PC Build for pro photographer in 500-800$ range.

How about http://pcpartpicker.com/p/YnBVrH ?

You lose gaming abilities, but gain everything else.

And stop putting the catalog on an external drive, that's your biggest issue! Instead, just back up the catalog to the external drive and copy back during use if you changed it on another computer.

1) Win10 is only valid if you have a retail copy that is not used in any other machine. If you have a laptop or desktop purchased from most companies (not custom), there is nearly 0% chance you can use it.
2) Neither of those two are particularly GPU heavy, the internal GPU of Skylake is more than enough (comparable to a Geforce 730 or AMD 240/250)
3) It's both the spinning disk and interface. Just don't do it. If you really want swapping, get an ESATA compatible 3.5" drive or hotswap SATA bay in the 5.25" bay (I personally used that method for a long time)

Yes and no, maximum transfer speed increases but IOPS (where catalog fails) does not. A better idea is to just copy the catalog to your disk first and then copy back to the disk afterwards.

Drop the CX PSU, it's low end. You won't need more than a 750Ti for two monitors, so save money by lowering the GPU to a 950 or 750ti and then get a EVGA G2 550 or 650 (sometimes they are the same price, usually the 550 is a bit cheaper)

this xeon build is exactly what youre looking for ,

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1241 V3 3.5GHz Quad-Core Processor ($263.99 @ SuperBiiz)
CPU Cooler: CRYORIG H7 49.0 CFM CPU Cooler ($34.50 @ Newegg)
Motherboard: ASRock H97 Anniversary ATX LGA1150 Motherboard ($69.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Memory: G.Skill Ares Series 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR3-1600 Memory ($56.99 @ Newegg)
Storage: Samsung 850 EVO-Series 250GB 2.5" Solid State Drive ($87.39 @ OutletPC)
Storage: Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive ($48.85 @ OutletPC)
Video Card: Asus GeForce GTX 950 2GB Video Card ($129.99 @ Micro Center)
Case: Corsair 200R ATX Mid Tower Case ($49.99 @ Micro Center)
Power Supply: SeaSonic S12II 520W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply ($55.98 @ Newegg)
Total: $797.67
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-03-26 10:14 EDT-0400

Not to get off topic, but do you have your 1.5 TB catalog of images backed up somewhere? Since you travel a lot, that external HDD could easily get damaged. As said above, move the files over to your computer's SSD or HDD when you are editing, then archive them back to the external for storage.

The build suggested by superninja looks pretty good to me, although you may want to go with a 500GB SSD. The prices are coming down.

calpissoda,

Given the demands and cost of the software, the file size, and the probable cost of the imaging equipment, in my view a $500-800 budget for the computer hardware is disproportionately low for professional use.

The only realistic alternative that can provide the capabilites for that cost would be to buy a used workstation:

HP Z420 Workstation Xeon Quad Core E5-1620 3.6GHz 8GB RAM 500GB NVIDIA Win 7 Pro > sold for $499 or offer

Then add to above:

1. Samsung 850 Evo 250 GB > $87
2. +8GB RAM > about $60
3. Seagate Desktop HDD ST2000DM001 2TB 64MB Cache SATA 6.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive Bare Drive > $72
4. Used GTX 970 > about $150
_______________________

TOTAL = about $870

This is about the minimal system I'd recommend for your use -that wouldn't need a replacement or substantial upgrade quite soon. The cost could be improved by using a GTX 960 or even a GTX 750 TI if there is no 3D use, by patient shopping for the z420, or if a $500 or offer could be bought for say $450. The good feature of LGA2011- besides 40 PCIe lanes inatead of 28 and double the memory bandwidth of LGa 1150, is that the CPU can be changed for a 12-core instead of a 4-core limitation. I'm planning in the Summer to change the E5-1620 in my older z420 to an E5-2690 8-core @ 2.9 /3.8GHz (About $350-$400), add a Quadro K2200 and Tesla M2090. this might be a future consideration for your use as some of Adobe CS /CC does not recognize multiple CPU's or GPU's and anyway proceesor rendering effiiciency drops after about 6 -8 cores anyway.

As to GPU's, a Quadro has a lot of advantages in imaging work including x64 antialiaigina, 10 bit color and etc.
I have two HP z420's including an E5-1620 one and both have been perfectly reliable over two years and demanding 3D CAD and graphic design work. I was working with a 380MB photo only yesterday. These are also by far the quietest computers I've ever had.

The Xeon E5-1620 is 4-core @ 3.6 / 3.8GHz and has really excellent single-threaded performance. On Passmark, the Q9650 has a single=threaded rating of 1271 and an average CPU score of 4279. The Q9650 has a single-threaded rating of 1929 and an average CPU score of 9100.

