Ready for a new rig. Any "next big thing" I should watch out for?

nibunnoichi

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Aug 27, 2012
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I've been running on a Core i7 860 rig for almost 6 years now, and I think the time is right to upgrade, now that Skylake is out. I'm looking to build a fairly high-end rig with a budget of around $1500. I need something that can handle mass photo processing well, on top of being just an all-around beast. Before I take the plunge, I just want to get an idea of what's coming, if there's anything else I should hold out for, things to be aware of to future-proof my build, price/deals/timings, etc.


The things that are coming to my mind are:

  • USB 3 type C mass adoption
  • Prices for high capacity SSDs to drop down to a low and fairly stable price.
Anything else?
 

vailr

Diamond Member
Oct 9, 1999
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Although it may be somewhat difficult to determine whether any particular motherboard being sold has the Intel Alpine Ridge controller, that is one feature to look for.
AFAIK, Gigabyte seems to be the only vendor including the Alpine Ridge controller on some of their Skylake chipset boards.
As far as video cards: the nVidia GTX 980 Ti (6 Gb) seems pretty decent, but also expensive at ~$650.
SSD - consider the Intel PCIe 750 SSD, which is available in 400 Gb & 1.2 Tb versions.
The just-released Samsung 950 NVMe M.2 SSD is also worth looking at.
 

Ken g6

Programming Moderator, Elite Member
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Dec 11, 1999
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I need something that can handle mass photo processing well, on top of being just an all-around beast.

There's something of a tradeoff these days between higher core counts and higher clock speeds. If your mass photo processing is well threaded, the Haswell-based hex-core i7 5820k might make sense for you. The 5820k can usually be overclocked to ~4GHz, clock speeds similar to the highest-clocked desktop chips.

On the other hand, Photoshop does peculiarly well on Skylake, while working on only one photo at a time. I'm not sure how it would do in your use case.
 

SirFelixCat

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Nov 24, 2005
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The new Samsung 950 Pro M.2 SSD is coming mid month that apparently is a big jump in performance vs the 850's...I'm waiting for them to pull the trigger, fwiw.
 

nibunnoichi

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Aug 27, 2012
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There's something of a tradeoff these days between higher core counts and higher clock speeds. If your mass photo processing is well threaded, the Haswell-based hex-core i7 5820k might make sense for you. The 5820k can usually be overclocked to ~4GHz, clock speeds similar to the highest-clocked desktop chips.

On the other hand, Photoshop does peculiarly well on Skylake, while working on only one photo at a time. I'm not sure how it would do in your use case.

Thanks for the info. Never realized that there was such a tradeoff.

By mass photo processing, I mean Adobe Lightroom - importing lots of photos in a session, editing, and exporting in batch. I'm sure a build with any decent recent components will be fine with Photoshop, but Lightroom is a different animal.

Not sure if Lightroom is "well threaded" or if I have any control over that.

Of course I'm looking to get a high-end SSD, and try to be aware of any advancements in bus speeds. Ideally I'd like to move XX gigs around anywhere in my system in the blink of an eye.
 

Cerb

Elite Member
Aug 26, 2000
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Lightroom's import did not scale at all, last I knew, but export scales well to 4+ cores. Overall, I think a Skylake LGA1151 i7 would be a good choice.

Like this. 4 cores is definitely past the knee.

NVMe M.2 drives can be added to PCIe slots, using adapter cards (2xSSD example, likely giving 2 lanes per SSD), so for fast SSD expansion in the future, make sure you have multiple spare 4x (electrical) slots. Then you can use those adapters for M.2, or buy natively PCIe slot cards, and get plenty of bandwidth to and from them (PCIe 2.0 is 0.5GBps/lane, 3.0 is around 1GBps/lane, and all PCIe is full-duplex).