$3500+ Editing rig

Thinking about getting a new rig.
Going to be mostly for photo editing and music editing.  (Photoshop CS6 and Lightroom 5, and also Ableton Live)
Also gonna do some light gaming on it. (Counterstrike: Sorce/Global Offensive, Dragon Age 1-2-3, The Secret World etc.) Preferably on high settings. 

 

Chose the PSU for clean platinum power, Motherboard for connectivity and NIC, i7 processor (posably some light [email protected]), 32GB RAM for editing, Graphics card for performance, SSDs running in raid 0 for speed, HDDs in raid 1 for security. and fans for a cool and silent experience.

Any thoughts or alternatives for this build?

 

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/3qIoo

The applications you're planning on running don't look to have much use for hyperthreading (unless that recording software is crazily complicated) I know Photoshop runs just as fast if not faster on an i5 (I've used it myself professionally on both rigs and stay fairly aware of benchmarks concerning that application suite)... you can save a good bit and get very similar performance with an i5... there's no need to raid 0 SSDs... they're plenty fast on their own... I suppose you could get a 120GB for cache if you really just wanted to waste money on SSDs, but raid 0 is just flushing money down the commode... you also won't have any need for 32GB of Memory, 16GB is overkill as is for what you're doing...

I recommend SSHDs for storage... they're cheap and almost as fast as SSDs... picked out a cheaper 780, EVGA's solid... same case, same quality CPU cooler it's just not ugly...

Overall I think you'd be very happy with this rig... it fits what you're doing quite well...and will play anything on ultra at 1080p with ease... that and it's $1900 under budget ;)

Thanks for the input.

Been having problems with current rig, when i5 been the bottleneck and 12GB of memory have been used up in  short time. Could go with 16GB to start with maybe to save on cost. Would love to get a Seasonic PSU but they are nowhere to be found in my country, nor is the G.Skill RAM :(


The SSHDs might be fine, but not much cheaper and I have more trust in the HDDs as it's old and well proven technology. The graphics card you found was nice, but only cheaper using pcpartpicker. Unfortunatly I can't buy my parts from those vendors as they don't ship to my country and the shipping and taxing of the parts that would ship would be crazy expensive :(


Found the card here at a local retailer but was almost $50 more then the one I had picked out already.


Turns out that the original rig would only cost $2500 if I could order from the vendors on Pcpartpicker.

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/3qTow


Local prices here are much higher, but so are the incomes.
But 16GB of RAM and maybe one SSD would do to begin with. Could always expand if not.

What country you in?

BTW there's no possible way an i5 is a bottleneck in photoshop... it's actually one of the fastest processors ytou can buy for Photoshop... Lightroom, etc... the i5 performs faster than an i7 in many cases... I could explain why but then we'd have to get into how hyperthreading works and how photoshop is optimized for multithreaded processors...

Never used the recording software, so if that's what you were referring to, then yes... 

What do you mean by 12GB being used up short amounts of time? Was the program crashing? I've worked with large high res images used for magazine print fairly frequently... and I've never seen it log more than 10GB of memory in resource monitor (and that while running through filters on a HUGE spread photo @1000P/I)... I guess it depends on what you're doing with it...

About the GPU... it's worth the extra $50 to get a non-reference cooler... EVGA, ASUS, and MSI, in that order, are my preferred aftermarket cooling solutions...

The SSHDs, while newer, are basically just a tried and proven HDD with flash memory used as cache... I don't see how they'd out of nowhere be unreliable... they do, however, take a little time to break in for the cache to know what you access often... but hey, buy what you like...

If not Seasonic... buy an XFX PSU.... same product basically...

I think your harddrive choice is a bit over kill. I do allot of 3d rendering and stuff with my workstation on a single 250gb SSD then I have a bunch of drives for back up.  For your price point if you go cheaper with the HDs you might be able to go 2011 with a 6 core i7

- Just a thought 

Live in Norway.



It bottlenecks sometimes when dealing with multiple programs at once. System at a few times have shown it to work at over 200% capacity. Photoshop is not the issue, nor heavy use of it. It's the multiple use of programs along with running programs doing rendering in OpenGL across a 27" display.
Graphics card is getting old too. It's a Radeon HD4860 if I remember correctly. Hence the big upgrade in graphics card as well.




About the RAM maxing out. It does so easily. Being the power-user I am. Takes a little web-browsing (uses between 2-6GB), Photoshop (taking up to 10GB as you mentioned), doing some light rendering and rest for keeping the system happy. See the problem here? :p




Non-referance GPU was the plan all along. Hard to decide between EVGA and ASUS, will have to see what's available and the prices here.




Thanks for the tips. We seem to have a small selection of XFX PSUs here :)



Cavemanbangs:
Socket 2011 and a six-core would also be a sweet option. Would only cost $80 more if I picked cheaper HDDs and 16GB RAM. Prices are insane though. An i7 4960X costs about $1330.
Best option then would be the 3930K at $750.
Or maybe stick to the 4770K which is only $440 :)




Will have to think about all of this before ordering. Thanks to both of you for some good tips and ideas :)

wooah thats a big price difference.. that chip is around $500 in the US

Yeah, I know....It's a BIG difference. Thus the "$3500 editing rig"- title.


This would be the rig, taking all your advices in and the local pricing.   


http://pcpartpicker.com/p/3tf4M


Total cost here would be $2914, compared to the $2115 of the PcPartPicker pricing. Basicly it's add $100 to the processor price, $50 to each component except the fans, where you add $10 each. PSU is only $1 cheaper then the Platinum Corshair one.


I think the rig looks almost as powerful as my original post but almost $600 cheaper, which is quite nice. What do you two think?

 

This is less than $3500 and its much faster on than the SSD's in raid 0

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/3tfks

Now I do want to say that I think this is overkill. You would be fine with a GTX 770 and a perhaps a couple SSD's. But if you got the money and want the fastest you can get, then that is what this build is for.

Highlights:

  1. The PCI-e SSD on this build is much faster than even the Samsung Pro SSD's in raid are. 
  2. The 780 ti is able to fit in the budget for pretty much the best gaming you can get without a titan or SLI
  3. The drives: 128gb ssd for OS and standard programs, 480gb PCI-e for projects and games, 2x2tb HDD for project storage and backup, 1x2tb HDD for standard media (the not so important movies and music and etc)

I know selection isn't the same in your country, but this is what I would be looking for. A friend of mine that does cad and video rendering on large scale projects sets up multiple pci-e drives like these for their rendering machines.. They are insanely fast.

That budget and requirements - look at a socket 2011 setup instead of socket 1150. Quad channel memory performance will help you a great deal.

I think that last build looks good man. I think the price is right for what you are trying to do. as far as using a 2011 setup, it is good, but you would want to be running your software and programs off of a large ram drive to really take advantage of that setup.. I don't think it is really necessary, but it is insanely fast. Here is a model build of that. You setup a ram drive and run the software off that.. it is extremely fast.. The fastest possible I believe perhaps other than some non-consumer machine.

http://pcpartpicker.com/p/3tN6O

You would need to install the editing program to the ram drive on restart and move the files, from there, but all rendering/conversion and other drive intensive tasks will freaking fly.. When you are done, you copy the files back to the SSD/HDD for backup.. don't forget or you will loose your work when you lose power to the PC. a battery box would also be a good invention for this system. 

Anyway, something to think about.