Building a new PC

[Recty]

Well, the time has come, the parts have been ordered, the smile has been plastered on my face.

I took 7 pictures of my brother's house the other day, used CS4 to merge them all into a panorama and it took 14, FOURTEEN, minutes for CS4 to get them all together successfully and be at a point I could work with it.

Now, they were RAW and 15MP, so I tried converting to jpeg thinking that would help but left at 15MP and it wasnt any better. I was hoping smaller file size would make a difference but pixel count/complexity seems to be the deciding factor.

When I was done merging, I had a 20,000 pixel wide image about 3000 pixels tall, just trying to crop the thing and then resize it was taking 15-30 seconds between clicks. Even just dragging out a selection box to crop with was a painful experience.

I also like to play RTS games and Starcraft II has been calling my name, so it was time for an upgrade

I'm trying not to break the bank with this upgrade, I didnt buy the best of the best but it will be insane compared to my 3 year old PC that wasnt exactly awesome three years ago when I bought it.

Anyway, I went with...

Windows7 64bit
i7 3.06Ghz processor (I went with the Bloomfield, not the Lynnfield)
6GB of DDR3 1600 RAM, however depending on how much that actually gets used I'll buy another 6GB to bump me up to 12GB, but I'll only do that if I see the 6GB consistently all being used up.
750w corsair power supply, probably a little overkill but the video card I got can draw 400w MAX, so I just didnt want to underpower and overheat it.
Just one 640GB 6/gbs SATA hard drive, I currently have plenty of hard drives which I will be removing from my old PC, so I want one fast/new one to install the OS on and what not, but for storage I'll just swap in my older drives. I'm not worried about them failing as I back up my pictures and everything else important weekly.
EVGA GTX470 video card, superclocked (why did they start using superclocked as a term instead of sticking with overclocked?) a little higher than average. I know Photoshop is starting to take advantage of a video card but I mainly got this for the couple games I like to enjoy, namely Starcraft II and then I have a flight simulator and an RC plane simulator that will both benefit from it.

I plan on adding the following items in the next month or two, I was trying to keep initial costs down but I should have just ordered it all at once and saved myself the hassle of pulling it apart and adding more components later, oh well...

Another 640GB 6/gbs SATA drive (ideally move out my old HDDs and just use the two new ones)
Two DVD RW (currently will be using an old one from an old PC)
A Sidewinder x6 for gaming and night use with the backlight
6 more GB of RAM, still up in the air about this

And last, but not least, I'm debating buying a 64GB SSD for fast data read/write. I was mainly planning on putting Photoshop's scratch volume on this drive, it has 285Mb/s read rates and like 200Mb/s write rates, that's crazy.

However, after testing for a week or two with Photoshop, I'll decide on the SSD as to whether it's needed or not. If I decide to get the SSD, then I'll go ahead and purchase the extra RAM and stuff along with it.

Anyway, long post, but I'm excited I have the 7 images I used for the photomerge set aside and I'm going to do the same process on the new PC and see the difference in time taken and in handling after the picture is merged, I expect the difference to be gigantic.

For what it's worth, I'm currently running...

Windows Vista 32bit
3GB RAM, dont know the speed
Intel Dual Core processor (not even a Core 2 Duo) around 3Ghz.
Decent hard drives, nothing fancy
128MB ATI video card, again nothing fancy.

The improvement should be HUGE.

 

[Recty]

I found this interesting, I had my friend try the same process with the same pictures on his two year old iMac, I thought it was going to be a lot faster.

In OSX 64bit (mac's operating system) it took 6 minutes.

He has Windows 7 32 bit installed and on there, exact same hardware, it took 12 minutes.

I was hoping this new PC of mine will be able to break the 2 minute mark on this, but his relatively fast iMac didnt even get close. I'm still somewhat hopeful... the parts should arrive in a couple hours and I'll get it built tonight. I think Photoshop will be one of my first installs, I'd like to try this photomerge while the PC is completely fresh without a lot of software

 

[fatrip]

very cool. This should be really interesting to see the difference. So it seems that which ever PS CS hes using utilizes the 64 bit cores. Kinda cool to see this in a practical setting.

 

[Recty]

So... the results are in.

Minimal software installed, basically just Windows updates, a couple PC monitors tools like CoreTemp and Prime95 for stress testing.

It took 1 minute and 10 seconds to do the exact same process. The same process that took me 14 minutes to do on my 2 year old PC... crazy. I'd say it was worth the upgrade, as I get more and more deeper into using Photoshop I'll need the power more and more. I'm excited to see how it does with some video editing as well

 

[Reef Bass]

Nice job Grant! You identified your needs, researched the hardware to support what you are trying to do and then put it together into a functional package. Sweet.

