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Building a Lightroom PC

paulstamatiou.com

121–130 of 232 posts

Re: Building a Lightroom PC

#121
post #73
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet OP spent that and more...

For a whole lot more performance than you'll get out of your comparably priced Mac. I guess he did have to... change settings though, so the thousands spent on mac aesthetics are completely worth it.

I guess if your time is free or you enjoy all the labor that goes into research, assembly and maintenance, sure, this is cheaper.

Re: Building a Lightroom PC

#122
Is it really worth using 6K on a non work PC, even if you have the extra cash?

I think, personally, I would prefer a 3K machine that I replaced twich as often.

Re: Building a Lightroom PC

#123
post #66

Paul, did you consider buying an existing workstation like the HP Z840 ( http://store.hp.com/us/en/mdp/business-solutions/z840-workst... ) or similar? I did this a number of years ago and never regretted it and dual-Xeon has really helped with DxO PhotoLab and Adobe Lightroom processing time (compared to all the other computers I had access to). Even years later I still believe that this is performing better than som…

Looking at that, you can only get workstation graphics, which is something he did not want since he does occasionally play games.

Re: Building a Lightroom PC

#124
post #107

Word of caution 4K@27" is still pretty terrible in Windows. It's fine if you stay in specific apps for 99% of the time (such as a cad workstation or a Lightroom machine as in this case) but 27 requires scaling and many apps simply don't scale well. The "simple" solution is to run 4K at 32" or larger where you can run att 100% scaling. Unfortunately, if you want a screen with decent color you are adding serious money…

Why is this said in every discussion of high-dpi displays? I've been using high-dpi displays on Windows for longer than Retina was a thing and it's totally fine with only the extremely rare app/dialog not supporting it. My main display right now is 4k@27" with scaling on. Most apps are built properly and Windows now even supports fringe features like multi-monitor setups with different scaling ratios (a feature I was…

A co-worker is seriously considering switching back to Mac because so many apps are misbehaving in a mixed-DPI environment in Windows. Maybe if both your monitors are 4k you're okay, but it really sucks if 1 is 4k and the other isn't, such as when you have a laptop with an additional monitor.

Re: Building a Lightroom PC

#125
post #2

N.B.: the "switch to Windows" is from macOS and not from Linux, just in case anyone was wondering. I think it's very interesting that the availability of Linux on Windows helped the author choose Windows.

The switch stories are always either “from Mac-OS” or “to Linux”, the former being a “oh no you didn’t” and the latter being “I’m with cool birds now” narrative. It’s basically non-stories because your OS matters as little as what programming language you use. Pick the one that works for you, but don’t become a fucking missionary or tie your personality to your brand of choice.

> but don’t become a fucking missionary

That might work for you and your choices but when you talk to developers whose software doesn't support your choice because "nobody uses it", and there are no native alternatives, you quickly see the fight is real.

The odd bit of platform evangelism is the reason we don't all have to use Windows. It's the reason we have a choice at all.

Re: Building a Lightroom PC

#126
post #123
post #66

Paul, did you consider buying an existing workstation like the HP Z840 ( http://store.hp.com/us/en/mdp/business-solutions/z840-workst... ) or similar? I did this a number of years ago and never regretted it and dual-Xeon has really helped with DxO PhotoLab and Adobe Lightroom processing time (compared to all the other computers I had access to). Even years later I still believe that this is performing better than som…

Looking at that, you can only get workstation graphics, which is something he did not want since he does occasionally play games.

Low spec the graphics card and replace just that one component.

You'd still get a more RAM support (and ECC at that), heavy workload CPU support, and most importantly a motherboard designed to shove that much data back and forth between the CPU, RAM and other devices.

What I realised with my gaming builds before is that the weakest link was just shifting the data around. The CPU was seldom maxed out, the RAM seldom straining under the workload, the storage not fully saturated... it was all constrained by how these bits fitted together and how the motherboard set the constraints on those components.

e.g. the Core i7-8700k compared to a Xeon E5-2637 v4 https://ark.intel.com/compare/126684,92983 the increased CPU cache, extra bus speed, more memory channels make a difference.

I basically doubted my ability to build a gaming rig that balanced all of the components to give the best performance for the money spent (for the same use-case as Paul)... that could rival one of the big company workstations. And when I looked at the money I was spending, I saw that HP were delivering more for each $ I spent.

In my case I purchased a standard HPZ800 (it's a few years ago!) and replaced the graphics card. It's great for gaming, and really strong for photo work (also have a Sony a7rii) and for video encoding.

Both routes (self-build rig vs workstation) are valid, just curious whether Paul went through those considerations too.

Re: Building a Lightroom PC

#127
The only issue I have with this glorious build is the totally inadequate Apple keyboard. It doesn't have so many keys I need to be productive. Not to mention it's simply too small to use. Also it fits in with the rest of his setup like an apple in a bucket of oranges.

Also, OP should take a look at VS code. It integrates very well with GNU/Windows.

Re: Building a Lightroom PC

#128
Considering many pros are properly pissed off with Adobe and its approach to Lightroom forcing it to be only cloud-enabled (CC) and generally not giving a f*ck about what customers actually want, it might be a strange approach to invest so much in hardware for this specific use case. As you can see it is poorly implemented, not using many CPU cores (I read somewhere that > 6 are not used, and even those only for few specific operations). GPU usage is a joke too.

Concept of perpetual fees just to have the option to edit your own photos just feels wrong. Competition is catching up fast, and Adobe will lose some customers. Actually with their greedy decision they created good opportunity for competition.

Horrible performance of Lightroom is not necessity of working with RAW, but pure lame engineering, other tools are easily 2-3x faster (especially if you work with panoramas). Use for example latest Autopano giga 2, and it creates panoramas blazingly fast from RAWs. On top of that, it has much better algorithms for stitching images together, where Lightroom simply fails or messes up image beyond recognition, Autopano performs very well. It never happens the other way around.

Let the market work its way and hopefully we customers will get superior products at the end, without bleeding cash continuously like Adobe would want.

Re: Building a Lightroom PC

#129
post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

UAC limits software to user privileges, even if you're running an administrator account. If you're running an administrator account, you just click YES in a popup to grant elevated privileges when they're requested. If you're running a user account, you enter an administrator password. Disabling UAC lets anything you run use administrator privileges without alerting you. Similar to running a Linux box as root. It's a…

It may be stupid depending on what you are doing, and how savvy a user you are. The problem with UAC is that 90% of users have no idea when it would be necessay to click "no" when that dialog box shows up. For them, it's the box that always annoys you and you have to just click "yes" to make it go away. I understand what it's supposed to do, but have had it disabled since it was released, and have saved hours of task…

My gut reaction was disabling it is rather silly but then again I can't remember ever clicking No for security reasons.

Re: Building a Lightroom PC

#130
post #66

Paul, did you consider buying an existing workstation like the HP Z840 ( http://store.hp.com/us/en/mdp/business-solutions/z840-workst... ) or similar? I did this a number of years ago and never regretted it and dual-Xeon has really helped with DxO PhotoLab and Adobe Lightroom processing time (compared to all the other computers I had access to). Even years later I still believe that this is performing better than som…

Following on from this, if you don't need the latest hardware (i.e. you are currently using a laptop as your main device), you can buy used workstations on eBay rather cheap.

At the end of 2016 I bought a three year old Dell T3600 with 32GB ECC RAM and a 8c/16t Xeon E5-2670 (Sandy Bridge) processor. I just threw in a modern graphics card (GTX 1060) and SSD, and it's perfect for my needs. Total cost was under €600.

I still have a laptop, so if I'm out I will just SSH in to work.

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