Advice on new PC system for Photoshop Lightroom and 4K display?

[disneytoy]

Greetings!

 My current system is about 4 years old. I primarilly work with large PS files 2+ gigs, lots of 30-50mp images in Lightroom.

I'm not looking for the highest cost/specs, kind of best bang for my buck. I'll build my own in the next 6 months.

And I want to be able to run a 4K monitor. and maybe a second 1080p(but not essential)

Any suggestions on CPU, Motherboard, video card?

I will probably use a SSD array for my start up. I have a ton of external USB 3.0 drives.

I don't do any gaming so many of the higher end video cards may be a waste. I may dable in vide but not much. No 3D rendering.

I'd max out the RAM hopefully 32gb. I currently run 16gb.

And I'm running Win 7 x64, but Windows 10 looks promising.

Probably not an issue, I do a lot of printing to Epson r1900, r2400, 9890.

I'm kind of excited setting up a new system.

If you have any recommendations on upcoming CPUs Video Cards etc I'm not in a rush but would like to build this in the next 6 month.

Thanks for your advice.

PS Interestingly, I know PS uses the GPU so the video card does a lot of the work. In the Lightroom forum, some say LR doesn't use the GPU at all? Weird.

Maxi

[garyhill]

Check out the following link.

http://www.imagescience.com.au/kb/questions/141/Build+a+powerful+PC+for+Photoshop+and+other+imaging+applications

They also had a blog post recently about 4K monitors.

http://www.imagescience.com.au/blog/2014-11-07/some-thoughts-on-4k-monitors-and-hooking-them-up/

Cheers,

Gary

[D Fosse]

They also had a blog post recently about 4K monitors.

Interesting quote there about 4K displays, which confirms what I've said all along:

"Thus our conclusion is it remains vastly more important to get a model that is highly colour accurate than one which has very high resolution, and this should always be the primary consideration for image makers".

So my CG246 and CX240 will do for quite a while yet...However, for text and vector I can see the benefits of higher resolution. If that's a large part of your work 4K might be worthwhile.

Incidentally, I have one newish i7 / 32 GB system, and another four year old i5 / 16 GB system. They're both SSD-based. Although I work with rather big D800 files, I have to say I don't notice much difference between them performance-wise, in normal everyday work. They both seem snappy and fully up to the task.

As for video card, the main thing is to get one that works and is bug-free, and that's something you never know in advance. Photoshop's OpenGL functionality is particularly vulnerable. It depends a lot on driver version. When you get a stable driver version, stick to it - an update may easily throw everything overboard again.

[kers]

I am on a mac, but if i would choose a system i would like to have a new 8 core i7 processor in it.
( not available for mac)
Not as expensive as the 8 core Xeons and faster...

[Torbjörn Tapani]

When I put together my system a couple of years ago there was little benefit to more than 4 cores for LR/PS. So I stayed away from the more expensive (mobo, cpu, memory) 6+ core systems and went for one of the fastest consumer i7 CPUs. I still feel that is valid today. This limits me to 32 Gb RAM (using 16 now), so that would be my only concern. If you need massive amounts of RAM then yes, go for the workstation mobo/cpu.

[disneytoy]

New considerations:

Faster SATA II on the motherboard.

More USB 3 ports, my current system only has 2.

I've had issues with 16gb RAM in PS. So maybe up to 32gb ram

A video card that can handle 4k.

a) HDMI 2.0 so I can run 4k @60hz (I think the GTX 970 does?)
b) Support 10 bit color - PS can run 10 bit mode, LR not at least for now.

A 4K LCD 55"-60" must support (HDMI 2, HEVC) Displayport 1.2 (probably not available)

[george2787]

I feel it's not a very good time to buy a computer if you're planning on running a 4k display and I would wait a year or so to get the second generation of GPUs that handle that resolution.

Other than that everything is SATA 3 now and usb 3 is standard and 32GB max has been around 4-5 years so none of that should be a problem, be sure to get a solid motherboard and a great PSU and you're good to go.

[disneytoy]

It may be early on 4k, but the displays are getting very reasonable. Nvidia has cards capable. Apple has a 5k imac. And their OS doesn't even support 10 bit?

It would be very nice to display an image near its native, captured resolution.