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Archive 2016 · PC build questions follow up (arrived)

  
 
CanadaMark
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p.5 #1 · p.5 #1 · PC build questions follow up (arrived)


15Bit wrote:
I don't think it's entirely fair to say there has been little progress, it's just that the progress have more been in terms of power usage than raw performance. In some ways i quite appreciate that, as i no longer need to upgrade my PC every 12-18 months like i did in the old Pentium days. And my laptop battery now lasts 6 hours instead of 90 mins...

I am also thinking about upgrading my Ivy Bridge to a Skylake X or Kaby Lake X later this year. It's not certain though, as my current Ivy Bridge is working great.


I would skip Kaby X because it's going to be limited to 4 cores (unless you want that of course). But yes, the improvements have benefited laptop/mobile users the most (lower power and better integrated graphics). I was specifically thinking about performance though I didn't really make that clear. I am hoping the price of the 8-10 core chips drops due to Ryzen, but I'm not holding my breath.





Jan 05, 2017 at 03:22 PM
15Bit
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p.5 #2 · p.5 #2 · PC build questions follow up (arrived)


I'm waiting to see how they implement Kaby X. It might be a really high clockspeed quad, in which case it becomes interesting. I'm probably also looking at a Skylake X though.

Don't expect Ryzen to make any difference to Intel pricing. Even in the glory days of Athlon, Intel still charged premium prices for P4's. If you really want 8-10 cores, check ebay for Sandy / Ivy era Xeons from decommissioned datacentres and throw them in an older S-2011 board. It'll only be 20-25% slower than a current gen CPU and will cost a fraction of the price.



Jan 05, 2017 at 03:30 PM
CanadaMark
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p.5 #3 · p.5 #3 · PC build questions follow up (arrived)


15Bit wrote:
Ben,

It is really not necessary to change what you specified in your last iteration. That computer spec is really excellent. Don't get caught up in this four channel memory business - the vast majority of desktop PC users have dual channel systems, Apple make all their iMac's with dual channel hardware, my PC is dual channel RAM, as is Mark's until he upgrades to a new one later this year. It really is a non-issue. And think about it this way - if you need 64GB RAM, then 64GB of slower RAM is a hell of a lot faster
...Show more

In the same breath I would add that if he isn't going to max out his 64GB of RAM, he's probably better off with a pair of 16GB sticks in dual channel configuration, and it will save him money to boot. I barely use the 16GB I have currently working with dozens of 36MP RAW files, so it might be worthwhile for Ben to pay attention to how much RAM he is using currently and make a decision based on that. It's always a relatively cheap upgrade down the road if he needs more.

Apple makes their macs dual channel because it's the fastest possible configuration with the processors they typically offer, not because they feel the differences between dual and quad channel RAM aren't worthwhile. The reason the vast majority of PC users have dual channel is because the only platforms that support quad channel ram are more expensive and less popular especially in the gaming community. Most PC users aren't heavy users either, so they would never notice, but when you get into heavy editing with enormous files, that's where you can see real improvements with a collection of more subtle upgrades. Even shaving off 5-10% of processing time equates to hours upon hours of saved time over the course of a year or whatever. Most people don't have Ferrari's, but they aren't somehow worse than a Toyota Camry simply because they are less common. The analogy that something is definitely not worthwhile simply because most people don't have them I think is very inaccurate, especially when we're already talking about a fairly non-standard build.

I wouldn't even be suggesting it if the cost increase was significant, but it's extremely small, and if this computer is to be kept for the next 10+ years I would be grabbing every advantage I could, if for no other reason than it might become much more valuable sometime down the road.

He won't be unhappy with the computer he has spec'd out so far, but as I'm sure you can tell by now I am very much of the opinion that optimizing where possible for minimal cost increases on a machine intended for many, many, years of service is my approach.



Jan 05, 2017 at 03:48 PM
CanadaMark
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p.5 #4 · p.5 #4 · PC build questions follow up (arrived)


15Bit wrote:
I'm waiting to see how they implement Kaby X. It might be a really high clockspeed quad, in which case it becomes interesting. I'm probably also looking at a Skylake X though.

Don't expect Ryzen to make any difference to Intel pricing. Even in the glory days of Athlon, Intel still charged premium prices for P4's. If you really want 8-10 cores, check ebay for Sandy / Ivy era Xeons from decommissioned datacentres and throw them in an older S-2011 board. It'll only be 20-25% slower than a current gen CPU and will cost a fraction of the price.


Yeah like I said, I won't be holding my breath haha. I'm sure I'll end up with some overpriced Intel chip

The Intel name is just too ingrained in today's society to give up much ground to AMD and I think they will hang onto their premiums, at least for the most part.

Skylake overclocks pretty good, and that should follow through to Skylake-X, so I think if I can get 6-10 cores (depending on how outrageous the pricing is) nicely over 4 Ghz, that will rip through anything I can throw at it for the next few years.



