Could use some advice before I finalize my system purchase.

I'm about to order my new system (i7 920 based) and have pretty well finalized my choices but still have a few lingering thoughts.

I had originally thought I would get 12Gig of triple channel DDR3 ram but some more reading has me questioning whether or not it's just a silly amount of ram and that perhaps I should stick with 6Gig. The extra cost is not a lot but if it's simply going to go to waste I could put the money towards something else (like lenses...). My last system was an AMD X2 4200+ with 2Gig and ram was never a real issue although that was with XP not Windows 7 and I have did not use Photoshop on it much.

Along with 2 x 1TB data drives, I had intended on getting 2 x 150Gig Velociraptors, 1 for OS and apps and 1 for Lightroom cache, temp etc.... I'm wondering if I should opt for a pair of SSD's (perhaps 80Gig Intel X25-M's).

Are there any concerns with going SSD? Any reason NOT to go with SSD, other than the extra cost (the Intel SSD's will cost me about $50 more than the Velociraptors)?

Other than general computing stuff I will be using Lightroom, Capture NX, Photoshop etc... I also do a lot of cd ripping, FLAC encoding etc... I don't play games on the computer much.

Any input would be greatly appreciated.

Adam.

I had to let the shop know what my final decision was so I could get this machine ASAP (been working on a borrowed laptop that I need to return) so I decided to stick with the config as is. The 12GB may be overkill but the price difference wasn't a big deal when averaged over the life of the computer. I'll consider SSD at a later date.

I suspect I'll be thrilled with the performance of the i7 920 system over my AMD X2 4200+.

There's hardly any difference in performance between Velociraptors and newer cheaper drives like the Samsung F3 1Gb. The Samsung will transfer data a little quicker but be a little slower in access times. SSDs are good for system drives, but personally I would go with a hard drive for now, and go SSD in a while when they'll hopefully have a few less wrinkles than now and may be a bit cheaper as well. By wrinkles I mean like 1)Intel withdrawing firmware support for TRIM on early X25-M drives because it killed drives, and 2)unimpressive write speeds in some circumstances.

SSD failure rate is still high. Very soon USB 3.0 will be part of the package (read motherboard). Intel just introduced six core CPU so inspect prices to go down on previous generation of the chips.

I was worried about issues with SSD so decided against them.

The motherboard in my new system has USB 3.0 and SATA III. I couldn't wait for chip prices to come down so I went with the 920 which was pretty reasonable anyhow. And I can get a newer processor down the road if I want. Truth be told, I rarely do partial upgrades other than add more drive space. I think it makes far more sense to enjoy a system for a few years (3 at the minimum) and then do a full upgrade unless you "require" the latest and greatest.

Hi. I'm actually into PCs much more than cameras. I have a i7 920 overclocked to 3.6 GHz with Hyper Threading/SMT enabled. I can convert files and every demanding task much faster than my older overclocked Intel dual core (E6750).

I actually had an AMD Athlon X2 3800+, which is just barely slower than your 4200+. The difference between these two CPUs is HUGE. I can't stress HUGE enough. If you apply lots of filters, convert lots of files, or do any other demanding task on your PC, the i7 920 won't (can't) disappoint.

What Motherboard do you have? I ordered another 6GB of DDR3 PC2-12800 around Christmas, but a RAM Module was defective and I chose to send it back instead of a replacement. I use Sony Data Converter, and if I open too many RAW images at once, I run out of RAM quickly. It isn't a problem as I only edit one photo at a time. However, if you have several programs open at once across multiple monitors, 12GB isn't a bad investment considering the relatively inexpensive cost.

SSDs are great if you can afford the cost. I noticed on Newegg.com, a 120 GB OCZ Vertex was on sale for just over $300 and under $300 after MIR. I would put the OS and PS on the SSD and leave a large mechanical HDD for file storage. SSDs are much faster than mechanical HDDs, but the cost is still high, presently.

