Some random computer build musings

ajdroidx · Oct 31, 2012

Okay, let me see here. Uses:

Web browsing (chrome)
Youtube / netflix
Photo editing including Panoramas and HDRs from a Canon 5DmkII camera. (photoshop CS3 (if I update, because I may have too anyway since I am already running a copy on my desktop) or perhaps elements. Or perhaps something else as photoshop is bloated anyway and their stupid sign in garbage)

Listening to music.

Seems to me, all the things an i5 Mac mini could do.

More advanced stuff I probably will not do much of.
Cutting / Editing HD video and making timelapse movies.

On the bright side, I do have a 15" MBP which should have plenty of power to do these tasks. Its running a quad core i7.

---

Maybe the dual core i5 mini, dual boot the thing, take the 200 bucks I saved, shove in an SSD for a speed boost and perhaps some extra ram later if needed. It comes with 4gig installed.

mrspeedmaster · Nov 1, 2012

Speed Daemon said:
The first questions that you need to find an answer for are:

Do you have a real need for lots o' cores?

Are you running out of RAM, or are planning on adding a RAM-hungry app?

Thanks to GKrellM I can see that the only times that I'm really using all four or six (depending on the machine) cores is when I'm doing compute-intensive video transcoding and related activities. You might find that the extra cores might be spending most of their time doing nothing.

Having more than enough RAM is great, but having a LOT more RAM than you'll ever use is money down the drain. Keep an eye on your RAM usage for applications (and especially not for system cache, where unused RAM is allocated) and see if you will really be using extra RAM. Most operating systems, including Linux will use unused RAM, even if it's to be there just in case a large FIFO pops up. As a general rule of thumb, if the paging file or partition isn't active at all, you have more than enough RAM.

Having lots of ram is a good thing. i have 32Gb and 64gb on my rigs.
Make a big ramddisk and you'll see real benefits. 2GB/sec transfers. 30 Gigabyte files copy in 20 seconds to a RAID 0 SSD.

Ramdisk. Thats all I got to say.

I would personally upgrade storage first. SATA III 6Gbps ssds 400/500 MB/sec speed. Put them into RAID and you can get close to 1GB/sec.

I put virtual machines in ramdisk or an SSD raid and you will see virtualized OSes boot in 2-3 seconds.

Speed Daemon · Nov 1, 2012

mrspeedmaster said:
Having lots of ram is a good thing. i have 32Gb and 64gb on my rigs.
Make a big ramddisk and you'll see real benefits. 2GB/sec transfers. 30 Gigabyte files copy in 20 seconds to a RAID 0 SSD.

Ramdisk. Thats all I got to say.

The thing is that I don't need to copy 30GB files in 20 seconds, and have no interested in spending big money for bragging rights.

My video and other software typically loads an image of the file I'm working on into RAM automatically, so why should I waste my time doing fiddly things when my apps do it for me?

Sure it would be nice to have tons of RAM if I could justify the expense. But right now I'd rather spend that money on a seriously powerful CUDA rendering engine that can transcode in the blink of an eye. And even that's more than I can justify the expense of.

SamuraiBigEd · Nov 1, 2012

Speed Daemon said:
The thing is that I don't need to copy 30GB files in 20 seconds, and have no interested in spending big money for bragging rights.

My video and other software typically loads an image of the file I'm working on into RAM automatically, so why should I waste my time doing fiddly things when my apps do it for me?

Sure it would be nice to have tons of RAM if I could justify the expense. But right now I'd rather spend that money on a seriously powerful CUDA rendering engine that can transcode in the blink of an eye. And even that's more than I can justify the expense of.

If you are running Photoshop CS4 or newer load up as much ram as you possibly can, you will be much happier for it. If I can ever get past the hurdles I have been dealing with this year I will be upping to 32GB on my system.

Speed Daemon · Nov 2, 2012

SamuraiBigEd said:
If you are running Photoshop CS4 or newer load up as much ram as you possibly can, you will be much happier for it. If I can ever get past the hurdles I have been dealing with this year I will be upping to 32GB on my system.

Considering that Adobe is giving us Linux users the middle finger, "happier" isn't the word I had in mind. :mad:

I also don't think that spending $10,000 on RAM to edit a picture file is going to make me happy when no more improvement in performance will come after $300. I maintain the fact that adding unused RAM that does nothing but use up electricity is nothing but a waste. Get enough RAM and then some, but don't go insane.

