Photo Editing / Light Gaming PC

fragilesi

fragilesi

fragilesi

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Joined
23 Aug 2023
Posts
5
Location
Waterlooville, UK
I am hoping for any advice on a build from OC for a PC that will be used for:-

- Standard home office use
- Photo editing (large RAW files, large volumes) using primarily Adobe Lightroom but also some Photoshop, my primary objective is to make the actual editing run fast and smooth including the AI features. Not so fussed about how long it takes to export batches etc.
- A little gaming but I'm not big into it and tend to play single player so I don't think this will be an issue with the build I'm suggesting but happy to be told I am wrong.

I do want this thing to last a few years, and don't worry about what will likely seem like excessive SSD storage. I do want it :-)

But does the build overall make sense? I have a lot of experience of using PCs but very low knowledge about what actually makes them tick. From what I see using task manager to look at Lightroom the CPU is definitely key for a lot of things and easily maxes out my current CPU, things like AI DeNoise hit the GPU very hard - they are as follows just for reference:-

Intel Core i7-9700K 3.6GHz (Coffee Lake) Socket LGA1151 Processor - OEM
Palit GeForce RTX 2060 StormX 6144MB GDDR6 PCI-Express Graphics Card

Should I add a little more memory? Is the cooling / power sufficient?

Proposed Build:

OcUK Tech Labs Intel Core Ultra (Arrow Lake) Pro Gaming Configurator
SKU SYS-OCG-00083
  • 1x Lian Li Lancool III RGB Full Tower PC Case - Black
  • 1x Intel Core Ultra 9 285K (Arrow Lake) Socket LGA 1851 Processor - Retail
  • 1x MSI MAG Z890 TOMAHAWK WIFI (LGA 1851) DDR5 ATX Motherboard
  • 1x Corsair Vengeance RGB 64GB (2X32GB) DDR5 PC5-44800C32 6400MHz Dual Channel Kit -
  • 1x Lian Li Galahad II LCD SL-INF AIO 360mm Performance ARGB All In One CPU Cooler - Black
  • 1x Asus GeForce RTX 5080 TUF Gaming OC 16GB GDDR7 PCI-Express Graphics Card
  • 1x Corsair HXi Series HX1200i 80 PLUS Platinum ATX Power Supply
  • 1x Samsung 9100 Pro 2TB M.2 2280 PCIe 5.0 x4 NVMe Solid State Drive
  • 1x Samsung 990 Pro 4TB M.2 2280 PCI-e 4.0 x4 NVMe 1.3c Solid State Drive
  • 1x Samsung 4TB 870 EVO SSD 2.5" SATA 6Gbps 64 Layer 3D V-NAND Solid State Drive (MZ-77E4T0B/EU)
  • 1x Samsung 4TB 870 EVO SSD 2.5" SATA 6Gbps 64 Layer 3D V-NAND Solid State Drive (MZ-77E4T0B/EU)
  • 1x Samsung 4TB 870 EVO SSD 2.5" SATA 6Gbps 64 Layer 3D V-NAND Solid State Drive (MZ-77E4T0B/EU)
  • 1x Kolink Core Pro Braided Cable Extension Kit 12VHWPR Type 2 - Jet Black/Racing Red
  • 1x Build Stock Microsoft Windows 11 Professional - Systems

    Any thoughts gratefully received, it's a daunting amount of money to be spending but this thing will be very important to me and get a lot of use . . .
 
I'd go AMD over Intel. For photo editing an 8 core CPU is fine - your GPU will do the heavy lifting. For memory ddr5 6000 C30 is the sweet spot for AMD.
 
Last edited:
Thanks, that's where I was thinking of heading but the Adobe products are developing very fast and putting a lot more demands on both CPU and GPU, it was with a view to future-proofing that I went this way. But will definitely think about it because maybe I have gone a bit OTT. The other factor is the increasing size of the RAW files of course.

SSDs seem great because they seem to be able to cope remarkably well, in fact hardly seem troubled by it, shifting the data isn't the issue it used to be, it's the processing of it that has become the bottleneck.

Of course this is all a combination of ignorance and a while watching Task Manager so I won't pretend that's anything like gospel!
 
That is interesting definitely, Photoshop and Lightroom must share some commonality but you'd expect Photoshop to be the heavier load for a CPU to carry.

Thanks!
 
AI seems to be adding a lot of work with all the photo editors Do you need to use the AI features or are they just toys?
 
fragilesi said:
Any thoughts gratefully received, it's a daunting amount of money to be spending but this thing will be very important to me and get a lot of use . . .
Click to expand...
Purely from the perspective of value for money, the 285k and 5080 are beaten by the 265K and 5070 Ti, but prebuilds have their own cost thing, so that's not necessarily the case.

The 285K, for example, has the same number of P-Cores (8) and just 1 additional E-Core cluster (16 E-cores from 12 E-Cores in the 265K).

That's a lot of money to spend on SATA drives which are limited by their interface. I'm not opposed to it, if you think you just need the storage, but I do wonder if you're better off looking at a NAS if you need that kind of capacity in your PC?

