[Digitalis]

over locking the CPU a little

You mean over clocking? This is only used by performance enthusiasts and at the consumer level at best with an unlocked CPU you will only get a 14% speed improvement* over stock clock speeds with an exceptionally good air cooling solution. The risk of system instability and hardware damage - let us not forget the possibility of reducing your CPU to elemental carbon is too great for such a small gain.

* and that is with some generous rounding. Not all motherboards support overclocking and HP PCs are built on the conservative side.

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Last edited by Digitalis; 11-09-2019 at 05:38 PM.

[fsge]

Hi all, well I’ve gone and bought a computer!

I bought a used HP Z420. It’s the Intel Zeon 1620v2 chip running at 3.7 GHz. It has 32gb ram and 256gb ssd for boot and I use it for my initial photo import storage, then transfer after to the 1TB HHD. It also has a NVIDIA graphics card. The condition is perfect and I bought it for...£210.00 🙌🏻

I already had a large screen so I had to buy a mouse and keyboard. I fitted a WiFi card and I’m good to go.

I’ve been using RAW Therapee to edit which is fine for what I need and is free!

The RAW files are coming in at 70MB and the computer is doing it no problem. There is some loading time for the image but nothing terrible (a few seconds). I may upgrade to more RAM at some point or look at over locking the CPU a little...

Thanks for all the advice and for sharing your stories. I have decided to have SD1 in the 645z to be RAW and SD2 to be JPG. So for my workflow I will run with the jpeg initially then defer to raw once I have narrowed down the selection.

I have my first portrait shoot with the camera this weekend so very excited.

Congratulations for your purchase, we look forward to browsing your 645z outputs!

[TPR]

[kaseki]

You mean over clocking? This is only used by performance enthusiasts and at the consumer level at best with an unlocked CPU you will only get a 14% speed improvement* over stock clock speeds with an exceptionally good air cooling solution. The risk of system instability and hardware damage - let us not forget the possibility of reducing your CPU to elemental carbon is too great for such a small gain.

* and that is with some generous rounding. Not all motherboards support overclocking and HP PCs are built on the conservative side.

The AMD Ryzen 1800X CPU in my HT PC is about 50% overclocked running on air, and has been stable since I had to move on from tweaking it around August 2017. This capability was the result of many tuners working with the same CPU and MB and playing with the multidimensional variate of the BIOS parameters. Others went farther. I would rather suggest a more practical limitation -- that overclocking requires a considerable time investment, both physically experimenting with the PC and keeping up with the OC literature for a given CPU/MB/RAM combination. The elemental silicon risk requires serious attention to temperatures. The required time for tuning likely precludes having the time needed for deep delving into photography, for example.

[TDvN57]

If you have thermal throttling on it is unlikely your CPU will remain clocked past 4GHz on all cores for long, The setting is hidden deep within windows but with throttling on the CPU often drops to 3GHz and slower as power consumption rises and the resulting thermal energy builds up. The option can be turned off [do so your own risk FYI]. As you stated, air cooling is very noisy - particularly on laptops as they are used closer to your ears and often have cooling solutions that are heavily restricted by space and available airflow. Water cooling can help get past that but you will have to get a desktop system for that*. This isn't the best solution for everyone, but it isn't difficult to find a water cooling solution design that is efficient enough keep all cores above 4GHz without the CPU literally frying itself. Though if the water pump fails in the water cooling loop, you can have you can end up having your own personal Chernobyl.

* Water cooled laptops do exist, but cost an extortionate amount of money.

---------- Post added 2019-10-30 at 07:42 AM ----------



RAID 0 is perhaps the unsafest mode of RAID for storing important data - the point of data striped Raid 0 is "high capacity, high speed, no redundancy" if one disk in the array fails the whole 13 Tb dataset is completely lost.

The safest raid levels are ones that can sustain one, or better yet, two drive failures with the entire disk arrays data intact. Though this redundancy does come at the cost of speed of the array*, new hardware can use smart tiered SSD caching particularly with fast M.2 SSDs. With 10G networking becoming more accessible the download/upload speed penalties are becoming less and thus the dependability of external storage is increasing to the point where there is little excuse for recklessness.

* Nested RAID levels can pretty much eliminate this.

The HP zbook seems to have no problem with the factory set overclocking for long periods above 4GHZ. I attach a screen capture of the task manager's performance monitoring. It runs like that for hours while I'm editing and printing. My only bottle neck now is the available RAM which on this machine should be much more than 16 GB. When the money fairy stops next time the RAM will be upgraded, but for now it is what it is.

[Digitalis]

The HP zbook seems to have no problem with the factory set overclocking for long periods above 4GHZ

Factory set overclocking pushes the envelope of the chip design, but not by much. I'm talking about what you can achieve with a clock unlocked CPU with overvolting & changing frequency multipliers - you need hardware that is built for it and appropriate cooling. If you want, you can push an Intel i7-8700K @ 5Ghz with reasonable stability.

[ghosteclipse]

I have a Ryzen too but it is barely utilized because I only have an HDD. My guess is you will need first an SSD then lots of memory before you bottleneck your CPU. If you have a great CPU after then you are all set. The GPU seems to never bottleneck anyways but I am assuming you are using at least a dedicated entry level and not an integrated.

