Ideal image processing desktop?

[gregbradley]

MY i7 laptop with iTB hard disk and 8gb RAM struggles with CCDstack..
I can't open more than about 10 Proline 16803 images at a time (32mb each) and some processing steps take quite a long time.

I was reading about building a powerful image processing computer and it had some suggestions like 3 or 4 small SSD drives and a large HD. Spend a large % on the monitor and calibrator.

i7 6700 skylake CPU with 32gb RAM and 3 x 240gb SSD drives and 1x 4TB high speed SD drive sounds good.

I am not sure how important the graphics card is. I think its more important for gamers which I am not. But is a decent graphics card important for Photoshop image processing?

How important is extra cooling and a bigger power supply?
I know one laptop I had used to overheat once the fan got too much lint in it. When hot it would slow down considerably.

Any recommended suppliers?

Greg.

[multiweb]

I bought a I7 with 24GB or RAM 6 years ago. I can open about 100 files (32MB each) in CCD Stack and work with them quite comfortably. I had do get a liquid cooler for the CPU though early in the piece as it was overheating under heavy load when encoding videos with AE. So I got a corsair unit with a small radiator. Still does the job today. ASUS motherboard. NVIDIA graphic card, quite old GPU now. An old GeForce of sort. Unless you do gaming and you need highres realtime rendering, you won't need a fast card. RAM is more important to manipulate large files. Why do you need so many drives? SSD for the primary boot makes sense as it's faster, then SATA standard drives for storage, 2TB are quite cheap now. I wouldn't even contemplate a RAID for a personal PC, it' s a pita to maintain and resync in case of failure. I had a RAID5 on three drives for a while then ditched it.

[cfranks]

For your Swap space I would add more RAM and use it for RAMDisk. Much faster and cheaper than additional SSD's.

Charles

[gregbradley]

The extra drives was from an article I read on the net about several SSDs for using Photoshop.

One was for bootup as you say, 1 was for scratch files and one was for something similar so Windows and Photoshop did not fight each other for RAM.

Some configurations now can have 64gb of RAM. I am not sure about speeds of different types of RAMs though.

Greg.

[multiweb]

If you have enough RAM PS won't have to rely on a scratch disk as much. 64GB is massive. I never maxed out 24GB tbh. Kingston is pretty standard for RAM chips nowadays.

[rustigsmed]

a relatively newish i7 or Xeon and 32gb ram will have you flying.

I find my even my i5 4690k @ 4.6ghz and 16gb ram, to be more than satisfactory.

it is true that some photo editing programs may use graphics cards in the future eg from pixinsight website:

GPU Acceleration

As of writing this document (October 2015), the current versions 1.8.x of PixInsight don't make direct use of Graphics Processing Units (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_processing_unit) (GPUs). Hopefully this is going to change during 2016. We are working to implement GPU acceleration via CUDA (http://www.nvidia.com/object/cuda_home_new.html) programming on systems with NVIDIA graphics cards.

so it is perhaps maybe worth thinking about a little bit - or atleast making sure your power supply unit will be able to handle a GPU if you plan on adding one later.

[ZeroID]

Forget using a laptop for serious processing, RAM'd to the max or not. It will always struggle because the mechanical restrictions of packing power into a small space will throttle it down.
Use a desktop with gaming specs and good cooling.
I have an i7 media server, Lenovo m92 package which is just basically a laptop in a tin box, small and discrete for the lounge. Does a wonderful job but my i7 desktop in the office, same specs basically but more memory is quite comfortable processing big avi's or large RAW files.

I support a mix of about 800 laptops and desktops at work. The desktops always win out for speed even if they are older specs.

[Bart]

I use an AMD 8 core, 16 Gb Ram, twin Nvidia gaming cards, twin monitors, and like Marc I use a water cooling system with a radiator and fans and I can open a lot of files and work on them with ease.

Try doing a clean up on your PC and ditch anything that is not needed, check what you have in your system hogging your ram(terminate but stay resident programs), and add more ram to get it humming. Be aware that some Windows systems will only support 16 Gb of ram, so it is important to get the right system and mother board to support the ram you want.

HTH! :thumbsup:

[sil]

I used to build custom PCs for the 3D gfx industry (competing against SGI) a gaming graphic card is a must as an increasing number of programs make use of GPUs but rarely if ever onboard graphics chips. nvidia or radeon though? have competing GPU options and nvidia seems to be more suited but personally I've never found their drivers to be as stable as radeons. Still in practice with my astrophotography it means nothing, i dont care if the software I use uses my gfx cards or not its the processing and results that important, my computer is permanently on so no big deal to leave it processing overnight or while at work.

I've used high spec laptops with as good or better specs than my desktop at the time and none could compete in practice with the actual work of the desktop, regardless what benchmarks say.

I've always used multiple hard drives to improve performance too as described already. One for operating sytem and programs and a second for data at least. Isolating the OS onto a dedicated physical drive is important as windows is always doing stuff needing drive access plus all the malware you are likely to have too. Likewise a dedicated drive for the pagefile and temp scratch space used by Windows and programs keeps all that traffic away from anything important. Both these drives can be smallish and speed is important here. a drive for temp page files can be regularly full formatted to keep it clean and ensure its not developing corrupt blocks. Programs and data could be partitions on a large drive. This way if windows crashes or get virus infected, and i can be 99% certain it will, your best course of action if to reformat and reinstall windows. Then data is kept intact, some programs might still run without reistallation but at least they and maybe their configs are safe so getting back up and running is quicker.

Be aware astrophotography uses a LOT of hard drive space and even more for the intermediate step files (not unusual to have over 500GB of files to delete after processing ONE image) and that is a huge amount of I/O operations on the drive. So be prepared to lose everything on the drive you process with, dont store anything you dont want to lose on the same drive.

