Please critique the following PC build. I intend that it should last quite a while. I am currently using LR Perpetual.

[CrabbyGuy]

Gigabyte Z390 Aorus Ultra Motherboard. (Holds two SSD sticks plus one Optane stick.)
Intel i7 9700K--will be overclocked a bit depending in part on what reviews say when they are released. (CPU is on order from B&H. Everything else is here.)
Corsair 115i (280mm water cooling closed loop)
32 GB 3600 G.Skill DDR4
EVGA 1060 GPU
Samsung SSD 970 EVO NVMe M.e 500 GB (for OS and programs)
Samsung SSD 840 500 GB (for photos being worked on)
WD Black HDD cached with 16 GB Optane (for other photos)
750W Corsair PSU
External drive(s) for backup
Win. 10 Pro
LR 6.14

I am confused by Intel's decision to stop making most multi-threaded processors. I have had good LR performance from 4 cores, 8 threads so I bought a 9th gen. proc. with 8 cores, 8 threads. ???

 

[Jimmsp]

I built something similar , but with a 8th Gen i7.
But I use my SSD's a bit differently. The C drive has the OS & software programs, but also has a photo folder I call "Work in Progress"
The next SSD has my Lightroom catalogs and I assign the other space to Photoshop as a scratch drive.
The spinner then has a couple of upper level photo folders called Active, History, and Archive.
I move the photos from Work In Progress to Active after I cull and do the initial and hopefully final post processing.

I am very happy with the speed of Lightroom and Photoshop with this setup.

 

[Replytoken]

Unless you are pushing LR to its extremes, there is no reason to believe that your selections should not serve you well for some time. You are buying the newest generation of hardware and are buying near the top of the line in performance, so unless you have an unlimited budget, or really just want to tweak that last ounce of performance out of your system, I would just roll with what you purchased, especially since you already have it. Remember, expectations are also a factor in satisfaction with performance.

Good luck,

--Ken

 

[Linwood Ferguson]

I think that all looks good. Overclocking will help though I opted not to as I value reliability even higher, but minor overclocking is probably still reliable. I did buy faster memory and overclocked it a bit (CPU overclocking seems to almost proportionally help performance for things like preview builds, memory not nearly as big of an impact).

I went with all SSD's and a fanless power supply (silverstone). Depending on the amount of HDD you planned, all SSD will add some cost but maybe not as much as you think. I didn't realize how much I liked the silent nature of the result until I dragged out my old computer for testing something on linux, and realized how annoying all that fan noise was (that I used to not really think about). Silence is nice. You don't need high end SSD's (just reliable ones), and for image storage they make very little performance difference, I just like not having the noise when I work. Plus they use a lot less power. Personally not an optane fan.

Be sure you can add more memory if needed. 32 is likely plenty, but who knows, you might start doing HDR's or panos with photoshop and need more.

 

[CrabbyGuy]

Jimmsp, Replytoken, and Ferguson, thanks very much for your comments.

The machine I am replacing has an i5 Haswell (4th gen.) proc., 16GB of DDR3 memory, and a marginal PSU. For me, it's time to sell off its components while they still have some value, trash the case, and rebuild while I still remember how this stuff goes together! (I recently turned 72.)

I have a question regarding overclocking the i7-9700k that remains on order at B&H. Non-overclocked processor speed now appears to depend inversely on how many cores are being used: the fewer the cores, the higher the speed by about 0.1 GHz per core. True? What does that do to the overclocking procedure if anything? Does Vcore stay the same as the number of cores used changes? Also, if just one core is used for some time, is there any concern about overheating on an overclocked chip?

Ferguson, I got a used Optane 16GB stick for $15 on eBay and I will see what it does to my WD Black HDD's speed--an experiment for me. My new motherboard has a slot for it, anyway. The reviews say that the performance of Optane SSD's does not seem as good as "normal" SSDs for LR work, IMO.

 

[Linwood Ferguson]

@CrabbyGuy, I can't answer the overclocking issue. I figured a bit out to experiment, but I just never was that interested in tinkering.

The Optane in principle can provide a significant increase in bursty write speed. I doubt you will see a lot of increase in read speeds if you have a relatively large disk. Maybe.

I just personally never trust consumer grade write-back caching solutions. There are just so many things that can go wrong, leaving a dirty cache that may never get flushed. Optane is at least non-volatile, so it's a bit improvement over RAM caches.

I'm a big fan of raid, not for backup but for reliability. And these type of caches do not work nicely with (software) raid, another reason I never had much interest.

But at $15 it's hard to go wrong with a test. Just remember, if it fails, your data is toast. Of course that's true of the hard drive as well, now it's toast if either one fails.

 

[CrabbyGuy]

With a big backup drive, I am not nervous about losing data from a failed Optane drive. Your point about the incremental chance of failure with an additional device is well taken, however.

 

[Linwood Ferguson]

With a big backup drive, I am not nervous about losing data from a failed Optane drive. Your point about the incremental chance of failure with an additional device is well taken, however.

Just make sure your backups are versioned. Remember -- a failure is not necessarily one that stops activity, it could also be one that corrupts data silently and you only find out hours, days or weeks later. Or in one case for me (my only data corruption case, but bad enough) years later. You need to be able to restore the version of something from X days ago, not just the last backup (which might also be corrupt).