Building a Lightroom PC • Hacker News Board

Re: Building a Lightroom PC

#201

Post by jjeaff » Wed, Jan 24, 2018, 5:51 PM UTC

buro9 wrote: post #126

hugg wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 s…

I think by the time you built up that dell system to match the custom rig, it will be much more expensive. ECC has no benefit here (for anyone really). And while you get more cores and cache with Xeon, the 6 core overclocked i7 with double the clock speed would surely outperform except in the most parallel of processing applications.

As for picking all the perfect components that work together, there are myriad of people and places online crowdsourcing and benchmarking the perfect configurations. I doubt Dell is putting much thought and testing into their configs beyond reliability and cost.

Re: Building a Lightroom PC

#202

Post by tracker1 » Wed, Jan 24, 2018, 5:54 PM UTC

JepZ wrote: post #180

Well, if you think water cooling is cool, try passive cooling. A few years back I build my current PC: - Core i7-4770S (Haswell, so you see its not that new anymore) - 32GB RAM - SSD 840 EVO 1TB (not that new either) - some passive PSU Last year I added an - AMD Radeon 460 So the whole thing is completely passively cooled. So no noise at all and I am pretty happy with the performance. I don't know what 'instant' perf…

Even the newest CPUs have those bugs (well, AMD doesn't have meltdown iirc). That said, I think the old 47xx cpus have aged extremely well. Running a 4790K myself, and will probably hold out for 2nd or 3rd gen Ryzen (unless Intel has something competitive in price/performance). The latest CPUs only do much better for many-core chores, and I just don't do enough of it to spend $2k+ on a new setup (migrating some bits) over keeping what I have for a 10-20% boost in performance.

Re: Building a Lightroom PC

#203

Post by cdkee » Wed, Jan 24, 2018, 6:10 PM UTC

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…

My work laptop is a 2017 15" MBP. I was able to get a 4k external monitor and it definitely felt sluggish. That's when I realized the $70 multiport dongle that apple sells cannot do 4k at 60hz, and so I was seeing 4k 30hz. Had to get a dedicated Displayport to USB-C cable and now it seems to be fine.

I haven't had too many issues with performance. Few crashes here and there. The keyboard is more of an issue for me when dust gets under the keys. I don't mind the giant trackpad as I feel it gets palm rejection right most of the time.

By far the worst part of this computer is the touchbar. It's useless. I can't fathom what Apple was thinking making this required for all higher end Macbooks. The only thing I use it for is the volume slider, and occasionally buffering songs on Spotify. Other than that the ESC key is horrendous and it has no utility for me over standard keyboard hotkeys/fn buttons.

Re: Building a Lightroom PC

#204

Post by mikewhy » Wed, Jan 24, 2018, 6:16 PM UTC

mikewhy wrote: post #193

hungerstrike wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can do whatever you want with Windows. Even after tweaking dozens of settings on my Mac, I still don’t like it.

Can you see the time with a fullscreen video without having to minimize the video yet?

I'll take the downvote as a "no".

Re: Building a Lightroom PC

#205

Post by nitrogen » Wed, Jan 24, 2018, 6:37 PM UTC

ranqet wrote: post #18

nitrogen wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And Windows is fine after tweaking and adjusting dozens of settings. MacOS or Linux also require tweaking to be useful for most people.

I probably flip several settings to make macOS liveable for myself. I’d have to do all the adjustments Paul discussed and probably more to make Windows liveable.

I on the other hand need about a day or two (interspersed with real work) to tweak a Linux system, a few more than that to tweak a Windows system, and a week or two for a Mac. And newer versions of all of them keep breaking the essential tweaks, so I am constantly frustrated by the OS getting in my way.

You can prove anything with anecdotes :)

Re: Building a Lightroom PC

#206

Post by altano » Wed, Jan 24, 2018, 6:42 PM UTC

alkonaut wrote: post #113

altano wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I definitely use lots of apps that aren't rebuilt in the last decade which is pretty common in the enterprise (in house stuff). But among the "new" and "widely used" apps on my desktop right now that don't scale well (i.e. bitmap scale) are e.g. Skype, McAffee, Cisco AnyConnect (it seems about 50% of the apps on my desktop are not properly DPI aware, but simply bitmap scaling). That's not the bad part though, I can l…

Wow that screenshot of DotTrace is pretty bad, thanks for sharing. Skype supports high dpi just fine though (I use it regularly).

Re: Building a Lightroom PC

#207

Post by altano » Wed, Jan 24, 2018, 6:44 PM UTC

wccrawford wrote: post #124

altano wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I actually use two monitors with different scaling and it works just fine for me. That’s why I mentioned it. What apps is your friend having trouble with?

Re: Building a Lightroom PC

#208

Post by tracker1 » Wed, Jan 24, 2018, 6:47 PM UTC

walshemj wrote: post #163

ranqet wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The fact that there is a wall between the Linux stuff and Windows stuff (“You can't edit a file that originates from the Linux userland inside Windows.”) sounds very hacky to me.

Just do a samba share from the Linux vm to windows

It's not a VM, it's like the inverse of WINE... it's a compatibility layer... and that one piece (not being able to edit files in the LSW from windows/gui) is what keeps me off of it.

Re: Building a Lightroom PC

#209

Post by semi-extrinsic » Wed, Jan 24, 2018, 6:47 PM UTC

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…

That dual CPU setup gets you 4x the memory performance though... Which is likely your main bottleneck.

Re: Building a Lightroom PC

#210

Post by leonroy » Wed, Jan 24, 2018, 6:48 PM UTC

PStamatiou wrote: post #184

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.…

Absolutely wonderful article. Your blog in general is incredible - nice to see folk maintaining such great blog content outside of Medium. Also gotta say - the quality of your photo sets, in particular NZ are just jaw dropping.

Regarding your LR benches any ideas why your 7700K setup was so much slower than your iMac and MBP in Lightroom? Seems odd how much faster the 8700K OC is...

On a related not I ran a similar test comparing a 7700K build with a GTX 1070 vs a maxed out Macbook Pro 2015 15". The Macbook Pro was 25% faster which is bizarre given that the 7700K is ~30% faster in single and multi-threaded performance.