Another New PC Thread....

Russ77

Russ77

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I'm hopefully moving house in January and with a little bit of left over cash I hope to buy myself a new PC.

I'm currently using an HP laptop for photo editing in Lightroom/Photoshop but it's not the quickest when it comes to processing/exporting the images, I'm stuggling to keep free disk space above 30/500gb.

I used to build repair PCs (well I'm still that family member that everyone calls when they have a PC/Laptop problem) but I'm a bit out of the game when it comes to latest spec.

I'm budgeting around £1200 and this is the rough spec I'm looking at:

Intel i7
16Gb RAM
2TB HDD (I already have another 2TB drive that I'll add for backup puposes and I have another that I'll use and store off-site)
120GB SSD
Graphics card with dual moitor support (I may add a second monitor at some point)
24" monitor
USB 3.0 card reader built-in
BluRay read/writer

Looking around on Chillblast, PC Specialist, Mesh etc you can get that sort of spec for that money (or there abouts) but ........

I'm guessing the monitor would pretty low spec when it comes to photo editing so would I be better sacrificing the i7 processor for an i5 and/or dropping to 8/12GB RAM for a better monitor?

Whilst I don't want to spend hundreds on the monitor alone, £120 seems to be the starting price for branded 24" monitors, how much more do you need to spend to get into the range deemed fit for photo editing purpose (if you get what I mean?) I will probably be investing in a monitor calibration device too if that makes any difference.

Cheers in advance!

Russ
 
I'd rather an i5 with a decent 24" monitor. Dell U24xx series are where you should be looking at. I'd prefer the U2410 at about £250-300
 
Ditto above, 3rd generation I5, as much RAM as possible. Check the spec of your motherboard - for future proofing get one that has more SATA 3 than 2 and more USB 3.0 than 2.0 (PCIe 3.0 is also latest graphics spec). In fact, with £1200 you should be able to keep i7 and get a decent monitor.good luck with the build.
 
PS: I use Scan Computers for all my parts and their 'Today Only' offers always have kits available at very good value.
 
Cheers for the advise! Taken a quick look on Scan Computers, if I'm feeling really brave I may build my own..... otherwise I may save a few more pennies and have one built for me :lol:
 
I recently had one built for me by a local company - 3.3ghz AMD bulldozer fx6100, 32gb ram, 1TB HD, 24" LED Monitor (although not the best and can be left off) DVD/RW (can be made blueray for not much extra) 2gb graphics card etc for under £500.

They charge something like £12 in delivery and do a great job. If you choose high end specs and buy a monitor separately you should get what your after and the monitor you want at less than £1000.

Www.internetct.co.uk

(No affiliation)

Go onto the computer system link and build what your after. They do intel systems too I think
 
Case
COOLERMASTER ELITE 311 BLUE CASE

Processor (CPU)
Intel® Core™i7 Quad Core Processor i7-3770 (3.4GHz) 8MB Cache

Motherboard
ASUS® P8Z77-V: PCI-E 3.0 READY, WIFI, SLI, CROSSFIREX

Memory (RAM)
16GB SAMSUNG DUAL-DDR3 1333MHz (2 X 8GB)

Graphics Card
1GB NVIDIA GEFORCE 210 - DVI, HDMI, VGA

1st Hard Disk
120GB INTEL® 520 SERIES SSD, SATA 6 Gb/s (upto 550MB/sR | 520MB/sW)

2nd Hard Disk
2TB 3.5" SATA-III 6GB/s HDD 7200RPM 64MB CACHE

1st DVD/BLU-RAY Drive
12x BLU-RAY RE-WRITER DRIVE, 16x DVD ±R/±RW

Memory Card Reader
INTERNAL 52 IN 1 CARD READER (XD, MS, CF, SD, etc) + 1 x USB 2.0 PORT

Power Supply
450W Quiet 80 PLUS Dual Rail PSU + 120mm Case Fan

Processor Cooling
INTEL SOCKET LGA1155 STANDARD CPU COOLER

Sound Card
ONBOARD 6 CHANNEL (5.1) HIGH DEF AUDIO (AS STANDARD)

Network Facilities
10/100/1000 GIGABIT LAN PORT - AS STANDARD ON ALL PCs

USB Options
6 x USB 2.0 PORTS @ BACK PANEL (MIN 2 FRONT PORTS) AS STANDARD
Operating System

Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium 64 Bit w/SP1 - inc DVD & Licence (£79)
Office Software
Click to expand...

