My hobby is photography. I did use an old 2-core laptop with 6GB RAM to photo edit for years. Lately it had been getting hotter and hotter to the point between each image processed it would overheat and shut down. When rotating the laptop when it was on I could hear solid debris crashing against the cooling blade fans.
I finally decided it was time to buy a desktop, because I realized 99% of my edits I did right from my desk so I could review on my big monitor.
- So I got myself an XPS 8500, I7-3440, 2TB HDD that had Windows 7 (this is not actually accurate... I had first bought an HP Envy with AMD FX6200 Windows 8 system that ended up with hardware issues, so I returned it within 2 weeks for the Dell, which was on special for about the same price as the Envy - but only had Windows 7)
- The XPS using Windows 7 actually felt slower than the Envy in Windows 8 + I missed some of the features to consolidate my web pictures that W8 offered
- So I spent some money to upgrade to Windows 8
- But while doing my homework (after buying the Envy), I convinced myself I needed an SSD... so then added a Samsung 840pro SSD to the 2 TB HDD (and, BTW, I already own a 1TB WD external HDD for backup... FYI, these RAW photo images these days are around 20MB each and on a good photo shoot I can easily take over 500 images in 1 day - 10GB)
- But while researching the SDD, I saw many photo editors really recommended a lot of RAM... If you stitch together a panorama with a bunch of 20MB images a lot of RAM really speeds the process. So now I just installed 32GB of Vengeance 1600 RAM
- Now this system just has a Radeon 7570 GPU, but funny thing about photo editing, there is no need for even a mediocre GPU... and I don't play video games, so I really am set there... which also means I do not need to upgrade my 460W PSU
The system I have now is probably 10X more than I really need... it really is an amazing upgrade from what I had been gimping along with... I should be set for years. But over the past 3 weeks I can now see how people can get drawn into this whole computer hardware obsession/passion/hobby... I've been like that for a while with cameras.
So now how do I walk away from the fun I just had over the last 3 weeks with computers? The only remaining thing is to replace my big monitor with a big IPS monitor and then color correct it... and I'm done... back to photography.
In hindsight, I could have built what I just bought and saved a couple hundred dollars... but how did I know I was going to get sucked into the "upgrade" spiral?
Anyway, if there are any photographers out there with some suggestions where I need to improve relative to hardware that I have not listed, please advise.
I finally decided it was time to buy a desktop, because I realized 99% of my edits I did right from my desk so I could review on my big monitor.
- So I got myself an XPS 8500, I7-3440, 2TB HDD that had Windows 7 (this is not actually accurate... I had first bought an HP Envy with AMD FX6200 Windows 8 system that ended up with hardware issues, so I returned it within 2 weeks for the Dell, which was on special for about the same price as the Envy - but only had Windows 7)
- The XPS using Windows 7 actually felt slower than the Envy in Windows 8 + I missed some of the features to consolidate my web pictures that W8 offered
- So I spent some money to upgrade to Windows 8
- But while doing my homework (after buying the Envy), I convinced myself I needed an SSD... so then added a Samsung 840pro SSD to the 2 TB HDD (and, BTW, I already own a 1TB WD external HDD for backup... FYI, these RAW photo images these days are around 20MB each and on a good photo shoot I can easily take over 500 images in 1 day - 10GB)
- But while researching the SDD, I saw many photo editors really recommended a lot of RAM... If you stitch together a panorama with a bunch of 20MB images a lot of RAM really speeds the process. So now I just installed 32GB of Vengeance 1600 RAM
- Now this system just has a Radeon 7570 GPU, but funny thing about photo editing, there is no need for even a mediocre GPU... and I don't play video games, so I really am set there... which also means I do not need to upgrade my 460W PSU
The system I have now is probably 10X more than I really need... it really is an amazing upgrade from what I had been gimping along with... I should be set for years. But over the past 3 weeks I can now see how people can get drawn into this whole computer hardware obsession/passion/hobby... I've been like that for a while with cameras.
So now how do I walk away from the fun I just had over the last 3 weeks with computers? The only remaining thing is to replace my big monitor with a big IPS monitor and then color correct it... and I'm done... back to photography.
In hindsight, I could have built what I just bought and saved a couple hundred dollars... but how did I know I was going to get sucked into the "upgrade" spiral?
Anyway, if there are any photographers out there with some suggestions where I need to improve relative to hardware that I have not listed, please advise.
I really hope you can get two monitors up and running because (in my opinion) it is a bit of a must for photo editing... If you would prefer not to take that risk and/or don't want to spend the extra $150 on a GTX 650 Ti that could handle the dual monitors, then I'd suggest one large 27" 2560x1440 monitor. These typically run for around $600-$1000 dollars so getting dual monitors is more cost effective...
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