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Recommendations for an off the shelf PC

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Bobapingu

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About a decade ago I build a monster of a PC for it's day. It's now out of puff and dying in many ways. I don't want to build another one. I need it to run Lightroom Classic easily. I have a large catelogue and keep data on internal, external drives and OneDrive. The monitor needs to be suitable for photo editing but need not be professional quality or overly huge. I'm not into gaming or streaming. I want to stay in the Windows ecosystem. Any recommendations and advice would be greatly appreciated.
 
You definitely want a SSD for your boot drive, and for the place where you store your Lightroom Classic catalog file. (Full-size photos can go on hard drives.)

Also at least 16 GB of RAM, as per Adobe's recommendation.
 
Are very large imports/preview generation/exports part of your normal workflow or is it mostly just working inside of LR Classic? If so roughly how many are you thinking? And how important is cutting down the time of those actions to you?

This is basically asking how many cores you'll need since most of the active tasks care about single threaded performance and while Intel is a bit ahead with 12th gen the gap is so small that anything from a AMD 5600X to an Intel i9-12900K isn't going to have much of a noticeable difference especially compared to the jump from your current PC. But for the passive tasks like I listed at the start of this among others is where there's a big gap.

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/a...Gen-Intel-Core-vs-AMD-Ryzen-5000-Series-2246/

If you scroll down to the graph it'll start on overall score but then you can click through the active/passive ones.
 
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BobT3218 said:
About a decade ago I build a monster of a PC for it's day. It's now out of puff and dying in many ways. I don't want to build another one. I need it to run Lightroom Classic easily. I have a large catelogue and keep data on internal, external drives and OneDrive. The monitor needs to be suitable for photo editing but need not be professional quality or overly huge. I'm not into gaming or streaming. I want to stay in the Windows ecosystem. Any recommendations and advice would be greatly appreciated.
Click to expand...
Laptop or desktop? Budget?
 
"I don't want to build another one."

You are voted off the island! 🙃
BobT3218 said:
About a decade ago I build a monster of a PC for it's day. It's now out of puff and dying in many ways. I don't want to build another one. I need it to run Lightroom Classic easily. I have a large catelogue and keep data on internal, external drives and OneDrive. The monitor needs to be suitable for photo editing but need not be professional quality or overly huge. I'm not into gaming or streaming. I want to stay in the Windows ecosystem. Any recommendations and advice would be greatly appreciated.
Click to expand...
The Dell XPS desktop has an SD card slot (I'm assuming you're not one of those people who bought a camera with XQD) and comes in a variety of builds ranging from $600 to $2680.

Dell has fairly good service and parts availability, as does Lenovo I've heard.

I would wait for 12th generation Intel, which I see in the $1230 XPS desktop, though it has only GTX 1650. Also DVD instead of BluRay, which is pretty stupid if you ask me.
 
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BobT3218 said:
About a decade ago I build a monster of a PC for it's day. It's now out of puff and dying in many ways. I don't want to build another one. I need it to run Lightroom Classic easily. I have a large catelogue and keep data on internal, external drives and OneDrive. The monitor needs to be suitable for photo editing but need not be professional quality or overly huge. I'm not into gaming or streaming. I want to stay in the Windows ecosystem. Any recommendations and advice would be greatly appreciated.
Click to expand...
I've owned several Dell Optiplex boxes. They are targeted at Dell's corporate customers. Various case sizes, lots of processor/RAM/storage options and service options. Nice layouts, cabling and component brands inside.

But I'd get one with a single RAM slot populated, and buy additional RAM yourself. Dell charges a lot for RAM, and if I were you I'd plan on at least 32GB, especially if you will be running other apps concurrently with LR.
 
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CAcreeks said:
"I don't want to build another one."

You are voted off the island! 🙃
BobT3218 said:
About a decade ago I build a monster of a PC for it's day. It's now out of puff and dying in many ways. I don't want to build another one. I need it to run Lightroom Classic easily. I have a large catelogue and keep data on internal, external drives and OneDrive. The monitor needs to be suitable for photo editing but need not be professional quality or overly huge. I'm not into gaming or streaming. I want to stay in the Windows ecosystem. Any recommendations and advice would be greatly appreciated.
Click to expand...
The Dell XPS desktop has an SD card slot (I'm assuming you're not one of those people who bought a camera with XQD) and comes in a variety of builds ranging from $600 to $2680.

Dell has fairly good service and parts availability, as does Lenovo I've heard.

