Upgrading the PC

NikonsandVstroms

Since this is a big refresh for it I thought I'd lay out the plan here and see if there are any comments/recommendations before I pull the trigger since I'll be living with this as my main system for more 3 years. Its main purpose will be photo/design work and maybe video in the future when I pick up a D800.

Current specs are a Xeon "Bloomfield" W3540, 12GB of ECC RAM, NVIDIA FX580 Quadro, and the bottleneck is a 7,200 RPM 500GB drive.

I'm going to keep the processor since it looks like it would be 1,000+ to only get 20-30% increase in speed.

The graphics card I want to swap out with a consumer card, the NVIDIA GTX 660 since I want to go with 3 and sometimes 4 monitors. (The Quadro's are a lot more expensive and I don't think there's much benefit with my work)

HD is going for an SSD, probably around 250GB.

And the RAM I'm on the fence about but I'm guessing when I move to 32MP images having 24 GB of it will be a big help.

Zerodog

I would say skip the 250 and just jump to a 500gb SSD. The cost of them has come down quite a bit and then you will have room to keep your working data on it as well. Your computer must be rippin as it is!

angevin1

You don't say if you're Building or Buying. Never the less. I would trade the XEON over to an "Sandy Bridge" i7. The XEON's FSB rating on Memory is only 1066 Max. And 24 GB Max RAM. Compare these two pages for your CPU Xeon: http://ark.intel.com/products/39719/Intel-Xeon-Processor-W3540-8M-Cache-2_93-GHz-4_80-GTs-Intel-QPI
and Sandy Bridge: http://ark.intel.com/products/63697/Intel-Core-i7-3930K-Processor-12M-Cache-up-to-3_80-GHz

24GB of RAM is nice compared to say, half that. With the Sandy-B you can go on up to 64GB. You can never have too much RAM.

MomaZunk

Ditto on the SSD at 500 GB. I keep just my programs and LR catalog on it, and I always seem to be watching my spare space with the 250 GB.

I have the NVIDIA FX580 Quadro and it has never been rated as fast as the gaming cards, but the QUADRO's are supposed to be better for graphics. I am curious about your thoughts is steering away from the QUADRO. What type of improvement do you think you would see?

Dan7312

The GTX580 is supported by the Mercury engine in Photoshop CS6. It means Photoshop can push some of the compute intense opertations of the processor in the GTX580, which is faster and better suited for doing those calulations than the PC processor. It means less time to see the effects of a filter and so on.

These are the video cards it supports. The GTX680 isn't listed, but that is supported too.

http://www.adobe.com/products/premiere/mercury-playback-engine.html

http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshop/mercury-graphics-engine.html

I mis-read the model number you mentioned. The Quadro FX580 isn't supported by the mercury engine. About which might be better for graphics in general is hard to say, but if it is one of those that Photoshop supports you should see an improvement in performance.

MomaZunk wrote: »

Ditto on the SSD at 500 GB. I keep just my programs and LR catalog on it, and I always seem to be watching my spare space with the 250 GB.

I have the NVIDIA FX580 Quadro and it has never been rated as fast as the gaming cards, but the QUADRO's are supposed to be better for graphics. I am curious about your thoughts is steering away from the QUADRO. What type of improvement do you think you would see?

NikonsandVstroms

kerryjosber wrote: »

me too, I keep just my programs and LR catalog on it, and I always seem to be watching my spare space with the 250 GB.

What programs are on it? I just checked the laptop I'm on which has CS5 along with some data (few 10-20GB of songs and music) and I'm not even at 100GB total.

Also the GTX660 is now installed , 3 USB 3.0 ports, and I got a 240GB Intel 520 SSD along with a 3TB 7,200 RPM internal drive that will be going in when I have a day to re install everything.

The Dell T3500 case looks like a mess but is actually easy to work on which surprised me. Everything is set up so you need the fewest tools possible, I actually replaced with video card/installed the USB's without a screwdriver even. Though with the GTX660 it was a bit nerve wracking to see if the card would fit even though Dell said it should....that thing is huge!

NikonsandVstroms

angevin1 wrote: »

You don't say if you're Building or Buying. Never the less. I would trade the XEON over to an "Sandy Bridge" i7. The XEON's FSB rating on Memory is only 1066 Max. And 24 GB Max RAM. Compare these two pages for your CPU Xeon: http://ark.intel.com/products/39719/Intel-Xeon-Processor-W3540-8M-Cache-2_93-GHz-4_80-GTs-Intel-QPI
and Sandy Bridge: http://ark.intel.com/products/63697/Intel-Core-i7-3930K-Processor-12M-Cache-up-to-3_80-GHz

24GB of RAM is nice compared to say, half that. With the Sandy-B you can go on up to 64GB. You can never have too much RAM.

Just swapping parts inside the case so sadly I can't do that, they don't have the same socket so that swap wouldn't work. A W3680 would and give a nice bump in performance but it's still as expensive as the rest of my upgrades combined and I don't have a huge need for it right now......but in a year or 2 as the price on it drops it might be a nice upgrade to keep this as a backup box.