A Ramble About Computers...

[Ron Scubadiver]

With digital photography it is kind of hard to get by without a computer.  I suppose one could shoot from a phone and upload directly to the internet, but that is kind of limiting.

The D8xx series of cameras poses a bit of a problem as the 36mp raw files take a bit of horsepower to process.  My 2.4 ghz Haswell powered Macbook Pro bogs down unless I stick to lower resolution previews.  Even with the low res previews there are occasional delays when using a brush in ACR.  My other computer is a 5 year old sandy bridge I5-2500 overclocked to 4.5 ghz running Windows 10.  It is acceptably fast.

I wouldn't mind something faster, but a $425 I7-6700k (local price) might offer a 20% improvement clock for clock and probably would not allow the low fan speeds I use with my current machine.  Add to that a minimum of $220 for a new motherboard and 16 gigs of DDR4 memory assuming I reused as much stuff from the old machine as possible.  It's really kind of discouraging.  The good old days of each new generation of hardware being a lot faster than the last are gone.  Its going to get worse:

http://www.extremetech.com/extreme/222590-an-end-to-scaling-intels-next-generation-chips-will-sacrifice-speed-to-reduce-power

New ultra low power chips will be slower although in data centers they could be packed far more tightly than they are now.  This leveling off of technology seems to be with everything.  Each new generation of digital cameras used to be a lot better than the last, but now improvements are incremental and in small increments at that.  My D800 is starting to look like it has been in a war but I can't get motivated to replace it with a D810.  I suppose if the D800 broke I would be on the phone with B&H to order an 810 before even asking Nikon about a repair.  Unfortunately, Houston, the fourth largest city in the USA does not have an authorized Nikon repair shop.

Did I mention Windows 10?  I have updated several Win 7 machines and like it.  There is a significant performance improvement in file copy operations, particularly across external drives which I use a lot.  The update clears out the sluggishness that an old Win 7 system has from the endless updates and no SP2.  MS appears to be ready to deliver new builds of Win 10 with feature updates as entire OS builds rather than simple updates or service packs.  They already had one November.  Yeah, I know some people will say they hate this, but is it that different from Apple's annual OS X refresh?

Probably the main reason to get a Mac is they just work.  There is no crapware.  Notebook displays are better than what is found in most popular Windows notebooks.  If one checks the owners forum for the popular Dell XPS15 there are endless software glitch problems solved by reinstalling Windows from scratch.  Sounds like crapware and dated drivers to me.  There is one big problem with Macs right now.  Apple has been delaying with hardware updates.  It might be that slow incremental improvements in hardware is discouraging them too:

http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/#Mac

Meanwhile as computer performance more or less stagnates, new versions of Lightroom and ACR manage to get slower.  If you think Adobe is slow try Photo Ninja or any other raw developing program based on that same open source image processing package whose name I can't remember right now.

Perhaps someone around here has some brilliant ideas regarding a way around these problems, I hope.

[Erik Lund]

I'm running on a ThinkPad W540 with win10 and my files from D3X is flying, Adobe CS6 and stitching 3, 4 or 5 images in PtGui is super fast, no lag or annoying hiccups,,, I use an 24" Apple Cinema Display via the mini DVI port, colour calibration was challenging, but mostly due to Win10 and the user 
I'm a long time MacBook Pro user 15" but switching between Win and IOS user interface was tiresome,,, 

[Tristin]

I'm still on Win7.  Tried Win8 on someones machine and nearly gagged when i saw the new start menu, have not touched it further.  Does Win10 still have that wannabe-tablet UI?

[Ron Scubadiver]

Eric, with only 12 mp those files should fly.  It was when I switched from a D700 to a D800 that computer horsepower became an issue.

Tristan, Windows 10 has returned the start menu.  There is still a remnant of the tablet interface attached to the right side of the start menu.  Non tablet programs are slowly becoming able to utilize the tablet interface and place an icon there.

Somehow I am able to switch between Windows and Mac without too much fumbling, but I will probably go with windows for my next notebook.

[Andy]

Ron,
imho, nothing from the foundational technologies in IT (CPU , storage size, memory, ..) grow slower than the file size of D-SLRs. The growth in NEF file size from the D1 (1999) to the D800 (2012) was about 10x. Basically, over time, the performance issue rather shrinks than grow

I do have a decent set of fast single socket, dual and even quad socket machines at home, but for photo editing, one of the lower performing machines is more than enough - for what I do.
Usually larger main memory is more useful than a faster CPU.
Unfortunately, quite a few photo editing applications are not leveraging the available parallelism in modern CPUs. For instance Lightroom has its sweetspot with 4 cores. I tested LR on 2 socket machines, but the performance dimishes further as the application can't cope with NUMA architectures at all. LR on a 2 socket 24-core workstation is often slower than on a fast 4-core machine.

As you mentioned notebooks, they are most often limited by thermal design limits, not the max performance a certain CPU architecture could provide. Hence I avoid using notebooks as primary photo editing machines.

To minimize time when selecting keeper images, I use Fastpictureviewer. A properly configured machine is able to display 5-6 D800 RAW photos per second. Basically it is as fast as you can press the keyboard to advance to the next image. Very convenient for the selection process.

My current photo editing machine is a i7-3570K with 32 GB memory and 2x Samsung SSDs for temp space. I don't store files locally, all data is residing in a home server (600k RAW files, 900k JPEGs, approx 7 TB data volume for photos).

I try to minimize my photo editing time, so the workflow is very simple. As example: When returning back from a trip with 5.000 D800 photos (lossless RAW), the selection process to get down to 30-50 keepers and processing in CNX takes about 2-3 hrs in total.

rgds,
Andy

[Frank Fremerey]

You can get a 6600k for half the price and it is only 10% difference in performance. Measurable. Not relevant.

my next machine will be Intel 6way or 8way with 32GB RAM.

i am still on a January 2009 core2quad and it does all I need.