I would wait for 12th generation Intel, which I see in the $1230 XPS desktop, though it has only GTX 1650. Also DVD instead of BluRay, which is pretty stupid if you ask me.
Click to expand...
They're good for mid tier systems and Dell has improved the airflow but I wouldn't want anything too hot in that case. Also if you do longer workflows then the power levels matter and I'm pretty sure Dell throttles theirs back to PL1 which causes a decent drop in performance. So for those kinds of workloads it could be worth it to look at one of the system integrators (main gear, origin are 2 of the higher end ones). You're paying a premium but you're also getting more performance.

But if your workloads are shorter with the focus being on editing images vs import/export the XPS with a 12th gen i5 or maybe i7 if you want to push it would be a great box.
 
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CBR1100XX said:
Are very large imports/preview generation/exports part of your normal workflow or is it mostly just working inside of LR Classic? If so roughly how many are you thinking? And how important is cutting down the time of those actions to you?

This is basically asking how many cores you'll need since most of the active tasks care about single threaded performance and while Intel is a bit ahead with 12th gen the gap is so small that anything from a AMD 5600X to an Intel i9-12900K isn't going to have much of a noticeable difference especially compared to the jump from your current PC. But for the passive tasks like I listed at the start of this among others is where there's a big gap.

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/a...Gen-Intel-Core-vs-AMD-Ryzen-5000-Series-2246/

If you scroll down to the graph it'll start on overall score but then you can click through the active/passive ones.
Click to expand...
interesting articles on pc hardware/software performance
 
Sagittarius said:
BobT3218 said:
About a decade ago I build a monster of a PC for it's day. It's now out of puff and dying in many ways. I don't want to build another one. I need it to run Lightroom Classic easily. I have a large catelogue and keep data on internal, external drives and OneDrive. The monitor needs to be suitable for photo editing but need not be professional quality or overly huge. I'm not into gaming or streaming. I want to stay in the Windows ecosystem. Any recommendations and advice would be greatly appreciated.
Click to expand...
Laptop or desktop? Budget?
Click to expand...
I'm thinking desktop but could be persuaded otherwise. Consider me a sub-professional user. I average 20-30 shots a day with a few keepers. Occasional trips ending with 1,000+ shots. No fixed budget but I usually look at just under top of the line.
 
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CAcreeks said:
"I don't want to build another one."

You are voted off the island! 🙃
BobT3218 said:
About a decade ago I build a monster of a PC for it's day. It's now out of puff and dying in many ways. I don't want to build another one. I need it to run Lightroom Classic easily. I have a large catelogue and keep data on internal, external drives and OneDrive. The monitor needs to be suitable for photo editing but need not be professional quality or overly huge. I'm not into gaming or streaming. I want to stay in the Windows ecosystem. Any recommendations and advice would be greatly appreciated.
Click to expand...
The Dell XPS desktop has an SD card slot (I'm assuming you're not one of those people who bought a camera with XQD) and comes in a variety of builds ranging from $600 to $2680.

Dell has fairly good service and parts availability, as does Lenovo I've heard.

I would wait for 12th generation Intel, which I see in the $1230 XPS desktop, though it has only GTX 1650. Also DVD instead of BluRay, which is pretty stupid if you ask me.
Click to expand...
I would like to wait for the 12th gen Intel too. I might have to get a laptop to tide me over.
 
Tell us more about the issues and bottlenecks you see in your current PC. Also some hardware specs so we know just how big a jump you might be making.

If you haven't done the obvious thing yet, let us know. Have you at least cloned the boot drive onto SSD? That will rejuvenate an older PC enormously, and it's pretty easy. Also not that expensive. Biggest issue is having a big HDD boot drive and replacing with a smaller SSD. You need to free up space, or the upgrade can't really be a clone process anymore and gets tougher.

As for off-the-shelf, I'd look at Dell simply because of the customizability (and support). That said, it's been since 1995 that I last bought an off-the-shelf PC. I prefer building them. Laptops are another story. Seem buy one of them every 3-4 years or so.
 