I posted an image of my CPU in my board. I used too large of an aperture and blurred out too much of the image. I have an ASUS P6T Motherboard.

lost_in_utah said:

What Motherboard do you have?

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Asus P6X58D Premium.

Good info! Looking at a new computer myself--what video card did you choose?

hotdog321 said:

Good info! Looking at a new computer myself--what video card did you choose?

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I chose a midrange card, an Asus built Radeon HD5750 with 1GB DDR5 ram. About $150 Canadian.

My previous card was an nVidia 7800GTX 256M and I was happy with it but I decided to try out an ATI this time.

thanx!

The Intel X25-M Gen 2 series of SSDs are simply wonderful - I don't know of hardly anyone with an issue with them (and I am a regular on the Intel SSD forums), they are reliable, will outlast any user system, and are fast as heck. The references dissing them and the temporary firmware issue that Intel corrected last Fall demonstrate complete ignorance - yes, my pair or X25-160's cost me $800 but for that I get blazing performance with the pair in RAID0 - 503MB/sec sustained read and over 200MB/sec sustained write (@128Kb block size) and unreal random r/w performance (which matters most). Pair that with a quad core CPU running 24/7 at 4.0GHz and 12GB of 1600MHz DDR3 RAM (read: the disk isn't even used for swap/scratch use at that amount of RAM) and nothing can touch it. Virtually zero seek time - instant. It is so nice to come back from a wedding or a major job with 500 RAW images and rip through CS4 with it - and still have lots of free hours left. Time is money and family life.

The only thing I don't get with SSDs in RAID is TRIM (yet), but there is more than enough unused storage that even under heavy use for months there hasn't been any performance degradation at all. So, if I have to drop the drives out of RAID to do a manual TRIM optimization once a year until Intel provide TRIM for RAIDed SSD (likely to occur sooner than later) - so what?

So unless these people own SSDs, they are talking through their hats.

Regards,
Mike

Well stated. The Intel drives are great right now. I think I will wait until they use 25nm NAND Flash.

SatoriGFX said:

I'm about to order my new system (i7 920 based).... 12Gig of triple channel DDR3 ram.... 2 x 1TB data drives,.... 2 x 150Gig Velociraptors, 1 for OS and apps and 1 for Lightroom cache, temp etc....

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Someone ought to be saying this, so I'm going to...

I think this system is 'massively' over-specified - for someone who doesn't play games much, and hasn't really used Photoshop yet.

Photoshop doesn't require anything anywhere near this kind of power and capacity.

Only serious 3D game playing, and perhaps heavy duty HD video editing, would need this much power - and I'm not sure whether either would need 12 GB of RAM.

SatoriGFX said:

My last system was an AMD X2 4200+ with 2Gig and ram was never a real issue although that was with XP not Windows 7 and I have did not use Photoshop on it much.

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Well, certainly neither Windows 7 nor Photoshop require an extra 10GB of RAM - either 3GB, 4GB or 6GB would be more than enough for most people/most uses.

Ironically, I'm currently migrating to a used AMD64 X2 4200+, with 2GB, right now - after stretching my first PIII system (850 MHz, 768MB) just past 10 years with some updating along the way, quite happily running XP, with the like of Photoshop CS, MS Flight Sim 2002, etc, etc.

Anyhow, it's your own money to do what you like with. and maybe your new system will last 10 years for it - it probably really ought to.

I agree that 12 gigs of memory is not needed and photoshop can't use that much anyway, from what I understand.

I am running the i7- 920 on an EVGA x58 3x SLI motherboard with 6 gigs of DDR3-1600 memory and dual 1.5 TB hard drives for data and a 500 GB HD for the operating system. I went with a higher end graphics card NVIDEA Quadro FX-1800 (approx $450), and Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit.