And your old pc was only 2 years old? Wow...

 

[fatrip]

Now just for an interesting experiment I'd do the process again once all of your normal programs are installed and running on the comp to see if affects the outcome processing time.

 

[Recty]

Nice job Grant! You identified your needs, researched the hardware to support what you are trying to do and then put it together into a functional package. Sweet.

And your old pc was only 2 years old? Wow...

It was two years old, but it wasnt top of the line when it was GIVEN TO ME two years ago. My dad lives about 250 miles away, he bought a craptastic $4-500 PC for my mom to use and she ended up not wanting it, so it was sitting in a box for 6 months and he finally asked me if I wanted it. I had actually just had my old PC die and was thinking about building one so I gladly took it.

Anyway, long story short, it wasnt a FAST PC by any means when I got it, it was a "new" PC but not the newest or fastest technology.

This new PC is basically the best of everything but one step down to the affordable price point. It screams.

Now just for an interesting experiment I'd do the process again once all of your normal programs are installed and running on the comp to see if affects the outcome processing time.

Yep, I've got those 8 files set aside and will try it again, it's a good thing to benchmark my machine against. I'd like to try it monthly and see how performance degrades or if it hits a point where it wont.

For some reason I only ordered one hard drive to put in, a nice 6Gb/s SATA drive. I just yesterday ordered a second and I'm going to set it up completely blank with nothing on it and make Photoshop use it as a scratch drive and see if that makes a difference. I'm thinking with having 6GB of RAM it shouldnt ever even have to touch the scratch drive, but it's hard to say, it will be a good test. If it does increase performance then I'll probably buy a small drive to be a permanent scratch drive, this new one is more for storage and way bigger than a scratch drive needs to be.

 

[fatrip]

Yea from My understanding now after reading a bit more on the scratch it won't be constantly using the scratch to save while processing when you have a lot of ram but it will be scratching info about the file kinda like a random save. but that would be another cool test to see if making the SATA6 a scratch over a SATA3 will boost any performance time assuming cache times are the same. Or if you have and IDE to use. I don't think it will really boost the time any but it would be interesting to see if it does.

 

[Recty]

Well right now I only have one HDD in the PC. It's a 6/Gbs SATA, but it's still one drive with the OS, the program and the scratch volume all on it.

So what I'm saying is when I get a second 6/Gbs SATA drive, I'm going to make that just the scratch volume to see what it does.

 

[swjim]

Sweet! I did a similar upgrade, minus the solid state drive, after getting my 5D Mk II. It really is frustrating trying to edit the huge files and having to wait for the computer to catch up after you make even the slightest change. Glad the new system is performing as you wanted!

 

[Recty]

I ended up not doing the solid state drive thing, I think I'm just going to use a regular drive as storage and scratch if needed. From what I'm reading with 6GB I'll rarely use the scratch drive and the SSD would basically only improve Photoshop, nothing else. So if I want to spend $150 on an upgrade, I'll just get another 6GB of RAM which will benefit the entire everything I'm doing.

Good timing on this new PC, I just worked things out to get a 7D so I'll have some high quality video to be crunching away at, my old PC would have rolled over and died.

 

[swjim]

Even with the i7 video editing/rendering still takes a while, at least that's been my experience. I'm just using Sony Vegas platinum though so higher end programs might be more efficient.

 

[Recty]

It will be a LOT faster than my old PC, of that I have no doubt.

Merging a panorama took about 8% as long as on my old PC, so I'm assuming video crunching will be sped way up as well.

 

[fatrip]

Well right now I only have one HDD in the PC. It's a 6/Gbs SATA, but it's still one drive with the OS, the program and the scratch volume all on it.

So what I'm saying is when I get a second 6/Gbs SATA drive, I'm going to make that just the scratch volume to see what it does.

I understand that. I was just saying that if you had a SATA 3/Gbs drive after you use the dedicated SATA 6 drive to see if it would change anything with a dedicated SATA 3 drive. just another experiment..lol..

 

[Recty]

What is interesting is how much RAM gets used up for file copies.

If you notice, I've got my 6GB total, but 0 MB free. The PC is using all available memory during a 110GB file copy from an external USB HDD. In a way it makes sense, all that is passing through memory and I suppose it's being used like a buffer of a sort.

So, I could still run a large app that needs memory and it would be used up and just less would go to the file copy.

Anyway, just something I had never really noticed before and never thought about I guess I didnt think to see 0MB of free memory so soon.