BobT3218 said:
Sagittarius said:
BobT3218 said:
About a decade ago I build a monster of a PC for it's day. It's now out of puff and dying in many ways. I don't want to build another one. I need it to run Lightroom Classic easily. I have a large catelogue and keep data on internal, external drives and OneDrive. The monitor needs to be suitable for photo editing but need not be professional quality or overly huge. I'm not into gaming or streaming. I want to stay in the Windows ecosystem. Any recommendations and advice would be greatly appreciated.
Click to expand...
Laptop or desktop? Budget?
Click to expand...
I'm thinking desktop but could be persuaded otherwise. Consider me a sub-professional user. I average 20-30 shots a day with a few keepers. Occasional trips ending with 1,000+ shots. No fixed budget but I usually look at just under top of the line.
Click to expand...
I recently upgraded to this computer

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www.microcenter.com

I do not know if it is available in Australia. For monitors you cal look at ASUS ProArt wide gamut monitor 2560x1440 pixels resolution. ASUS 4K wide gamut is quite expansive. I prefer to do my editing on wide gamut. I have an older ASU ProArt 27" 2560x1440 monitor and happy with it. You can also look at EIZO monitors.
 
BobT3218 said:
I'm thinking desktop but could be persuaded otherwise.
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Unless you absolutely need a laptop for mobility reasons, get a desktop. Much better performance and monitor flexibility and size at a substantially lower price. Also the absolutely best laptop keyboards are lousy compared to a decent desktop keyboard.
 
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Thanks for your comments guys. Actually, you've got me thinking, maybe I would be getter off building my own again. The last time, I found a tested recipe online for a machine that suited my purposes. I built that and couldn't have been happier. It's been 10 years since I did that and things have changed a lot. I'll need some guidance on how things are done today. Anyone know where I might look for proven builds?
 
No recipes here, but this seems sensible: Building a PC for photo editing

In particular, see the link to pcpartpicker

The major sticking point with any of these is finding a graphics card at a believable price. That's one major motivator for buying a pre-made system.

There are custom PC builders that don't use proprietary parts. That may be a reasonable compromise in getting a system without upgradeability headaches. I've never used one, though. I assemble my own, regardless of how much money I lose in the process.
 
BobT3218 said:
Thanks for your comments guys. Actually, you've got me thinking, maybe I would be getter off building my own again. The last time, I found a tested recipe online for a machine that suited my purposes. I built that and couldn't have been happier. It's been 10 years since I did that and things have changed a lot. I'll need some guidance on how things are done today. Anyone know where I might look for proven builds?
Click to expand...
Some things to consider in deciding whether to build your own or buy a pre built PC:

Modern tower cases for pre-built PCs:
  1. don't have multiple horizontal 5-1/4 drive bays on the front for expansion.
    1. If you want a DVD drive to load software that you already own, a horizontally mounted DVD drive allows just dropping the CD/DVD in the tray. Like you probably have on your 10 year old PC.
    2. Do you like a lot of USB2 and USB3 ports on the front of your tower PC? I have a 4 port USB3 front panel and a 4 port USB2 front panel installed in my self built tower PC. Those ports are mostly always full.
  2. don't have a DVD drive and if they do, the drive is almost always a compact vertical DVD drive. Pain in the butt to have to press the disc on to the vertical hub, instead of just dropping the disc into a tray, and a pain in the butt to remove the disc off the hub.
  3. may have limited space inside of the case. Depending on the case, the motherboard may not be completely exposed. It may go underneath stuff that have to be removed to do ram upgrades or do troubleshooting by swapping ram cards, etc.
  4. may have nightmare cooling fan configuration. Like one pre-built PC's case cooling is the lone fan on the CPU and the power supply's fan. That's it! Cool air is drawn from the vented side panel and is funneled down to the cooling fan on the CPU. Talk about a good way to clog the CPU heatsink with dust.... that's it! Be sure you check the configuration of the case cooling fans if you buy a pre-built PC.
  5. The power supply will be a generic one and may be limited in wattage. If you build your own PC, you can buy a reputable power supply like Seasonic and get the wattage you want.
If you build your PC, suggest getting a motherboard and CPU with integrated graphics. Just use that for now while graphic card prices are stratospheric. It will work fine for Lightroom Classic.

For the monitor, 27", 2560x1440 res, sRGB is a sweet spot. If you want a larger size monitor with 4K, be sure that your graphics controller can support 4K.

Sky
 
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BobT3218 said:
Thanks for your comments guys. Actually, you've got me thinking, maybe I would be getter off building my own again. The last time, I found a tested recipe online for a machine that suited my purposes. I built that and couldn't have been happier. It's been 10 years since I did that and things have changed a lot. I'll need some guidance on how things are done today. Anyone know where I might look for proven builds?
Click to expand...
Maybe something like this? They call their lineup "streaming" but their parts look decent for general use to me.


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nzxt.com
 
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