Update on New PC build

[FredAzinger]

Mike - yes, I'm water-cooled....best way to buy some headroom without a ton of noise.
I also OC'ed to 4.5Ghz on all cores, but it couldn't sustain that for multiple hours of stress.
Last thing I want is flakey, so I dialed it back to a "conservative" 4.0 Ghz and it is stable as a rock.
It was very happy at 5.0Ghz until I added a second set of DDR that bumped me up to 64GB.
Back when I built the machine, I paid a ton of money for the DDR4 and it was un-returnable....so I live with the "slow" speed caused by the double-load of the memory.

In a nutshell, I found that the memory controller was the weak link. Intel addressed that the Broadwell update, but I'm not about to refresh the CPU just for that.

 

[Mike Irish]

Mike - yes, I'm water-cooled....best way to buy some headroom without a ton of noise.
I also OC'ed to 4.5Ghz on all cores, but it couldn't sustain that for multiple hours of stress.
Last thing I want is flakey, so I dialed it back to a "conservative" 4.0 Ghz and it is stable as a rock.
It was very happy at 5.0Ghz until I added a second set of DDR that bumped me up to 64GB.
Back when I built the machine, I paid a ton of money for the DDR4 and it was un-returnable....so I live with the "slow" speed caused by the double-load of the memory.

In a nutshell, I found that the memory controller was the weak link. Intel addressed that the Broadwell update, but I'm not about to refresh the CPU just for that.

Yes I'm running 64Gb also. Eight sticks of 8Gb 3200 G.Skills and it seem happy with them.
Mike

 

[Mike Irish]

I posted this on the Adobe forum when I first started researching for my new postprocessing PC. Allot has changed since then but I still think that it could be a good system at its much low cost factor. I know that some items can be improved upon but it still is a good starting point for someone looking to build a good postprocessing PC on a budget.

Posted on the Adobe Forum.
Hi. I am currently researching for my new PC build. I am a Photoshop and lightroom user since PS 7. I am sure that there are lots of people have asked this question before But I couldn't find any entries on this forum! I have found it hard to get a positive answer to my questions. Some people say that you only need a low end or budget Video card and others say that you should get a legend card!! I will give you a list of the parts that I am thinking of using for this build. Please let me know what you think of my parts list and any suggestions you might have to improve my PS/ LR editing build.

With kindest regards.

Mike Skerritt.

Parts list:
#1. Case: Cooler Master SGC-5000W-KWN1 Stryker "USB 3.0, or Trooper. Lots of room for further upgrades and 8 plus hard drive spaces.

#2. Motherboard. Asus Maximus VIII Hero/Alpha Intel Z170 DDR4 S-ATA 600 ATX Motherboard

#3 . Intel Core i7 6700K Processor (4 GHz, 4 Core, 8 Threads, 8 MB cache, LGA1151

#4. G.SKILL TridentZ Series F4-3000C15D-32GTZ 32GB DDR4 3000 MHz C 15 1.35 V Memory Kit

#5. MSI R9 390 GAMING 8G Radeon R9 390 Graphic Card - 1.06 GHz Core - 8 GB R9 390 GAMING 8G

#6. Swiftech H240-X2 CPU Watercooling Kit. Or the Coolermaster H100i 240 cooler.

#7. C drive: Samsung 950 PRO NVMe M.2 256 GB Solid State Drive - Black

#8 Lightroom catalog and Scratch disk. Samsung 850 PRO 512 GB 2.5 inch SATA III Solid State Drive - Black

#9. Four of : WD 3 TB 3.5-inch Internal Hard Drive - Black

 

[Mike Irish]

Mike - yes, I'm water-cooled....best way to buy some headroom without a ton of noise.
I also OC'ed to 4.5Ghz on all cores, but it couldn't sustain that for multiple hours of stress.
Last thing I want is flakey, so I dialed it back to a "conservative" 4.0 Ghz and it is stable as a rock.
It was very happy at 5.0Ghz until I added a second set of DDR that bumped me up to 64GB.
Back when I built the machine, I paid a ton of money for the DDR4 and it was un-returnable....so I live with the "slow" speed caused by the double-load of the memory.

In a nutshell, I found that the memory controller was the weak link. Intel addressed that the Broadwell update, but I'm not about to refresh the CPU just for that.

Hi Fred. Here is a test that you should carry out to see just how fast the your system is. This test was suggested to me be a very knowledgeable chap called Trevor from the adobe forum community. I reily would like to see how you fair out in this test. Could you post your results here please. If anyone else would like to take part in this test please post your system specifications here and ofcourse your results of the test also.
Thank you for your time.
Mike.
Ps. My system gave me a time of 14.7 seconds to compleate the test.

Open a 30,000 pixel square image, and run a 5000 pixel brush, with spacing set to 1% from corner to corner (touch down, shift touch down opposite corner) Mine took a whopping 41.2 seconds!


Here are my results of the test

Subscribe to see EXIF info for this image (if available)

PS Speed test by Mike Skerritt, on Flickr

 

[FredAzinger]

Done - 10.2 seconds.
I presume the extra cores play a role in the speed over your machine.

 

[FredAzinger]

Is this a test of the CPU or the GPU?
If I goto the link you provide, they talk about the GPU.

I'm running an Nvidia GTX-980 GPU

 

[Mike Irish]

Done - 10.2 seconds.
I presume the extra cores play a role in the speed over your machine.

Nice on Fred . Could you post a screen capture of the test. I'd lone to see that and it would be nice for others to see also.
Regards.
Mike

 

[FredAzinger]

Subscribe to see EXIF info for this image (if available)

OK .... tried it again, this time instead of using a real image, I created a new 30,000 x 30,000 empty 8-bit RGB image that is just white and used that because that looks like what you tried.

This time I repeated runs between 4.9 and 5.1 seconds depending on how straight I can drag the mouse across the image.

 

[FredAzinger]

Woops - wrong brush size....stay tuned....

 

[FredAzinger]

Ok - much slower....
Only get 19.2->19.7 time range.
Here is the screen shot:
Again - 30k x 30k with 5k brush

Subscribe to see EXIF info for this image (if available)

 

[FredAzinger]

My CPU utilization shows PS only using ~50% on "real" cores only ... the even cores (HT's) are not being activated during this test.
I suspect my slower DDR4 is the hold up in this test....I "only" have DDR4-2400 Cl16's as that was pretty much the fastest available when I built the machine.

 

[Mike Irish]

Hi Fred. Yes these times look good if you open the info tab and you then can capture the full test results + the the time taken during the test. This leaves nothing time chance and gives a clearer picture.
I also can see where you went wrong in your other tests as you were trying to draw the line instead of taping on the start pound and the other diagonal point.
I think that is we could get others to contribute to those post that other could help others cause the best components to build their postprocessing PC that the are sure will handle almost anything they can trow at it.