That's coming out just shy of £1000 and I've found a Dell Ultrasharp U2412M on Amazon for £224

The mobo has 4 6mb/s SATA (which I'm guessing I'll need if I'm running a total of 3 6mb/s SATA drives), it also seems to have VGA & DVI output so I could run two monitors from the onboard graphics card? I've added a low-end graphics card anyway as it was only a few quid in the grand scheme of things.
 
The 6Gbit SATA3 is only there for compatability onm the HDDs. It's only SSDs that can move data that quickly. You can connect the HDDs to SATA II connectors and you won't notice the difference.

As to onboard, if you want dual monitors, I'd be using 2 digital ports rather than one digital and one analogue (VGA).
 
arad85 said:
The 6Gbit SATA3 is only there for compatability onm the HDDs. It's only SSDs that can move data that quickly. You can connect the HDDs to SATA II connectors and you won't notice the difference.

As to onboard, if you want dual monitors, I'd be using 2 digital ports rather than one digital and one analogue (VGA).
Click to expand...

Cheers again.

My thoughts on the dual monitor was to have the "nice" 24" monitor for the photos and use a smaller crappier monitor for the control panels of Lightroom/photoshop so I'm not that bothered about it just being a VGA out.
 
Reading a couple of newer "need a new PC" threads, would I be better off getting a i5 and over clocking it or sticking with my original plan of an i7?
 
Russ77 said:
Reading a couple of newer "need a new PC" threads, would I be better off getting a i5 and over clocking it or sticking with my original plan of an i7?
Click to expand...
i5 + overclocking.

Have a look at this thread: http://www.talkphotography.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=449072 and specifically this post: http://www.talkphotography.co.uk/forums/showpost.php?p=5141081&postcount=74

2nd gen i7 vs 3rd gen i5. Summary is that they take the same relative time to encode (one runs at 4.3GHz, the other 3.2GHz and the time difference is near enough bang on the clock ratios).
 
PS. Clearly you could overclock an i7 with K suffix, but it'll only buy you ~10% over the i5 at the same clock speed.
 
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Cheers Andy..... definitely food for thought.....
 
Is there any significant deterioration with the processor lifespan when over clocking?
 
gman said:
Is there any significant deterioration with the processor lifespan when over clocking?
Click to expand...

No one really knows for certain as chips can fail at stock. however increased heat through a CPU due to increased voltages could damage it. This can be offset by utilising a after market cooler which works better than the stock.

Lastly the O/C is not constant. It only ramps up when the CPU is under load, the rest of the time it stays at stock.

My I5 runs stock at 3.3 but overclocks to 4.3 when playing BF3 or running some very few other highly intensive applications.
 
PsiFox said:
My I5 runs stock at 3.3 but overclocks to 4.3 when playing BF3 or running some very few other highly intensive applications.
Click to expand...
Your i5 runs at 1600MHz and turbos up to whatever is necessary when the workload is there. Edit: it is 1600MHz on my i7, and I think this is the same on all i5/i7 except for mobile where it is 800MHz. The changing of frequency is managed by on chip hardware and happens many, many times a second.

In answer to the original question - is there any damage. No, not at the temperatures that we are talking about. We qualify our chips to be 125 deg C at the junction constantly for 3 years and tell our customers to design heatsinking for that value. If there was a significant failure rate, we'd tell them to design for different parameters. What tends to kills chips these days is over voltage which stresses the transistors more than the heat does.
 
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So would this mean a good stable psu is essential for safe overclocking?
 
+1 on the good PSU.

It depends how quiet you want to be and how well spec'd you want them. The last few PSUs I've bought have cost more than (the admittedly second hand) APC UPSs that sit protecting/powering them.... I'm buying Corsair AX or Silverpower fanless at the moment - as quiet as you can get and very efficient. Both Seasonic manufactured, so hopefully fairly reliable. Not cheap tho!
 
Cheers all!
 
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