Photography rig design: your thoughts?

[inthedistance]

Hi all,

I'm taking the leap to building a new rig, optimized for photography work and graphic design, but also used for internet and word-processing. I also have this fantasy that I will have some free time to play one or two of the latest crop of games with insanely cool graphics, but that's not my focus.

Also, this won't be a rig that I'll be replacing for some time, so it needs to be robust enough to last. Hard drives and RAM may get added, but that will likely be it. I need to keep it all below $2000, all inclusive. I already have external HDD backups.

I shoot with a Nikon D200 so I have lots of large files. My primary software use is Adobe Photoshop CS3 and Lightroom, and also PTGui (large Panoramas) and Photomatix (HDR photography). I occasionally also use other Adobe apps, like InDesign and Illustrator.

So here it is so far:

Case: COOLER MASTER Centurion 5 CAC-T05-UW
Power: ENERMAX Noisetaker II EG495P-VE ATX12V 485W
Motherboard: ASUS P5B-Plus LGA 775 Intel P965 Express ATX
Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 Conroe 2.4GHz
Graphics Card: XFX PVT84GUDF3 GeForce 8600GTS 256MB
Ram (2Gb): Kingston 1GB 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800
HDD (OS/Apps): Western Digital Raptor WD1500ADFD 150GB 10,000 RPM Serial ATA150
HDD (x2; Photo/Work Storage): SAMSUNG SpinPoint T Series HD501LJ 500GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0
Extras: Vantec HDD cooler for the Raptor, basic DVD-R/W, ergo keyboard.

Total: $1327 (as of today, from the Egg)

Still deciding: >20" monitor (maximum $500).

What are your thoughts? Is there anything you'd change, and if so, why? Am I missing anything?

Thanks for taking the time to read and share your thoughts.

m

Edited to add that I might play with overclocking (never done it before), but I'm comfortable using it as-is.

 

[Jjoshua2]

Are you using Vista or XP. If you are doing photo editing work on vista you should have more than 2gb of memory probably. That looks like a pretty nice setup. Are you willing to try overclocking or want stock performance?

 

[tungtung]

Make sure you get extra drive for "quick" backup of your data drive (or you can always do RAID 1 off them) ... that's all I can say, the rest looked ok.

 

[inthedistance]

Vista looks sexier, but I don't care enough about its features to use it so I expect to be using XP for some time.

I'm still debating whether to use the 2 500GB drives in RAID1 or not, but they are intended to duplicate each other, not offer 1TB of usable space.

 

[Jjoshua2]

Are you Overclocking?

 

[inthedistance]

I might, I'm not sure yet. I've not done it before, and with these specs I'd be plenty happy. I'm not interested in pushing framerate metrics on FPS games. But if I could up the specs a bit without any cooling or stability worries, I'd consider trying it.

 

[cparker]

Why don't you go to a photography enthusiast site such as photo.net and find out what some of the pros there are using/recommending? It's really related to the application software that you're going to use, and they probably would be able to offer good advice as to the amount of ram you really could use (might be more than you think!) as well as a good backup strategy (possibly external drives of large capacity).

 

[tungtung]

Originally posted by: inthedistance
Vista looks sexier, but I don't care enough about its features to use it so I expect to be using XP for some time.

I'm still debating whether to use the 2 500GB drives in RAID1 or not, but they are intended to duplicate each other, not offer 1TB of usable space.

If you don't want to take the performance hit, just do a scheduled offline backup every night or something like that. That way you will still have the backup and not losing performance when you need it.

 

[bobbyz]

Even when using XP, you should put 4GB. Of course not all of it will be used but you doing large pano so anything above 2GB should help by not going to scratch disk.

Also how fast these raptors compared to regular SATA II drives? Wouldn't be better to put separate drives for OS and PS scratch disk? For DATA drives, I would 2 500GB without any RAID.

For my cheap PS system that I am putting together, I am using:

E4300 with DS3 rev 3.3
4GB DDR2-667 RAM
Seagate 80GB SATA II for OS/apps
Seagate 80GB SATA II for PS scratch - Also have a partition for C1LE preview cache
Waiting for nice deal on 2 Seagate 500GB SATA II for data storage
Cheap 256MB PCIe video card as I don't do games

 

[inthedistance]

Originally posted by: cparker
Why don't you go to a photography enthusiast site such as photo.net and find out what some of the pros there are using/recommending?

Ha

I've been reading photo.net since 1996 and this was still my first stop for design/build advice.

About the PS scratch space, I'm thinking about another small SATAII drive to hold my Lightroom database, scratch files and PVR recordings if I throw a card in there. It's still do-able for under my 2k budget, too.

And thanks for the comments about the offline backup. I don't have RAID experience and if anything failed, I'd rather have a simple backup system in place for rapid recovery.

 

[GuitarDaddy]

Looks good!

I agree with others the 4gb ram would be better for your uses, with XP you will only see 3.25gb but that will still help and you will be ready should you ever want to go vista x64 and get even more ram

I would get 2 of these
2gb ddr667 sticks $72.75
They overclock to DDR800 with cas4 timings

And on the CPU I would drop it to an E4300 for $115 bucks and overclock it, then when the Intel price drops happens in july I would drop a Q6600 in for $266