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Building a Lightroom PC

paulstamatiou.com

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Re: Building a Lightroom PC

#181

Post by cromulent »

josephg wrote: post #132
cageface wrote: post #90

I'm leaning in the same direction myself. My 2017 MBP Pro has been a disappointment. The touch bar is a nuisance. The excessively large trackpad leads to a lot of phantom taps, and I'm still using adapters to plug things into it. Since I'm wrapping up the last of my iOS client work there's nothing really tying me to macOS any more and a PC seems to provide way more bang for the buck for the things I care about - Andr…

2016 MBP with touchbar reporting in. I have the 13” model without a dedicated graphics card, and I made the mistake of getting an external 4K display. The laptop can use the display, but everything is remarkably sluggish for a computer I paid $3000aud for. Especially safari with a few tabs open. The most embarrassing part is that I sort of got used to it and stopped noticing, until I spent time on my Windows gaming p…

A guy at work just got his 2016 13" MBP replaced under warranty due to the slow graphics with an external display. There seems to be some known issue.

He loves his new one.

Re: Building a Lightroom PC

#182

Post by balls187 »

Great write up, and incredibly impressed with your post on New Zealand.

I recently upgraded from a 5d2 to a Mark4, and the integration with the iphone made for an interesting workflow. As I shoot, I take mental notes about what type of adjustments I'll make in post processing, and with Lightroom Mobile, I was able to take a handful of shots, and share them via social media.

I'm considering switching a workflow from my heavy duty gaming rig, to using something like a Surface Pro.

Re: Building a Lightroom PC

#184

Post by PStamatiou »

maxx wrote: post #179

There are lot and lot of advices in this article you SHOULD PRECISELY NOT FOLLOW when you build an editing PC. > Watercooling Watercooling addicts will try to argue that you can achieve a better cooling performance than with aircooling. The truth is that watercooling is at best only 1 or 2 degrees cooler than a proper aircooling system, or even worse in some tests. Then they will argue that watercooling provide a bet…

I think you are misinformed about the current state of watercooling (even AIO). I'm running a very hot overclocked machine running extra voltage than normal. A 280mm radiator is an improvement over even the largest copper hsf.

As for the gaming card - it's not top of the line (that would be Titan Xp and Titan V) - but yes it's very high-end. So why did I opt for that? Why not? I do a ton of 4K gaming and VR as well. Definitely not the primary goal but a nice side benefit. I mention some of the games I play in the setup section.

As for the pricing - obviously monetary concerns were not much of an object with this build but the price of my graphics card has doubled since I purchased it. And RAM has gone up another $100.

But yes - it will get outdated in just a few weeks. The benefit of the PC is that I can just swap out an upgrade to the next high-end thing over a weekend when I want. I already did that once - this build started out as a 7700K cpu/mobo and I swapped them out for an 8700K before publishing this.

Re: Building a Lightroom PC

#185

Post by paulmd »

sumoboy wrote: post #172
PStamatiou wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no real benefit of that much RAM in Lightroom (Premiere Pro is a different story). I also don't need spinning disk storage as I have a 12TB NAS (which is 3 years old, I can probably replace all the disks for 10TB models) for when I archive my shots, so faster M.2 SSDs were a priority. The dual CPU setup doesn't help Lightroom either -- it's not terribly efficient for multiple cores so I can't imagine it would…

Running latest lightroom on a 1950x w/1080ti card and CPU % doesn't go beyond 20%. Just unfortunate all this computing power is wasted.

Oddly, Lightroom does not parallelize across multiple photos in a job. Try cutting your photos into smaller batches and launching multiple batches in parallel.

You would figure that's an obvious and simple feature to offer, at least as an option.

Re: Building a Lightroom PC

#186

Post by paulmd »

PStamatiou wrote: post #76
SubiculumCode wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For $6000 he could have got something like: CPU: 2 x Intel Xeon E5-2637v4, 3.5GHz (4-Core, dual threaded, HT, 15MB Cache, 135W) 14nm RAM: 128GB (8 x 16GB DDR4-2400 ECC Registered 2R 1.2V DIMMs) Graphics: NVIDIA Quadro P4000 GPU, 8GB GDDR5, 105W, Single-Width, PCIe 3.0 x16, Seagate 1TB Exos 7E2 HDD (6 Gb/s, 7.2K RPM, 128MB Cache, 512n) 3.5-in SATA just a quick build i did over at Silicon Mechanics

There's no real benefit of that much RAM in Lightroom (Premiere Pro is a different story). I also don't need spinning disk storage as I have a 12TB NAS (which is 3 years old, I can probably replace all the disks for 10TB models) for when I archive my shots, so faster M.2 SSDs were a priority. The dual CPU setup doesn't help Lightroom either -- it's not terribly efficient for multiple cores so I can't imagine it would…

> There's no real benefit of that much RAM in Lightroom

This really depends on what you are editing. 13mp snaps from your ancient DSLR? Yeah, no point. 52mp snaps from your digital medium-format camera? You'll probably want more than you'd think. 4x5 or 8x10 negative scans? Open the bloodgates.

(and remember that by default Lightroom does not parallelize across multiple photos within a batch job, so multiply your measurements by 4x or whatever if you're going to be launching multiple batch jobs at once to fully occupy a high-end processor.)

128 GB is overkill, but there's a solid justification for at least 32 GB or 64 GB for power-user situations.

Re: Building a Lightroom PC

#187

Post by cheeze »

fyfy18 wrote: post #130
buro9 wrote: 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…

+1 here. Buying used professional grade gear is the way to go. I just built a fileserver with better passmark than threadripper for 700 dollarydoos (plans for lots of concurrent transcodes), and got ECC ram to boot.

Re: Building a Lightroom PC

#188

Post by PStamatiou »

buro9 wrote: 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…

Hey - ah that did not come to mind, no. Was a bit over-enthusiastically into the idea of making a project out of this and building one.

Re: Building a Lightroom PC

#189

Post by cheeze »

skeleton wrote: post #71
cheeze wrote: post #38

This seems like massive overkill, but it doesn't look like OP actually cared about money, given the $400 VESA mount and the $159 (wat) custom PSU cables. Also surprising that one would spend that much money only to get a little bose speaker. But if ya can afford it, more power to you.

In regards to speakers, I found over time I rarely use speakers and are thus happy with a rather basic set (maybe not quite as basic as OP). Headphones is where I prefer to put the majority of my audio budget.

Totally fair, just surprising that one would splurge on literally everything else but not a decent pair of speakers.

Although it looks like OP does know what he is talking about and gave options for higher quality speakers if one wanted them.

Re: Building a Lightroom PC

#190

Post by mikewhy »

jccalhoun wrote: post #183

This is really interesting. Reminds me to a degree of John Siracusa's OSX reviews. I am struck by how customizable windows is. Is it possible to customize osx to such a degree?

I'm not sure, but much of this was to get Windows to function as baseline macOS anyways.
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