Help new rig - Photo editing £1k-1.5k

FrostFox

FrostFox

FrostFox

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30 May 2004
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Hey guys I need your help speccing a complete new pc rig for photo editing, the rig is for a friend of mine and I told him id get some feedback from u guys in recommending a rig for him. He recently purchased a £4k camera and says his current laptop(8yrs old) just cant cut it and has problems even opening the large picture files the camera creates.

Budget is £1000 - £1500
everything is needed incl monitor/keyboard and mouse ;)

Thx guys for any ideas/input you come up with.
 
Hi,

Thats a nice, sizable budget, this may be quote straight forward.

May I ask a few questions.

Is this rig solely for photo editing or will he be gaming or video editing? Or anything else?

Monitor wise, us there any requirements, size or needing 2 monitors. (off the back id champion an IPS panel, 1440p if possible.

Is there any size constraint?

I think that's about it for now. :)
 
1 more question from me: Is the friend going to be using Photoshop CS or something else? I ask because Photoshop works great with a small SSD as a scratch disk and an Nvidia GPU for CUDA acceleration in certain work tasks. AMD cards are getting there as well but behind at the moment.

If he is going to be printing his own work, he needs a monitor with a wide Adobe RGB gamut which will be rather expensive given the budget. If only editing for soft copies, a good sRGB coverage monitor is enough.
 
I will be here :D

To be honest, photo editing doesn't really need a lot of horsepower. It is the things often not considered that come in handy- printer, SSD scratch disk, monitor and monitor color calibrator.
 
Ok ive been informed he'll be using photoshop and be printing his own work as well. Also photo editing only and no mention of requiring multiple monitors
 
Then have him get a 1440p/1600p IPS monitor, a color calibration tool and printer first. They will take a good chunk of the budget already.
 
vsg28 said:
Then have him get a 1440p/1600p IPS monitor, a color calibration tool and printer first. They will take a good chunk of the budget already.
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I agree with this.

That will take up a serious chunk of the budget. Montiro will be around £300-£400, Im not sure about colour calibration, and a good £150-£300 on a printer too depending on Size.

That's a fair half the budget gone already. :(
 
I am not from the UK so can't recommend price wise but the Dell U3014/U2713H are great. I prefer the XRite ColorMunki for calibration. Printers are a whole new minefield so just have him get one from a reputed company that does the job. Canon printers are great but expensive for example.
 
This would be my idea for the main build:

YOUR BASKET
1 x Dell UltraSharp U2713HM 27" Widescreen LED Monitor - Midnight Grey £439.99
1 x Intel Core i5-4690K 3.50GHz (Devil's Canyon) Socket LGA1150 Processor - Retail £189.95
1 x Kingston HyperX 16GB (2x8GB) PC3-17100C11 2133MHz Dual Channel Kit - Black/Red (HX21C11BRK2/16-OC) £125.99
1 x MSI GeForce GTX 750 OC 1024MB GDDR5 PCI-Express Graphics Card (N750-1GD5/OC) £79.99
2 x Crucial MX100 256GB SATA 2.5” 7mm SSD + 9.5mm Adapter (CT256MX100SSD1) £79.99 (£159.98)
1 x Antec P100 Mid Tower Silenced Computing Case £69.98
1 x Gigabyte Z97P-D3 Intel Z97 (Socket 1150) DDR3 ATX Motherboard £69.95
1 x Seagate Barracuda 2TB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache - OEM (ST2000DM001) HDD £59.99
1 x SuperFlower Golden Green HX 350W "80 Plus Gold" Power Supply - Black £44.99
1 x CM Storm Devastator Gaming Bundle - USB Keyboard & Mouse £29.99
1 x Raijintek Themis Evo Professional CPU Cooler £27.95
Total : £1,316.45 (includes shipping : £14.75).



Monitor is top of the range 1440p. :)

i included a K series CPU but it not majorally important. As photoshop is single threaded faster cores give better results, so if he's up to Overclocking, the K series is the way to go. If not drop to a non-K and save £30ish.

The GPU will be enough, with CUDA to help image editing.

2 SSD's for either Boot/Programs and Working documents or RIAD0 them for SUPER fast speeds. :)

Thoughts?
 
That's a pretty good build. I would get the U2713H instead since this has much better adobe RGB coverage for printing. I would personally also get rid of the K processor, get a 750 Ti, get rid of one 256gig SSD and use the other for Windows or Mac (needs to be bought) and crucial software with about 40-50 gig of it as a separate partition for Photoshop scratch + 1 TB regular drive for other programs/temporary storage.
 
Thx doomedspeed for the rig it seems to cover pretty much most items he'll need and have given my friend a link to this thread so he can have a look :)

Thx for all the input guys really appreciate it :D
 
vsg28 said:
That's a pretty good build. I would get the U2713H instead since this has much better adobe RGB coverage for printing. I would personally also get rid of the K processor, get a 750 Ti, get rid of one 256gig SSD and use the other for Windows or Mac (needs to be bought) and crucial software with about 40-50 gig of it as a separate partition for Photoshop scratch + 1 TB regular drive for other programs/temporary storage.
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I don't see how the Ti would be beneficial really for the extra £'s. The software doesn't use a lot of GPU just a tad for acceleration.

Yeah, the 2nd SSD was just a luxury, but for editing huge files you may see a difference if the File is on the SSD to start with. Just my personal opinion, and the money is there for that. :)

FrostFox said:
Thx doomedspeed for the rig it seems to cover pretty much most items he'll need and have given my friend a link to this thread so he can have a look :)

Thx for all the input guys really appreciate it :D
Click to expand...

Brilliant, let us know the outcome or send him over with any questions he may have. :)
 
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