Considering PC hardware for photo editing? I recently upgraded my laptop, and I'm considering a new desktop as well. Here's a recent article with a discussion of the trade-offs.
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Wanted: an ‘Adobe PC’ for processing photographs
Allen has a decent budget for a PC to run Adobe Photoshop CS6 and Lightroom 4, but what sort of specification should he be looking for?
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what did you go with for the laptop? i am looking to get one within the next week and am looking for options for photo editing
Yeah I'd be very interested in hearing that too +Jeff Sullivan
Funny. I ditched my laptop for editing and went back to a PC earlier this year. Ended up building a slightly customized Dell based on the model mentioned in the article (i7, 16Gb, win7 64-bit).
I've been real happy with its performance with CS5 and even a little surprised how well it handled a demo D800 RAW file.
If I was building one it would be 16 gigs of ram, ivy bridge I7, GTX 570 or 580, and as much ssd space as you can afford. And I would think about going 32 gigs of ram, it's so cheap.
Go Mac and you'll never go back. Just kidding, but I appreciate how well LR and PS integrate on the Mac. Apple's next big release is supposed to be the long overdue replacement for the Mac Pro.
Well, my PC runs linux gentoo, no windows, no osx.
For PP, i use rawstudio, rawtherapy, digikam, luminance, Gimp & G'mic. These are the softwares I use the most.
My main PC is an old Q6600, with 16GB memory & raid-5 data disks (external controler, not built-in).
No need to have a "gamer" graphic card, in photo editing & processing, it is just useless. GTX & GT series, and radeon HD, even if they slighty improve performance, are just useless.
Nvidia Quadro & Ati FX are the must-have graphics cards for professionnal photo editor. They are just about 100 times faster in photo editing & manipulation than the last nvidia & ati "home cards" series. Speed is just incomparable. Try it, and you'll buy it.
And now you can have some used Quadro FX3400 for about 200€.
They won't make run crysis 3 or call of duty at maximum details and 200fps, it's not their purpose, but in video & photo & 3D editing, they will hugely overblast even a quad-sli of gtx680…
If you only use adobe softwares, prefer a quadro nvs, it has been designed especially for adobe products.
For a laptop, choose a quadcore at least, no matter the Ghz, with some good cache (12 or 16MB). And with a quadro or ati fx graphic card. The difference is so huge that you won't even believe your own eyes.
+Mark Rodriguez and +Colin Smith, I started to write a response with notes on my experience with my new Sony laptop, but it got long so I made a new post out of it: https://plus.google.com/107459220492917008623/posts/FjKqGAaYyUz
I'd love to get a Mac +Paul Porter, but even though I could get the Apple "friends and family" discount they're just too expensive. Since I can buy roughly two Windows PCs for every Mac, I can upgrade every year instead of every two, and my kids can benefit greatly from the extra machines I pass down.
I did drop by an Apple store recently and those Retina displays sure do look nice though. If money were no object, I'd consider a MacBook. The Apple 27" monitors looked great too, and at 2560 x 1440 I could fit on the screen a lot more of an image I'm working on at 100% zoom. The Apple display is over $1000 while Dell has similar models for closer to $700 (low cost brands go as low as $400, but reviews rate them as horrendous). So on the desktop PC front I'm considering graphics cards supporting that resolution well. The off-the-shelf PC models don't seem attractively configured or priced (I was just looking at Dell's site this morning), but I can build a system relatively cheaply for the performance I'd get.
thanks +Jeff Sullivan that will be one to consider
+Steve Cole I have a generally favorable impression of Dell, and after hearing horror stories about HPs recently, while +Lori Hibbett has had a good experience with a new Dell with 24" Monitor, I was looking this morning at the Dell XPS One with 27" monitor, in case Dell might put together an attractively-priced bundle for the holidays.
Unfortunately the customer reviews seem to be unanimously negative for that model:
http://www.amazon.com/Dell-XPSo27-6472BK-27-Inch-Desktop-Black/dp/B0084C38ZA/ref=sr_1_6?s=electronics&ie=UTF8&qid=1356030604&sr=1-6&keywords=XPS+One+27%22
I'll probably still favor a Dell 27" monitor, but the positive reviews of those are by general users, while photographers rate them very poorly. I'll probably wait until the new S Series that Dell positions as better for photographs (to customers complaining about the current 27" displays) includes a 27" model. The max at the moment is a 24" model at only 1940 x 1080, no more resolution than my current laptop.
+Mickaël DILY For Premiere Pro CS6 in particular, you may have a good point with regards to the Quadro card. On one hand, Premiere Pro CS5 benchmarks currently seem dominated by machines with GTX cards: http://ppbm5.com/DB-PPBM5.php
However, a discussion on the Adobe support site indicates that Premiere Pro CS6 may use features giving the Quadro cards an edge:
"This could throw "bang-for-the-buck" out the window. CS6 may make excellent use of the capabilities of a Quadro (such as DirectCompute) that are seriously lacking in the GeForce. What this all means is that a PC with a CPU that's typical of what most of us have been already using for CS5.5 and equipped with a top-of-the-line GeForce may run slower overall in PPro CS6 than an otherwise identical PC equipped with a relatively low-end Quadro 600 (with the CUDA hack if it's still allowed in CS6)."
http://forums.adobe.com/message/4359830?tstart=0#4359830
+Jeff Sullivan The way MS Win use GPU capabilities and adressing is just something mysterious, mystical, not incomprehensible. They just act as if they had lost source code from the kernel, and since they have to make dirty hacks to make things just work. Fantastic…
I had to use a quadro 1700 on my desktop, under linux, it was really impressive. Gimp, gmic, with every softwares i used, all the manipulations was smooth, really really fast, "natural". I used 18Mp RAW files under gimp, resizing, zooming, deformation, pivoting, everything was realy really smmoth, done by the hardware, all those manipulation took less than 0,5s to execute. With my GTX580, zooming, deforming, moving, copying, painting… such big files can take up to several seconds, something more than 10. With quadro, it's just instantaneous. First time i used it, it was so fast i believed my pc was buggy, and wasn't doing the right jobs. It was right, and not buggy. Just fast.
A friend of mine use a Qcore with a sli of 2 quadro 600. He use dynebolic as his main OS. As he doesn't know very well linux, i maintain his pc. Frequently, he tells me that since he has the quadro, he gained 90% of worktime. And when i see him at work, i can understand what he means.