Someone asked about editing raw files.... I opened and edited 52 raw files at the same time just to play around, and it didn't even strain. That just happened to be the number of files I had on my memory card. I should qualify this by saying that I'm still running Photoshop CS3, which does not run in 64 bit. I bought the higher graphics card thinking CS4 or CS5 might be more resource hungry running 64 bit. The performance is amazing compared to the POS I upgraded from.

Bottom line... I think you're going to like it.
--
Gallery at: http://www.pbase.com/tim32225
Photoblog at: http://timrucciphotography.blogspot.com/

Mark H said:

Someone ought to be saying this, so I'm going to...

I think this system is 'massively' over-specified - for someone who doesn't play games much, and hasn't really used Photoshop yet.

Photoshop doesn't require anything anywhere near this kind of power and capacity.

Only serious 3D game playing, and perhaps heavy duty HD video editing, would need this much power - and I'm not sure whether either would need 12 GB of RAM.

Well, certainly neither Windows 7 nor Photoshop require an extra 10GB of RAM - either 3GB, 4GB or 6GB would be more than enough for most people/most uses.

Ironically, I'm currently migrating to a used AMD64 X2 4200+, with 2GB, right now - after stretching my first PIII system (850 MHz, 768MB) just past 10 years with some updating along the way, quite happily running XP, with the like of Photoshop CS, MS Flight Sim 2002, etc, etc.

Anyhow, it's your own money to do what you like with. and maybe your new system will last 10 years for it - it probably really ought to.

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Why do you think the system is "massively over-specified"?

I would agree, the ram is most likely overkill. I figured the next step down assuming I wanted to take advantage of triple channel memory (and I did) was 6 gig (I wouldn't have gone with only 3 gig) and the difference in price to go to 12 gig was not huge so I bit the bullet. As of today the system was not ready. I'll call Monday and see if I can drop the extra 6 gig.

Having separate fast drives for OS/apps, temp/cache and data is something I have done for years and something that makes sense. There is a real benefit in speed and maintaining that speed over time and it makes drive replacement/upgrade easy since I can change only the drive that needs to be changed leaving everything else intact.

The "amount" of storage I have chosen is definitely not overkill, I know because I know how much space I use now and how fast my needs are growing. I currently have 500GB of FLAC's and that grows every time I buy a new cd. Then I have all of my photos (and more all the time) and a slew of other data.

The video card is a midrange card ($150) that will give me decent performance for the occasional game or running 3d apps like Softimage XSI (which I own).

The processor is also not exactly what I would call extravagant. Considering that my computer will be used for not only general tasks but 2d and 3d graphics, audio ripping and encoding, running Squeezecenter, video encoding etc... I don't think the CPU is overkill.

I think you misunderstood my Photoshop comment (probably my fault because I wasn't clear enough). I have used it but I was not using it much recently on the AMD machine, at least not on larger images. Now that I am going to be doing more photo editing I will be using Photoshop or at least "some" form of 2d image editor quite a bit more.

So, yes, I can see your point with regards to RAM but don't know why you would conclude that the rest is overkill. Some of the RAM may go unused but the drive space/speed won't and I'll be making good use of the 920's clock cycles. I use my computers for many hours a day and run them pretty hard.

Thanks for your input.

If you use a 32 bit version of Photoshop, you won't need 12 GB or even 6 GB of RAM. I would purchase the 64 bit version and have access to much larger RAM capacities. A stock i7 920 is nothing close to overkill if you intend to use it for all of the tasks you mentioned. I can list some benchmark results from stock 2.66 GHz to overclocked 3.6 GHz. The performance gained is around 25% and sometimes more/less. I use Paint.net for quick crops/resizing for instances when I don't need to use Photoshop. I encode video as well as photo editing/conversion. Sometimes I wish I had 2 CPUs just so it would go faster, but then I would be limited by my HDD. I would still recommend 12GB if you run multiple programs at once and leave them open. I think it's easier to just minimize a program and switch over to another instead of opening and closing it several times. With that being said, I've only maxed out my 6 GBs of RAM several times.