Jan 05, 2017 at 03:53 PM
newhaven
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p.5 #5 · p.5 #5 · PC build questions follow up (arrived)


Ben, I agree that you have ordered a great system, but there is one thing I would change. The Noctua NH-L12 is a low profile cooler and not rated as highly as a tower version like the Noctua NH-U12S (same cost). I believe the case you selected does not have enough clearance for the NH-U12S or Cooler Master Hyper 212 and they were not listed as options.

Noctua comparison



Jan 05, 2017 at 04:39 PM
ben egbert
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p.5 #6 · p.5 #6 · PC build questions follow up (arrived)


newhaven wrote:
Ben, I agree that you have ordered a great system, but there is one thing I would change. The Noctua NH-L12 is a low profile cooler and not rated as highly as a tower version like the Noctua NH-U12S (same cost). I believe the case you selected does not have enough clearance for the NH-U12S or Cooler Master Hyper 212 and they were not listed as options.

Noctua comparison


Thanks I will ask about that.



Jan 05, 2017 at 05:36 PM
ngaio
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p.5 #7 · p.5 #7 · PC build questions follow up (arrived)


CanadaMark wrote:
Using 4X memory on a dual channel board is slower than using 2X memory on a dual channel board.


Do you have a link to online benchmarks that demonstrate this?

Thanks,
Damon




Jan 05, 2017 at 06:20 PM
15Bit
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p.5 #8 · p.5 #8 · PC build questions follow up (arrived)


CanadaMark wrote:
Skylake overclocks pretty good, and that should follow through to Skylake-X, so I think if I can get 6-10 cores (depending on how outrageous the pricing is) nicely over 4 Ghz, that will rip through anything I can throw at it for the next few years.

I just put together a dual 8 core sandy bridge Xeon (2.6GHz on paper though runs 3GHz all cores). Those CPU's cost around $150 a pair from ebay. The mobo cost me quite a bit cos i live in norway, but you'd be able to get one cheaper in north america. For any software that scales well with core count i would put that up against an overclocked 8 or 10 core i7.



Jan 06, 2017 at 01:28 AM
rico
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p.5 #9 · p.5 #9 · PC build questions follow up (arrived)


The other reason for more channels is maximum memory capacity at minimum cost. Once you get past the base cost of a dual-Xeon machine, you can use the sweet-spot DIMM capacity and load up the box. I started with 4 DIMMs of 16GB each, and later doubled that. Still have eight more slots I can populate at will.

There is a boost in throughput with 4 channels (per socket), but very few programs can hit main memory that hard while doing useful work. I have 102 GB/s bandwidth from memory on paper, but never see more than 50 with my custom benchmarking utility. Anything higher would require memory partitioning and other NUMA tactics that are very far from an ordinary programming discipline.



Jan 06, 2017 at 04:48 AM
newhaven
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p.5 #10 · p.5 #10 · PC build questions follow up (arrived)


Pugetsystems compares photoshop performance using i7-7700k (64GB), i7-6700k (64GB), i7-6850 (256 GB), i7-6900 (256 GB), and i7-6950K (256 GB)

Pugetsystems i7-7700k photoshop performance



Jan 06, 2017 at 10:34 AM
CanadaMark
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p.5 #11 · p.5 #11 · PC build questions follow up (arrived)


15Bit wrote:
I just put together a dual 8 core sandy bridge Xeon (2.6GHz on paper though runs 3GHz all cores). Those CPU's cost around $150 a pair from ebay. The mobo cost me quite a bit cos i live in norway, but you'd be able to get one cheaper in north america. For any software that scales well with core count i would put that up against an overclocked 8 or 10 core i7.


All the software I use scales well up until 8-10 cores (diminishing returns after around 6), so anything beyond that would be wasted on me I think. I'm shooting for 8 unless the prices are insane. I also like overclocking, and I know the Extreme CPUs are binned really high which is important - not sure about the Xeons in that respect.



Jan 06, 2017 at 11:14 AM
ben egbert
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p.5 #12 · p.5 #12 · PC build questions follow up (arrived)


Interesting, I did not see any reference to quad versus dual channel. Also, how much ram can Photoshop utilize?

Another test that would really matter is what happens when the ram is fully utilized and the scratch disk is required? This happens a lot to me with 16GB.

Ok, on my way to make some updates to my build.



Jan 06, 2017 at 11:17 AM
CanadaMark
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p.5 #13 · p.5 #13 · PC build questions follow up (arrived)


ben egbert wrote:
Interesting, I did not see any reference to quad versus dual channel. Also, how much ram can Photoshop utilize?

Another test that would really matter is what happens when the ram is fully utilized and the scratch disk is required? This happens a lot to me with 16GB.

Ok, on my way to make some updates to my build.


They weren't testing that. But it does make a case to go for the i7 7700K instead of the 6700K if you are set on your current build otherwise. When your RAM is full, it goes to the hard drive, which even with a SSD is much slower than RAM. Also the motherboard you chose can only handle a maximum of 64GB RAM.

To my knowledge PS has the capability to use as much RAM as you can give it, but unless you're doing enormous renders or something like that, you aren't going to be hitting the 2TB RAM limit of your OS anytime soon anyway haha.

