New PC a coming - pick holes in my components!

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stupar

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Ok, deciding to pull the trigger on a new PC after sitting last night trying to multi task the Q6600 and 8gb RAM with Photoshop, Lightscribe and music streaming which it struggled to cope with (I know any excuse for a new toy ;))

Anyway having looked at components and specs etc to suit an approximate £1200 budget this is what I came up with. Let me know if you think I am missing anything or if you feel there is a weakness in the components.
I photo edit and play current PC games. I'm wondering if the inclusion of the GTX660 card would require extra headroom on the power supply - thoughts

Full ATX case
Corsair modular 650w PSU
MSI Z87 G45 Motherboard
Intel i5 4670K processor
16/32gb DDR3 12800 RAM
Samsung 840 120gb SSD drive
Western Digital 1TB 7200 internal drive
Nvidia GTX660 graphics card


Money from selling old PC will fund a 24 inch Dell U2412M monitor
 
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Strange RAM speed?
 
In addition to Neils question... are you going to overclock and which modular supply?
 
Mikesphotaes said:
Strange RAM speed?
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It's 1600MHz frequency. The 12800 refers to the bandwidth.... as it's 1600MHz x 8 bytes it's 12800Mbytes/sec or 12.8Gbytes/sec.
 
arad85 said:
In addition to Neils question... are you going to overclock and which modular supply?
Click to expand...

Yeah planning on clocking to approx 4.2 on air. modular PSU is Corsair RM Series RM 650 '80+ Gold' 650W

I'm wondering if I should give extra breathing room with the 750W PSU instead.
 
What OS..?

Reason I ask is that there's so much 'hype' about how 'poor' windows 8.1 is at the moment, wondering if you're going to use 7/8 or dare I say... XP!?

You say you struggle on a Q6600 and 8GB ram..?
I still use a 2.6 (Overclocked to 3) Athlon 64 Dual 5200+ and 2GB Ram, on 64Bit Windows 8..!
 
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I not undertand what anybody on this Thread has said:thinking:
 
dont go for a gtx 660 its an older card go for a 760-770 if you can with 4gb ram as modern games like lots of vram
 
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BennyBoo said:
What OS..?

Reason I ask is that there's so much 'hype' about how 'poor' windows 8.1 is at the moment, wondering if you're going to use 7/8 or dare I say... XP!?

You say you struggle on a Q6600 and 8GB ram..?
I still use a 2.6 (Overclocked to 3) Athlon 64 Dual 5200+ and 2GB Ram, on 64Bit Windows 8..!
Click to expand...

OS is unknown yet but it will either be Windows 7 64 bit Ultimate or Windows 8.1 Pro 64 bit.
My Q6600 is already clocked to 3.2Ghz but the files I am working with are sometimes quite large TIFFs created from a 5D2.
 
Yikes, my system is ok with 15mb cr2 from my canon 40d with lightroom 5 and cs5 so not too bad..!

Sent from my GT-P5100 using Talk Photography Forums mobile app
 
define okay.. while the Q9550 coped it was maxed across all cores a lot of the time. and we're talking 20-30mb RAW files.

the move to i7 and SSD was much nicer, plus i can do stuff while i wait :D
 
neil_g said:
do you NEED any of the features of ultimate? otherwise its a waste of cash.

i struggled with batch processing high ISO 5dmk2 RAW in LR3 on a Q9550 :D
Click to expand...
Already got 7 ultimate was going to see if I could transfer license but also fancy trying 8.1
 
neil_g said:
define okay.. while the Q9550 coped it was maxed across all cores a lot of the time. and we're talking 20-30mb RAW files.

the move to i7 and SSD was much nicer, plus i can do stuff while i wait :D
Click to expand...
Ditto but on a Q6600 ;D
 
Okay meaning coped.. haha

To be fair it was fine, no overheating, no slow running.. its done me proud..!

Sent from my GT-P5100 using Talk Photography Forums mobile app
 
arad85 said:
It's 1600MHz frequency. The 12800 refers to the bandwidth.... as it's 1600MHz x 8 bytes it's 12800Mbytes/sec or 12.8Gbytes/sec.
Click to expand...

Thanks, Andy was head scratching there:eek:
 
Supply should be OK - spec it based on the graphics gard you are going to put in it. As long as you stick with Corsair, you should be fine with rated power. Given the cost, I'd probably stretch to the 840 Pro over the EVO (although as a boot drive read speed is more important than write I guess).
 
stupar said:
Ok, deciding to pull the trigger on a new PC after sitting last night trying to multi task the Q6600 and 8gb RAM with Photoshop, Lightscribe and music streaming which it struggled to cope with (I know any excuse for a new toy ;))

Anyway having looked at components and specs etc to suit an approximate £1200 budget this is what I came up with. Let me know if you think I am missing anything or if you feel there is a weakness in the components.
I photo edit and play current PC games. I'm wondering if the inclusion of the GTX660 card would require extra headroom on the power supply - thoughts

Full ATX case
Corsair modular 650w PSU
MSI Z87 G45 Motherboard
Intel i5 4670K processor
16/32gb DDR3 12800 RAM
Samsung 840 120gb SSD drive
Western Digital 1TB 7200 internal drive
Nvidia GTX660 graphics card


Money from selling old PC will fund a 24 inch Dell U2412M monitor
Click to expand...