On Passmark, there are three z420 / E5-1620 / GTX 970 systems, the best of which is:

Rating: 4638
CPU: 9264
2D: 728
3D: 8726
Mem: 2465 (32GB)
Disk: 4186 (sandisk SDSSDHIII)

The top rated system using a Q9650 (not overclocked):

Rating: 2523
CPU: 4657 (6203 -overclocked to 4.1GHz!)
2D: 495 (GTX 660)
3D: 3918 (7831 with GTX 970)
Mem: 1115 (8GB)
Disk: 2714 (OCZ Vertex 4)

The difference in the perfomrnace of the GTX 970 reflects the differnce in CPU's. the real limitation in your use has probably been effects processing 300MB files as the memory badnwidth and memory clock speed and quantitty will bottleneck the processing.

Cheers,

BambiBoom

Modeling:

1. HP z420 (2015) > Xeon E5-1660 v2 (6-core @ 3.7 / 4.0GHz) > 32GB DDR3 1866 ECC RAM > Quadro K4200 (4GB) > Intel 730 480GB (9SSDSC2BP480G4R5) > Western Digital Black WD1003FZEX 1TB> M-Audio 192 sound card > 600W PSU> > Windows 7 Professional 64-bit > Logitech z2300 speakers > 2X Dell Ultrasharp U2715H (2560 X 1440)>
[ Passmark Rating = 5064 > CPU= 13989 / 2D= 819 / 3D= 4596 / Mem= 2772 / Disk= 4555] [Cinebench R15 > CPU = 1014 OpenGL= 126.59 FPS] 7.8.15

Rendering:

2. Dell Precision T5500 (2011) (Revised) > 2X Xeon X5680 (6 -core @ 3.33 / 3.6GHz), 48GB DDR3 1333 ECC Reg. > Quadro K2200 (4GB ) > PERC H310 / Samsung 840 250GB / WD RE4 Enterprise 1TB > M-Audio 192 sound card > Logitech z313 > 875W PSU > Windows 7 Professional 64> HP 2711x (27", 1920 X 1080)
[ Passmark system rating = 3844 / CPU = 15047 / 2D= 662 / 3D= 3550 / Mem= 1785 / Disk= 2649] (12.30.15)

That used to be the case a decade ago, not so anymore, especially if you know what you want


I'm sure you'll love that system, it's not much different than mine, and it absolutely destroys LR6 (though I think I have a bit more than you, ~100k photos remaining in a 1.5GB catalog and ~400gb of video)

at the $800 scale you could have this:
PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Core i5-6500 3.2GHz Quad-Core Processor ($196.88 @ OutletPC)
Motherboard: ASRock B150M-HDV Micro ATX LGA1151 Motherboard ($67.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Memory: GeIL EVO POTENZA 16GB (2 x 8GB) DDR4-2133 Memory ($55.99 @ Newegg)
Storage: Team Ultra L5 120GB 2.5" Solid State Drive ($37.98 @ Newegg)
Storage: Mushkin ECO2 512GB 2.5" Solid State Drive ($129.99 @ Newegg)
Storage: Seagate Pipeline HD 2TB 3.5" 5900RPM Internal Hard Drive ($53.90 @ Amazon)
Video Card: Gigabyte GeForce GTX 960 4GB Video Card ($189.99 @ Amazon)
Case: Rosewill SRM-01 MicroATX Mini Tower Case ($21.99 @ Newegg)
Power Supply: EVGA 600B 600W 80+ Bronze Certified ATX Power Supply ($44.99 @ Amazon)
Total: $799.70
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-03-26 11:58 EDT-0400

the 512 GB SSD is your boot disk, the 2 TB drive holds your completed projects , and the 120 GB SSD is exclusively your swap space. the 960 gives you some CUDA cores and gaming setups.

its basicly the same as the i7 6700 but without the build in graphics, u got your graphics card for that.

In that case, yea go for the 6700, LR6 finally does multithread batches correctly so exports will be faster.



Don't spout nonsense! That chip is equivalent to the Haswell 4770, not the 6700. The 6700 has a base clock speed 14% faster and an additional ~5% IPC, meaning it's ~20% faster

no, the extra SSD would be used as a scratch drive or cache drive for Photoshop, so that everything runs off the very fast SSD, without trashing the lifespan of your boot drive.

Usually no need. Even massive use won't be more than 5-10TB/yr so even for a relatively small (256gb) disk you'll have >20 years continuous use before hitting the endurance limit