Most important in my book is stability, so I get the best motherboard, power supply and RAM and always Intel.

plus I never overclock.

have been working as an editor in the hardware department of a renowned computer magazine earlier in life.

[Ron Scubadiver]

Andy, when you say 4 cores do you mean 4 threads or 8?

Frank the I7 is $390+8.25% tax added at checkout locally.  The I5 is $230 plus tax.  Both will overclock to about 4.5 ghz reliably although the stock speed on an I7 is considerably higher.  On Photoshop the difference clock for clock is probably less than 10%, but I have not been able to find a good benchmark.  Adobe says only some functions use hyperthreading.   

[Andy]

Andy, when you say 4 cores do you mean 4 threads or 8?

Ron,
with "core" I referred to the physical resource on the chip, so it is 4.
Threads are execution paths and Intel introduced a while ago SMT in their product line-up. (branded as Hyperthread in Intel language)
Please note, that for high performance computing, SMT (Hyperthreads) are quite often turned off, to improve overall performance.
You might try it with your setup as well. (Many applications aren't scaling well with too many threads, so it might help to reduce the number of threads.)

rgds, Andy

[Akira]

Just upgraded my main machine from Win7 Core i7 (I don't remember the code name) to Win10 Core i5 6500T (Skylake), both with 16GB RAM and the latter with 256GB Sundisk SSD.  I opted for a quieter desktop machine, and now the only moving parts are the twin CPU cooling fans rotating above the CPU whose TDP is 35W.  I haven't done any extensive processing with my main (and currently only) editor CC2015.  I don't do batch processing, and my current camera yields humble losslessly compressed 12bit 20MP RAW files.  So, I would be content with the processing power.

At this moment, my only major complaint is Edge and Mail.  Edge freezes when I start playing movies posted in Facebook.  The UI of Mail is nothing but crap.  I switched to Firefox (now 64bit version is available) and Thunderbird.

Upgrading from a 2.5inch 7200rpm HDD to an SSD made a significant difference in speed.

[charlie]

I'm still on Win7.  Tried Win8 on someones machine and nearly gagged when i saw the new start menu, have not touched it further.  Does Win10 still have that wannabe-tablet UI?

Agree'd, win8 was terrible. I like Win10, it installs with an over inflated start menu that has a bunch of useless apps in it but they can all be removed so you are left with a clean and simple start menu. From what I've read if you do move to Win10 it is better to do a clean install of it as opposed to upgrading through Win7.

[Frank Fremerey]

Frank the I7 is $390+8.25% tax added at checkout locally.  The I5 is $230 plus tax.  Both will overclock to about 4.5 ghz reliably although the stock speed on an I7 is considerably higher.  On Photoshop the difference clock for clock is probably less than 10%, but I have not been able to find a good benchmark.  Adobe says only some functions use hyperthreading.   

In Germany the 6600K sells for under 215€ incl. Tax plus shipping. We tested in our lab, that a synthetic performance difference of 30% or more translates into a perceptible difference. I guess that holds true till today.

I see you are stitching, so doubling your RAM will increase performance more than a 10% increase in measurable performance.

PS: I like Win 10 very much, upgraded all my systems from win7 and win8 and with the current version you can do a clean install using your old Win7 or Win8 code.

PPS: If you want to sacrifice system life and stability for overclocking (very rarely brings the necessary 30% performance increase) I recommend to dive into water cooling.

[Bjørn Rørslett]

I do much of my processing on a couple of Thinkpad W520 machines, each with Intel Quad i7 CPUs, 32 GB RAM, 512 GB SSD + 1 TB HDD. Both run Win7/64 and are darned fast. Their monitors are quite good and suffice for my modest requirements. I usually put them into docking stations to provide support to some more monitors for extra work space.

[Erik Lund]

Ron the D3X is 24 MP

16GB Ram and 520 GB Samsung SSD PRO

[Hugh_3170]

Ron, I realise from your postings on this and other sites that you travel a fair bit, so I am guessing that you need an airline friendly computer and that you are therefore probably not interested in a machine that isn't portabe.

If I have guessed wrongly, then a custom built desk top can deliver huge performance advantages at affordable prices, particularly if you are into heavy image stitching or stacking.  PM me if you are interested and I can give you the name of another photographer that has recently gone down this path.  I am sure that he would be prepared to share with you the configuration of his purpose built machine.  He has been known to routinely stitch many hundreds of input images into a single output.

[Ron Scubadiver]

Andy, I don't have to turn off hyperthreading because my I5 doesn't have that feature.

Clock for clock the latest Skylake chips are about 20% faster than Sandy Bridge, on highly threaded applications, less on most stuff.  The old Sandy Bridge chips overclock easily so both would be running around 4.5 ghz.

Eric, forgive me for my little mistake.  Still 24 mp processing should be about 50% faster than 36 mp processing.

Having a lot of memory definitely makes a big difference when stitching.  With 8 GB on the Macbook pro things get really slow if there are a lot of frames.  I mean two cups of coffee slow.  With 16gb on my desktop 16 frames are stitched pretty quick.  32 GB should handle anything I will ever do.

Local prices for Skylake chips dropped a bit today, $370 for the I-7, $220 for the I-5, add 8.25% tax to each at the register.  Just love living in the USA...

For the money, a 32 GB I5 should do better on stitching than a 16 GB I7. 

Hugh, I have an airline friendly notebook and a custom built desktop.  I am considering upgrading my desktop at this time.  I can't get by with a single premium notebook with the amount of travel I do. There is too much risk something could happen to it.