P.S.), but it is nice to not have to worry about how many components you can add to the system.



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[Colin500]

Looks like a great build to me. I would probably go with lower wattage on the power supply in order to save a few bucks on my electric bill (and get more time from my APCC U.P.S.), but it is nice to not have to worry about how many components you can add to the system.

I might be wrong, but with current power-supplies, a 1000W unit with 500W of load shouldn't draw more energy from the wall than, say, a 650W PSU with a 500W load ... at least if it's not built in a completely brain-damaged way?


Colin

[freelanceshots]

Just buy a Mac and be done with.

[Daniel Browning]

I might be wrong, but with current power-supplies, a 1000W unit with 500W of load shouldn't draw more energy from the wall than, say, a 650W PSU with a 500W load ... at least if it's not built in a completely brain-damaged way?

You're right. For some reason I thought efficiency at low load levels was really poor, but I checked the reviews just now and an order-of-magnitude difference in load (e.g. 1000W vs 100W) only causes about 10-20% lower efficiency with typical modern power supplies. Smaller differences (e.g. 700w vs 350w) are only a few percentage points. So it's really not enough to worry about.

[bob williams]

Well, Just finished my new workstation, and performance is very nice. On my old system it would take about 3.5 minutes to process a 7 shot HDR in Lightroom/HDR Efx Pro---now that same process takes plac in 45 seconds. I haven

[Daniel Browning]

Great! Thanks for reporting back.

[Sheiky]

Well, Just finished my new workstation, and performance is very nice. On my old system it would take about 3.5 minutes to process a 7 shot HDR in Lightroom/HDR Efx Pro---now that same process takes plac in 45 seconds. I haven't much time to play with video yet, but the premier elements opens and loads much faster than before. Since I went from USB to SATA connections for my back up drives---they are about 10 times faster.

Now that's what we're talking about! To me it's also making it a lot more fun to do editing on a larger number of shots, because it's so fast.

The best part, everthing went together very easily and fired up on first boot and has been running ever since (About a week) clean install on all software and no driver or compatability issues---This was the easiest build/install I have ever done and performance is well worth the money spent.

If you know how to install an Ikea cabinet, you can build your own pc [] Plus, like Ikea, most of the times it pays off to do it yourself instead of letting someone else build it for you[A]


Have fun with your new pc Bob!


Ps: I'm thinking about upgrading my pc again as well. Those new Intel Sandy Bridge processors are kicking quite some butts, whilehaving low energy consumption[]

[bob williams]

Now that's what we're talking about! To me it's also making it a lot more fun to do editing on a larger number of shots, because it's so fast.

Thats for sure, Jan. Even the imports, export, LR3 catalog synchronization, etc is faster. The only thing I intentionally slowed down was the start up---Because I like to watch all of the drive id's, memory posts, etc ---for no other reason than to say---That's cool. Unfortunately, Now I have the bug for a Sata 3 solid state drive, which would mean reload of all software, but I may wait a while for that.


Bob