For storage get yourself a NAS unit with slots for drives so you can expand its capacity later, start with just one large drive in it.

CPU you want high GHz (raw grunt basically), quad or oct core , lots of RAM plan on filling the motherboard and use quality brand ram if you skimp to save money with "equivalent" components you are wasting money. A good monitor too and colour calibration device like a Spyder is a must. I can recommend the Dell Ultrasharp range of monitors, I use a 24" at home and our office uses the 27" ones. Fantastic colour accuracy out of the box and edge to edge/corner to corner brightness and colour consistency from angle viewing angle.

BTW with all the above recommendations you also end up with a kickass gaming machine. It will be costly too but rock solid and dependable. Overclocking? Don't bother, if you're that impatient and want to risk a fire you'll do it anyway and nobody in astronomy cares how fast you can push your CPU. My machine is 5yrs old since its last upgrade and still rock solid and gaming it doesnt break a sweat. I do run out of ram and push all 8 cores to the max regularly, data processing has killed a few 2TB drives but I havent lost anything and don't feel any need to consider an upgrade in the foreseeable future. It could be improved with SSD drives but I don't feel they are proven yet for long term reliability.

If you want a purpose built machine then stick to using it for that purpose and nothing else. The more you install the slower the operating system becomes and uninstalling never removes everything so you wont get back lost performance.

Cooling, can be good if you live somewhere with winter and summer extremes but water cooling not really needed. Just remember hot air rises and dont place drives or cards up against case walls or other hot components, keep as much airflow space around things as possible, tie back cables so they dont block airflow.

Power supply, 1000W should be fine and you can get them with cable sockets so you just plug in the actual power cables you need (they come with a kit of them) instead of having a huge ugly bunch of cabling in your computer blocking airflow.

Laptops can be useful, particularly for capture (good usb3 and SSD drive helps here) and maybe for sorting stuff in front of tv but not really for processing, they generate a lot of heat and that also shortens their lives when running them flat out. a good desktop is the correct tool for the job.

[gregbradley]

Fantastically helpful post. Thank you for sharing your expertise here. Most appreciated.:thumbsup:



Thanks very much Marc. Kingston is type of RAM? I normally see DDR4 mentioned but then some say 32gb but don't mention DDR4. So what should I look for there?





Thanks. This is what I suspected.



Thanks for that. My current laptop is a 1.5 year old HP. Its pathetically designed to fall apart quickly so you buy another. The letter A rubbed off the keyboard within 6 months. The left hand side USB ports all failed, the sound card has recently failed and you can't install extra RAM as there is no removable cover like they used to have on HP laptops.

The screen is very blue biased even with callibration throwing off colour balance and basically costing me an honourable mention at the Malins on one of my images (pretty much said so by David).

Last HP laptop I am buying.

I have a Dell Ultrasharp and its fine but not as good as cheap Samsung LCD monitor I got recently for $250. Now that's quite good. The Dell won't work off a HDMI cable only a DVI cable and I wasted money on several cables before I figured out what it would accept despite having all sorts of ports in.
So not impressed there. Also resolution seems quite a bit less than the cheaper Samsung despite reviews saying it was super sharp. Not in my experience.

Greg.

[sil]

Why do you want to use HDMI instead of DVI? You did read the manual right, Dell has its own port that looks like HDMI but isn't. You need to use the native resolution of the screen to get it at its sharpest, not just the highest resolution of your gaming card which is the wrong way to use the hardware. I have never seen a single "bad" dell ultrasharp monitor ever, we have several dozen in the office in daily use.

Kingston is a reputable RAM brand (not the best but not the worst either), 32GB is a size, DDR4 is a type of RAM and your motherboard needs to support that to make use of the performance.

[rustigsmed]

Hi Greg,

I've put together a basic list which you may find useful starting point:

http://au.pcpartpicker.com/list/8ysZf8

you would just need to add about $450ish for the graphics card (the prices aren't listed yet on this website but I've seen that model for $429).

of course you can choose more/bigger storage etc if you feel like it.

the psu is of high quality and realistically you could get the lower 650watt if you felt the urge.

After thinking about this thread, I actually went out on the w'end and doubled my Ram to 32gb and grabbed an extra 2tb storage. :lol:

[multiweb]

Kingston is a reputable brand. When I bought my machine DDR3 was common. When you buy your system buy the RAM with the motherboard and max it out. Don't update later. Also get the CPU, Graphic card altogether as to minimise hardware conflicts down the road. Don't get too creative with RAM or vital components. Leave that to the shop to advise. They build enough machines to know what works and what doesn't. Don't be afraid to ask the hard questions and buy quality base components.

What matters: (where you should spend your money)

MB
RAM
Power Supply
Box
Fans and Cooling system
Onboard HD controller

What is not critical:

HDs (Easy to change)
Graphic Card (Easy to change)
Monitor, Mouse, etc... all peripherals.

[HarryD]

Interesting to read peoples thoughts re computers for image processing.

I have a newish i7-6700 3.4 Gh, with 16Gb of ram, a good power supply and of course a couple of SSD drives. Seems more than enough for me.
I don't have to wait for Pixinsight or Photoshop.

The comment was made that video cards and monitors are not critical. I don't agree.

Given that image processing is what we are most concerned with it, it is illogical not to have at least one high quality monitor that can be calibrated.
Calibration with a spider type device is essential.

I have 2 monitors, A 27 inch Eizo and a 19 inch Eizo. The 27 for the image and the 19 for tools etc and a reasonable, not top gamers, video card.

My printer, Epson photo, can print up to A3+. I can see the image at printed size on the 27 and calibrated to look on screen as close as I can get from the print. I think being able to achieve this is most important.

Just my thoughts

Greg