Choosing a bundle from two

Yammer

Yammer

Yammer

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I'm rebuilding my old OCUK Titan Lite using one of their current bundles. It's an Antec 300 case with a Corsair TX650W supply. I've added a Corsair GS240 SSD, an AMD Radeon HD7850, and 3 WD enterprise drives in RAID 5.

I'll be mainly using the PC for high resolution (36MP+) photo processing in Photoshop CS6. I'm not a gamer. I've been reading up and asking questions, and I think I've got it down to two bundles:

1. Z77 Gamer PRO Intel Core i7 3770K 3.50GHz @ 4.40GHz DDR3 Ivybridge Overclocked Bundle (On special offer)

2. "X79 SPEC OPS" Intel Core i7 3820 3.60GHz @ 4.50GHz Overclocked Bundle

Both 4 core CPUs rate roughly the same on PassMark, and both are overclocked by similar amounts. Both systems use Asus motherboards, and have 16GB 1600MHz DDR3 RAM (not sure if #2 is quad channel).

The difference is price. #1 is £150 cheaper, but uses Z77/LGA1155, #2 uses X79/LGA2011.

My question is this: am I better to save money and go for #1, or is it worth spending the extra £150 on #2, and what benefit do I get for my particular use?

Or am I completely off track, and you can think of a better bundle?
 
Im not sure but I think your on the wrong track...

I thought that photo processing ( even at extreme level, like you are doing) is single threaded. This means it works better on 4 or more cores at a high frequency.

The i7's main selling point is it comes with hyperthreading. It has twice as many threads as the i5 but the same amount of cores. Hyperthreading is used in video editing and heavy rendering...

I suggest you research my claims, and if your work does turn out to be single threaded the i5 3570k will be perfect. The higher the over clock the better the performance
 
Doomedspeed said:
I thought that photo processing ( even at extreme level, like you are doing) is single threaded. This means it works better on 4 or more cores at a high frequency.

The i7's main selling point is it comes with hyperthreading. It has twice as many threads as the i5 but the same amount of cores. Hyperthreading is used in video editing and heavy rendering...

I suggest you research my claims, and if your work does turn out to be single threaded the i5 3570k will be perfect. The higher the over clock the better the performance
Click to expand...

Thanks for your comments. I had a quick google and there isn't a clear answer. Photoshop is capable of multi-threading, but not all of it. I can't find which bits are multi-thread and which are not. Some processes are passed to the GPU using OpenCL, some old features are single-threaded, some features use some of the available threads, and some features use as many thread as are available. :confused:

I'm going round in circles.
 
Yammer said:
Thanks for your comments. I had a quick google and there isn't a clear answer. Photoshop is capable of multi-threading, but not all of it. I can't find which bits are multi-thread and which are not. Some processes are passed to the GPU using OpenCL, some old features are single-threaded, some features use some of the available threads, and some features use as many thread as are available. :confused:

I'm going round in circles.
Click to expand...

That's frustrating. I guess PhotoShop has improved since I used it (CS3).

It may be best to assume the worst, that you will use multi threaded features. Even if this will not be the case.

Out of the two above I think #1 is perfect. The 3820 offers very little over the 3770k and with the £150 difference, its a bit of an easier (on the pocket) decsion.

As for future upgrades unfortunately both X79 and Z77 will be dead platforms soon. The new mainstream range will use the 1150 socket and the X79 is being replaced by X99.

Do you want a bundle or would you vlbe happy to build yourself and save a little bit of £?
 
Doomedspeed said:
That's frustrating. I guess PhotoShop has improved since I used it (CS3).

It may be best to assume the worst, that you will use multi threaded features. Even if this will not be the case.

Out of the two above I think #1 is perfect. The 3820 offers very little over the 3770k and with the £150 difference, its a bit of an easier (on the pocket) decsion.

As for future upgrades unfortunately both X79 and Z77 will be dead platforms soon. The new mainstream range will use the 1150 socket and the X79 is being replaced by X99.

Do you want a bundle or would you vlbe happy to build yourself and save a little bit of £?
Click to expand...
Cheers for that. And thanks for saving me money! ;-)

I'm guessing that a good reason to go for the X79 system would be a potential CPU upgrade in the future? But, as you say, I might want a whole new 'bundle' instead anyway. Besides, if it's supplied ready-overclocked, it won't be a simple job for me to replace the CPU, and will invalide the OCUK overclock guarantee.

Even though I've probably built over 1000 PCs in the past, those days are long-gone, and I'm not that comfortable with overclocking. I'm running a 2.66GHz Core2 Duo at 3.8GHz, but I grew a few more grey hairs getting it there.
 
it is true that Z77 is due to be replaced later this year but it's going to be a slow transition and Z77/Ivybridge will still be the standard for quite some time. The performance is still going to be fantastic as we are not expecting Intel to perform miracles with the new hardware.

No news on X79 replacements yet.

Due to the large files sizes and the massive data needed for the filtering & history, processing power and memory bandwidth are important for Photoshop, both of which are slightly better on the X79 platform. That said, for just this reason, faster SSD & Hard Drives have just as much influence on performance since you'll find that Photoshop is using many times more than the original file on the hard drive as a "swap file".

You don't save much, if any, money building it yourself, we are very reasonable on that front. The Gamer Pro, for example, I believe is currently slightly cheaper than buying the components yourself and you get the extra warrant and performance from our overclock for nothing.
 
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