I'd strongly recommend against using a cable extension for the 12VHPWR/12v2x6, not wise to add additional points of failure.

fragilesi said:
Is the cooling / power sufficient?
Click to expand...
Yes, that's fine.

fragilesi said:
Should I add a little more memory?
Click to expand...
You can buy 96GB kits from OCUK, but I don't think you can from the configurator. If you think you will need that amount in the near future, I'd get it now (adding more sticks is not simple with DDR5, though I'm not aware if Arrow lake handles this better than previous systems).
 
fragilesi said:
I am hoping for any advice on a build from OC for a PC that will be used for:-

- Standard home office use
- Photo editing (large RAW files, large volumes) using primarily Adobe Lightroom but also some Photoshop, my primary objective is to make the actual editing run fast and smooth including the AI features. Not so fussed about how long it takes to export batches etc.
- A little gaming but I'm not big into it and tend to play single player so I don't think this will be an issue with the build I'm suggesting but happy to be told I am wrong.

I do want this thing to last a few years, and don't worry about what will likely seem like excessive SSD storage. I do want it :-)

But does the build overall make sense? I have a lot of experience of using PCs but very low knowledge about what actually makes them tick. From what I see using task manager to look at Lightroom the CPU is definitely key for a lot of things and easily maxes out my current CPU, things like AI DeNoise hit the GPU very hard - they are as follows just for reference:-

Intel Core i7-9700K 3.6GHz (Coffee Lake) Socket LGA1151 Processor - OEM
Palit GeForce RTX 2060 StormX 6144MB GDDR6 PCI-Express Graphics Card

Should I add a little more memory? Is the cooling / power sufficient?

Proposed Build:

OcUK Tech Labs Intel Core Ultra (Arrow Lake) Pro Gaming Configurator
SKU SYS-OCG-00083
  • 1x Lian Li Lancool III RGB Full Tower PC Case - Black
  • 1x Intel Core Ultra 9 285K (Arrow Lake) Socket LGA 1851 Processor - Retail
  • 1x MSI MAG Z890 TOMAHAWK WIFI (LGA 1851) DDR5 ATX Motherboard
  • 1x Corsair Vengeance RGB 64GB (2X32GB) DDR5 PC5-44800C32 6400MHz Dual Channel Kit -
  • 1x Lian Li Galahad II LCD SL-INF AIO 360mm Performance ARGB All In One CPU Cooler - Black
  • 1x Asus GeForce RTX 5080 TUF Gaming OC 16GB GDDR7 PCI-Express Graphics Card
  • 1x Corsair HXi Series HX1200i 80 PLUS Platinum ATX Power Supply
  • 1x Samsung 9100 Pro 2TB M.2 2280 PCIe 5.0 x4 NVMe Solid State Drive
  • 1x Samsung 990 Pro 4TB M.2 2280 PCI-e 4.0 x4 NVMe 1.3c Solid State Drive
  • 1x Samsung 4TB 870 EVO SSD 2.5" SATA 6Gbps 64 Layer 3D V-NAND Solid State Drive (MZ-77E4T0B/EU)
  • 1x Samsung 4TB 870 EVO SSD 2.5" SATA 6Gbps 64 Layer 3D V-NAND Solid State Drive (MZ-77E4T0B/EU)
  • 1x Samsung 4TB 870 EVO SSD 2.5" SATA 6Gbps 64 Layer 3D V-NAND Solid State Drive (MZ-77E4T0B/EU)
  • 1x Kolink Core Pro Braided Cable Extension Kit 12VHWPR Type 2 - Jet Black/Racing Red
  • 1x Build Stock Microsoft Windows 11 Professional - Systems

    Any thoughts gratefully received, it's a daunting amount of money to be spending but this thing will be very important to me and get a lot of use . . .
Click to expand...
Question Do you have a NAS solution/offsite backup solution in place?

I know your question is about the pc to do the processing but I just feel that if the processing of photos is very important to you and will get a lot of use, does this mean you do photography for a living or? Should a backup be as important as the pc?

For my processing pc I'd be looking at a system with as many pcie lanes as possible, use NVME drives...one OS, one progs/storage, one cache drive (for me I use this for focus stacking). I'd then add a portable backup device or quick grab device.

I'd then have a NAS setup and then an offsite NAS setup.

The above is what my next pc and setup will be when funds allow. Currently its a mishmash of things 12700k, 1080 gtx, 64GB ddr4, nvme os, nvme storage drive, 8TB nvme photo storage, nvme cache and finally 8TB hard disk to act as backup. I also have second pc as a NAS.

Biggest upgrade performance wise for me was the NVME drives and RAM to 64GB...the graphics card is feel is letting me down now.

Software I use is lightroom/photoshop, topaz denoise very rarely will I use sharpening and I also use helicon focus stacking.

Denoise takes between 5-9 seconds per image depending on option selected, but my images are from my om1 23mp sensor size.

Matt
 
"1x Samsung 9100 Pro 2TB M.2 2280 PCIe 5.0 x4 NVMe Solid State Drive
1x Samsung 990 Pro 4TB M.2 2280 PCI-e 4.0 x4 NVMe 1.3c Solid State Drive"

What is the reason you chose SSD nr 1 to be Gen 5 and SSD 2 to be Gen 4? I am currently planning to build an editing PC myself, so I am wondering what SSD should be nr 1 and 2. I am thinking that most traffic will be going to and from SSD 2 where all the files are stored. I consider using 1 Kingston KC3000 4.0 2TB, and one Kingston Fury Renegade G5 5.0 2TB.
 
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