If you are completely maxing out your RAM and using RAM intensive applications, it's going to slow down after 32GB the way you have it configured. You may not notice this because you have nothing to compare it to, but that argument could be used for every component in the entire system (i.e. you would never notice a 5% slower processor either, but you are still going with a better one which is good).

In a perfect setup you would have your scratch disk as a dedicated separate drive, and one that is as fast as possible, like a second 960 Pro, but that is not what most people do.

Photoshop also defaults to maximum 70% RAM usage, so if you want to let it use more, you need to manually change that. Photoshop also uses the application drive as the default scratch disk, so if you want chat changed you also need to do it manually. If you want to let photoshop use your 250GB 960 EVO drive as scratch, I would have a look at how much else you plan on installing on it - if you are going to fill it up, that is another good case to go with the 960 Pro 512GB because you want a good amount of headroom.



Jan 06, 2017 at 11:31 AM
ben egbert
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p.5 #14 · p.5 #14 · PC build questions follow up (arrived)


Thanks for the I have a bit more than 150 gb on my C drive, and I plan to lean that out a bit. But that's why I went 256 rather than 120 on the M.2 drive.

I just got off the phone with the rep at AVA and decided to keep my build as is. They were more than willing to change it, but I decided it was ok as is.



Jan 06, 2017 at 11:46 AM
CanadaMark
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p.5 #15 · p.5 #15 · PC build questions follow up (arrived)


Sounds good Ben, enjoy.


Jan 06, 2017 at 11:56 AM
jzucker
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p.5 #16 · p.5 #16 · PC build questions follow up (arrived)


it's my understanding that multiple cores will not help most photoshop operations which are single threaded. Photoshop benefits more from raw CPU clock speed so having 8 cores running at 2.6ghz is not going to be as fast as 4 cores running at 4ghz.

Particularly for operations such as rendering smudge tool or mixer brush on multi layer high resolution files with the tool set to "sample all layers".

Some filters may be optimized to take advantage of multiple cores but in general , photoshop is a single CPU hog.

I'm also interested in upgrading my desktop which is currently an i7 3820 3.0ghz with 32gb of memory.

wondering if I would see much difference to upgrade it?



Jan 19, 2017 at 09:34 AM
Mr Mouse
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p.5 #17 · p.5 #17 · PC build questions follow up (arrived)


jzucker wrote:
it's my understanding that multiple cores will not help most photoshop operations which are single threaded.


Actually, some Photoshop Feature take advantage of all the core it is allowed to use. And some Photoshop feature will take advantage of your GPU if you have Photoshop configured to use your GPU. Some of Photoshop's features require things be done in sequence. Those features will be single thread and will not use more than one core. There need to be a core available. So it other applications are running concurrently you should have more the one core so your system and other applications have something to run on. However, the only way to have Photoshop sequential processes done in a shorter time is to use a faster processor. I have seen a Photoshop filter like smart sharpen utilize all 24 cores on my workstation for a lengthy time.

In general, if you are using Photoshop in an interactive mode Photoshop will not ne running your CPU. When you have Photoshop apply a Filters or use Photoshop automation like Actions and scripts will Photoshop use your CPU. Some Photoshop features a compute intensive thing like Mixer Brushes can tax your machine. Set a mixer brush spacing to 1% and the tip size large and make a stroke it will lag forever. Games don't mix paint and paint on a characters they just quickly render images with textures.



Jan 19, 2017 at 03:27 PM
jzucker
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p.5 #18 · p.5 #18 · PC build questions follow up (arrived)


A few of the filters take advantage of multiple CPUs but the most important and CPU intensive chores like the brush engine (particularly the mixer brush), smudge tool, healing brush and other such goodies do not take advantage of multiple cores and are dog slow if set to {sample all layers}. Liquify and some other parts of PS were rewritten to utilize the graphics C/P but that has nothing to do with multiple physical cores or logical ones for that matter.

Mr Mouse wrote:
Actually, some Photoshop Feature take advantage of all the core it is allowed to use. And some Photoshop feature will take advantage of your GPU if you have Photoshop configured to use your GPU. Some of Photoshop's features require things be done in sequence. Those features will be single thread and will not use more than one core. There need to be a core available. So it other applications are running concurrently you should have more the one core so your system and other applications have something to run on. However, the only way to have Photoshop sequential processes
...Show more




Jan 20, 2017 at 01:23 PM
Shutterbug2006
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p.5 #19 · p.5 #19 · PC build questions follow up (arrived)


I don't know how much money you've allocated to your storage system out of the total system purchase, but since you're building new you should consider the Intel 750 Series. They're really fast.

http://intel.ly/1DVnjle

It would give a significant performance boost for a small upgrade cost.

http://intel.ly/2jzqTdn



Jan 21, 2017 at 12:54 AM
JameelH
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p.5 #20 · p.5 #20 · PC build questions follow up (arrived)


tag


Feb 06, 2017 at 06:24 PM
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