[kaseki]

I have a Ryzen too but it is barely utilized because I only have an HDD. My guess is you will need first an SSD then lots of memory before you bottleneck your CPU. If you have a great CPU after then you are all set. The GPU seems to never bottleneck anyways but I am assuming you are using at least a dedicated entry level and not an integrated.

Where a multi-threaded CPU like the Ryzen can be helpful is speeding up post processing if the PP software is multi-threaded and a complex manipulation of an image or set of images is to be performed.

[ghosteclipse]

Indeed as a former AMD R&D engineer myself I know that software needs to be designed to use this kind of hardware. As far as the photo programs I have used they do not seem to.

[kaseki]

Indeed as a former AMD R&D engineer myself I know that software needs to be designed to use this kind of hardware. As far as the photo programs I have used they do not seem to.

I thought I read somewhere that Darktable had been multi-threaded; although it could have been Raw Therapee that was mentioned.

[rdenney]

Adding to this stale thread:

I needed to move from Win7 to Win10 so I could install the latest DxO Photolab (v. 3 requires Win10). I didn’t want to migrate my old computer—I needed a backup plan and I wanted something with a little more power. But I also wasn’t interested in spending a grand or two.

So, I bought an old workstation-class computer, maybe 7 years old, with Win10 Pro installed, for a coupla hundred bucks. It was originally equipped with a 256G SSD (now the primary OS drive), and uses a Xeon processor and error-correcting RAM. Big, enterprise-grade power supply, fast SATA3 ports, several PCI-e 16-lane slots, 5 USB3 ports, 5 USB2 ports, a native FireWire port (needed by my Nikon film scanner), GigE Ethernet—a reasonably powerful machine even by today’s standards. I filled it up with RAM (64G), and added an 8TB HDD (Hitachi or HGST—good rep for reliability a year or so back when I bought it) that I had bought but never installed in the old machine. I used my newer video card from the old machine, which is perfect for photo work (but not fast enough for gaming, which I don’t do).

I installed the software on the SSD, but remapped the Documents library to the 8TB drive.

The biggest challenge was persuading Win10 to consistently see my NAS, both from user apps and from my backup software (Macrium Reflect). I finally got that solved, though Win10 Pro is excessively difficult to integrate in a peer-peer network.

I also own a cradle for temporarily attaching SATA HDDs to a USB3 port, and used that to move all my old files.

And I was able to leverage all my product keys and subscriptions into a full suite of software for Office 365, Adobe (Acrobat and the photo package), DxO, CAD, Corel, Macrium, and a bunch of others.

I doubt I have more than $500 in it. $230 for the computer (shipped), $175 for the RAM (harder to find DDR3 ECC sticks), $100 for the hard disk. Everything else I had from the old computer.

I’ll probably recycle the old board into my storage server—the new versions of Unraid need a 64-bit processor. That’s a big project for much later.

Rick “Photolab processes RAW files in half the time as previously, but still not as fast as current 2-3 kilobuck machines” Denney

[SFTphotography]

I used to have a MacPro Xeon tower - 4 core, 1gb GBU 1tb drive and edited on Aperture then C1pro. For start C1pro wouldn't render 645z files so I tried Aperture and it does but it's so horrifically slow I've built a mega bucks PC.

Likely new editing suits with be on1 RAW or DxO photolab 4 or even Silkypix (not LR - never got on with it and the subscription model is hideous as well as it's inability to support GPU acceleration or multi core processers).

1. I prefer not to have DAM but organise my folders myself - the sidecar approach works better.
2. DxO and on1 RAW will use GPU power and all the cores on the system. Later editions of DXO will use full GPU and multi core ability like C1 and on1 RAW
3. I had planned on c1 pro as it really can utilise very powerful systems to the best.

2x AMD epyc 7282's - giving me 32 cores and 64 threads.
1x 1tb m2 SSD - for OS and current work
1x2 SATA SSD for past work I still use
external drives for back up and Amazon drive also

GPU - Quadro RTX400
RAM - 128gb -this really is enough

The SSD isn't any better than a good hard drive if it's attached to the SATA bus; if your system allows for a PCIe bus connected SSD, that would be a great thing to have. But that really is just a "nice to have".


The thing that's going to be the biggest bottleneck is your video card. Good video cards now occupy two or three slots in your PCI bus, have their own cooling systems (two or more fans, at least, and some have elaborate water-cooling), and have so much computing power onboard that there are people making supercomputers out of them (saw it on NHK Japan). I've got a EVGA GeForce 8400 GS videocard in one machine running on an Intel Core i5-2400 CPU @ 3.10GHz, and a AMD Radeon RX570 in another running on a much faster I7. Both on Win-7. The slower one is mainly used for going through JPEG's and light editing using Affinity Photo as well as the camera mfgr's bundled raw development packages. (I write to both cards, raw to one JPEG in largest and least-compressed format, on the other, in cameras that support two). That's mainly so I can delete stuff and weed out the crappy shots right quick. The other machine is used for raw editing and file storage.


Here's the kicker - I use the faster machine for editing raw files coming out of my 50mpx Canon 5ds-r, and it's pretty darned fast, not greased lightening, but more than satisfactory despite the huge files. The other machine can do it, but you have to be patient with it.