Overall, if your budget is about £1200 excl monitor, you are well under, unless your case is gold-plated;)

A wee count up at ebuyer comes to around £770, without case, for 16Gb RAM.

I would suggest a bigger HDD, probably 3Tb.

Also suggest another SSD for your scratch disc for editing.

PSU is cheaper for a 750 than a 650 in ebuyer so no brainer there.
 
Agree on the HDD - at least 2TB.
 
Disk is completely person dependant. I store everything including pics for the last 3 years on a 256G SSD (no, I don't take a lot of pictures ;)). It has 110G free at the moment. I too would suggest a second SSD for your main files, although depending on how many you have, you may end up moving them around to the HDD. If you do go for a second SSD, definitely take something that has good write as well as read performance (256G 840 Pro would be my choice :)) I have a 1G drive in the PC as backing store (temp files and offloaded pics) several 2G drives and a 3G drive scattered around, but they are all for media storage and backups.
 
ancient_mariner said:
Agree on the HDD - at least 2TB.
Click to expand...

personally I'd rather have multiple smaller drives (mainly external and/or NAS) , 3TB is great but its putting a lot of eggs in one basket if/when the drive fails (and yes I know you should back up, but a lot of people wind up with backing up on the tuit list rather than actually doing it
 
big soft moose said:
personally I'd rather have multiple smaller drives (mainly external and/or NAS) , 3TB is great but its putting a lot of eggs in one basket if/when the drive fails (and yes I know you should back up, but a lot of people wind up with backing up on the tuit list rather than actually doing it
Click to expand...

The thing is, these days one pays a premium for 1Tb rather than 2 or 3Tb drives.

As for back up, best to be paranoid, but that is a different discussion.
 
neil_g said:
3tb and above are extortionate at the moment. 1tb drives are half the price ( based on 30 seconds on ebuyer)
Click to expand...

£44.....£64.....£84 = 1, 2, or 3Tb.

Based on 10 secs in ebuyer, one rests one's bag!
 
exactly so just buy 1tb , which is all you need - don't pay twice the price and have a stupidly large drive.
 
big soft moose said:
exactly so just buy 1tb , which is all you need - don't pay twice the price and have a stupidly large drive.
Click to expand...

That really depends on what data the OP has.

My point was 3 times 1Tb is £132 which is a premium over £84!

One man's "stupidly large drive" is another's need much more!
 
TBH I'd buy 2 X 2TB and either mirror or keep one external in a caddy (probably the latter).
 
I wouldn't use mirroring as the only backup. Get your backup data as physically far away from the original as is practical. Mirroring is good if you have a backup in place and want redundancy in case a disk fails. Mirroring is less reliable as it has a couple of shared points of failure (disk controller, PSU blowing and taking disks out) plus it isn't a backup in the true sense as once you delete data from a mirrored array, it has gone completely. IMHO, the ordering is:

offsite > onsite (separate enclosure) > onsite (same enclosure) > mirroring > nothing

( > means "is better than"). Personally, I think the minimum these days is one backup onsite that is in a different enclosure to the main data.
 
The thing is, as I said earlier, this thread is not about backup, it's about the fella wanting a new PC.

Who knows how many NAS, externals or clouds he has floating about?
 
Mikesphotaes said:
The thing is, as I said earlier, this thread is not about backup, it's about the fella wanting a new PC.

Who knows how many NAS, externals or clouds he has floating about?
Click to expand...
It's always something to at least think about when specing a new machine. If you're going to be increasing the size of your machines drives, do you need to increase the size of your backup drives to match etc etc
 
Hey guys,
Interesting comments noted since I was last in this thread.

To paint the picture - at present I have a 160GB hard drive for OS and programs and Western Digital 1TB external drive for image storage, whilst not ideal it has served me well as my images are for personal use so if they got lost it would be a bummer but it would only be my loss.
Now that I am doing portrait shoots for other people I probably do need to think about a safe means of storage in case of eventualities.

So the question, how easy is it to back up off site, would a cloud system suffice or would I be better looking at networked drives - this area is kind of a new arena to me so all hints and tips are greatly appreciated
 
Depends on your internet connection and how much data you want to backup.

Ultimately you should always have at least 2 copies of your data (raid counts as 1 copy even mirrored) with 1 offsite copy, whether that is cloud based or an external drive in your work drawer or parents house etc..
 
neil_g said:
Depends on your internet connection and how much data you want to backup.

Ultimately you should always have at least 2 copies of your data (raid counts as 1 copy even mirrored) with 1 offsite copy, whether that is cloud based or an external drive in your work drawer or parents house etc..
Click to expand...

Virginmedia Cable - 30mbs subscribed service.
So I could basically have a raid system within the desktop plus a hard drive offsite connected to the network. Is the latter easy to set up from a network perspective?
 
That's 30 up as well isn't it, so plenty of bandwidth.

You could have an internal raid (motherboard depending) but I wouldn't bother. Either just have the internal drive and backup to your external then either use the cloud or have another external which you rotate off site.
 
neil_g said:
That's 30 up as well isn't it, so plenty of bandwidth.

You could have an internal raid (motherboard depending) but I wouldn't bother. Either just have the internal drive and backup to your external then either use the cloud or have another external which you rotate off site.
Click to expand...

No 30 down 2 up
 
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