SamuraiBigEd · Nov 2, 2012

Speed Daemon said:
Considering that Adobe is giving us Linux users the middle finger, "happier" isn't the word I had in mind.

I also don't think that spending $10,000 on RAM to edit a picture file is going to make me happy when no more improvement in performance will come after $300. I maintain the fact that adding unused RAM that does nothing but use up electricity is nothing but a waste. Get enough RAM and then some, but don't go insane.

I am speaking from a Winders point of view, Photoshop is designed to use as much ram as you give it and with the high resolution cameras available it is beneficial. I have a Canon EOS 5D MKII which averages around 18mb per pic but after editing and adding layers those pics can easily top 100mb and even go over 1gb in extreme cases. You need that ram or a huge scratch disc to handle this efficiently otherwise you will run out of ram and it will take forever or tell you flat out it can't do it.

I am running 8gb ram and a 60gb SSD scratch disk and have run into slow downs a couple of times.

Haggistech · Nov 2, 2012

the system i use at work for photoshop has a 120gb SSD and 32gb ram

the more ram you can get in there the better

plus it future proofs your pc too

Haggistech · Nov 2, 2012

on another note you wont see speeds of 1gb/s on raid 0 SSD due to the Raid Hardware bottle necking it

Ballymoss · Nov 2, 2012

I have an OCZ Revodrive 3 and it wasn't cheap but it is pretty quick. Here's a scan from my Flickr pages Atto Disk Benchmark OCZ Revodrive 3 3.10.12 | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

Rolo42 · Nov 2, 2012

ajdroidx said:
The Mac mini is either dual i5 or quad i7

Mea Culpa: there is one dual-core, hyperthreaded i5:
ARK | Intel

mrspeedmaster · Nov 2, 2012

Haggistech said:
on another note you wont see speeds of 1gb/s on raid 0 SSD due to the Raid Hardware bottle necking it

Actually, you are wrong. Maybe current SATA 2 hardware raid
but SATA III 6Gb/s SSD raid in software raid with 2 samsungs 830s, I get 800MBs all day long. That is with 2 drives in both Linux Mint on a various Macs. Linux and OSX, you can stripe two drives in soft raid pretty easily.

In terms of hardware raid, People have gotten 1GB using Thunderbolt Raids by Pegasus.
Anandtech even benced one. The Pegasus R6:

AnandTech - Promise Pegasus R6 & Mac Thunderbolt Review

It does 800MB/s with platter regular hard drives. When he put in SSDs, he got over 1GB/second.

If you are used to getting consumer raids (e.g. Mediasonic, Sonic, Rosewills off NewEgg and Amazon) then of course, you won't get anything past SATA 2 speeds.

There are new controllers and chipsets from ASMedia, Oxford in the thunderbolt hardware that is pushing the boundaries.

mrspeedmaster · Nov 2, 2012

Speed Daemon said:
The thing is that I don't need to copy 30GB files in 20 seconds, and have no interested in spending big money for bragging rights.
My video and other software typically loads an image of the file I'm working on into RAM automatically, so why should I waste my time doing fiddly things when my apps do it for me?

Different use case for sure.

Copying files is one thing. There are other tangible benefits. I run web services and dropping a database into ramdisk and http server helps a lot . Also, I often drop in entire virtual machines into ram disk like a whole install of Windows 7 running inside virtualbox.

mrspeedmaster · Nov 2, 2012

Speed Daemon said:
I also don't think that spending $10,000 on RAM to edit a picture file is going to make me happy when no more improvement in performance will come after $300.

32GB of DDR3 1800 mhz ram goes for $140-160 at Frys or NewEggs.
ECC version cost at most $300 for 32GB.
But most people here aren't running Xeons, they'll be most likely using non-ecc memory.

ajdroidx · Nov 5, 2012

So I was doing a bit more research into the next desktop and not anywhere closer then what I was before I started. I did look at the mini ITX case and its not much of a smaller footprint then my tower is. Its shorter and not quite as deep. Not as small of footprint as I was hoping.

Dropping down to an i5, only knocks about 100 bucks off my total, so why not shove an i7 in the thing? But that don't help me reduce my footprint.

Still up in the air what I want to do.

MrPeter1985 · Nov 5, 2012

Well unless you need the extra threads, not much of a difference really. Use the $100 for something else.

Some random computer build musings

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