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by Charlie Woodrich on Sat May 23, 2015 6:09 pm
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I'm going to order a new desktop and I want to make sure I'm not making a mistake with the following setup.  It's mainly going to be used for PS/LR.  Your feedback is appreciated.  Thanks!

Charlie

[font=Arial, Helvetica, Sans]Chassis
X99 Talon - Standard Black
Chassis Fan Kit
Performance Fan Pack - Talon
Power Supply
SilverStone® 750 Watt Modular
Motherboard
Asus® X99 Deluxe
Processor
Intel® Core™ i7 5820K 3.6GHz
Processor Overclock
No Processor Overclock
Processor Cooler
Asetek® Liquid Cooling - Talon
Memory
32GB - 4x8GB - 2400MHz - DDR4
Video Card
NVIDIA® GeForce® GTX 750 Ti 2GB
Sound Card
On-Board Audio
Networking
On-Board Ethernet
Operating System Drive
Micron® M600 SSD 512GB
Data Drive 1
Western Digital® Red™ 3TB
Optical Drive
Asus® 16x DVD Writer
64-Bit Operating System
Microsoft® Windows 7 Professional [/font]
 

by Phil Shaw on Sun May 24, 2015 3:46 am
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I recently built a system based on an Asus X99 Pro mb with a similar spec.  I put in one Plextor M6e 512GB M.2-2280 Solid State Drive for OS, applications etc and another Plextor M6e 256GB M.2-2280 Solid State Drive as a working drive.  I also added 2 Western Digital BLACK SERIES 4TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drives for storage which are mirrored.  The WD red drives are optimized for 24/7 operation in a NAS.  I was going to load Win7Pro64 as the operating system, but in the end I was persuaded that Win8.1Pro64 works much better with today's hardware under a uefi bios than the 5yr old win7 operating system.  It is easy to remove all the Win 8 UI charms, tiles and other cr*p (what were Microsoft thinking?) so that the start up screen and ui behaviour is like that of Win7 - just type "classic shell" in google, or go to ninite.com to select and load all your apps there.

You can see the actual build here http://uk.pcpartpicker.com/p/bvCbzy
Phil Shaw
Essex, UK
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by E.J. Peiker on Sun May 24, 2015 4:33 am
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Looks like a very nice system!
 

by BlueDeuce on Sun May 24, 2015 9:17 am
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If funds permit substitute the WD red for black, add a SSD  to be used as a scratch disk for PS.  You can save a few bucks with the 4790K instead of the 5820 and will never notice a difference.
Mike
 

by E.J. Peiker on Sun May 24, 2015 9:19 am
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BlueDeuce wrote:...add a SSD for the OS ...
He already has an SSD for the OS ;)
 

by Kim on Sun May 24, 2015 6:49 pm
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Hey EJ he suggested adding an extra SSD as a scratch disc for Photoshop.....not for the OS
 

by E.J. Peiker on Sun May 24, 2015 8:53 pm
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Kim wrote:Hey EJ he suggested adding an extra SSD as a scratch disc for Photoshop.....not for the OS
See the quoted text, he obviously edited his post after mine ;)
 

by BlueDeuce on Mon May 25, 2015 7:05 pm
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E.J. Peiker wrote:
Kim wrote:Hey EJ he suggested adding an extra SSD as a scratch disc for Photoshop.....not for the OS
See the quoted text, he obviously edited his post after mine ;)
Actually I edited it about a minute of my initial post.  Not sure why it stayed as is.
Mike
 

by E.J. Peiker on Mon May 25, 2015 8:01 pm
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No problem :) my answer posted just two minutes after yours so it just hadn't propagated yet.
 

by Charlie Woodrich on Tue May 26, 2015 5:21 pm
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I'm not processing huge files so I believe a 512GB SSD is big enough for both the OS and the scratch disc for PS.  Am I wrong?
 

by E.J. Peiker on Tue May 26, 2015 5:45 pm
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Charlie Woodrich wrote:I'm not processing huge files so I believe a 512GB SSD is big enough for both the OS and the scratch disc for PS.  Am I wrong?
It will be fine.  you would gain a little bit of performance by having a second smaller SSD set up for caching but it's by no means a necessity.
 

by Charlie Woodrich on Tue May 26, 2015 6:09 pm
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Thanks!  My performance is fine now but I have a 120 SSD, which I thought would be plenty in 2011 but I'm continually cleaning it up to keep it below the 90% level, so I had to switch my PS scratch drive to the data drive. 
 

by E.J. Peiker on Tue May 26, 2015 6:27 pm
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So why not install that old 120GB as a seperate scratch disk drive?
 

by Charlie Woodrich on Wed May 27, 2015 7:14 am
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E.J. Peiker wrote:So why not install that old 120GB as a seperate scratch disk drive?
Well the data drive is over 66%, and I'll have to deal with that in the next year. Another minor annoyance is the only USB 3.0 ports are on the back on the unit so every time I want to use them I have to get on my knees with a flashlight.  And last but not least I have some money burning a hole in my pocket and the time seems right to upgrade. 8)
 

by E.J. Peiker on Wed May 27, 2015 8:10 am
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Install the old SSD internally.  Given your system specs you should have plenty of SATA ports available.  Then format it and point Photoshop to it for its scratch drive.  This is actually all very simple to do.
 

by Mike in O on Wed May 27, 2015 8:44 am
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Charlie Woodrich wrote:
E.J. Peiker wrote:So why not install that old 120GB as a seperate scratch disk drive?
Well the data drive is over 66%, and I'll have to deal with that in the next year. Another minor annoyance is the only USB 3.0 ports are on the back on the unit so every time I want to use them I have to get on my knees with a flashlight.  And last but not least I have some money burning a hole in my pocket and the time seems right to upgrade. 8)
Get a 3.0 extension :) and never use your flashlight again 
 

by E.J. Peiker on Wed May 27, 2015 10:26 am
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He doesn't need it. The SSD will have a SATA port if you take it out of it's housing (assuming it is external since we wouldn't even be talking about USB if it was internal). All you need to do is to take the SSD out of its housing and connect it to a SATA port on the inside of the machine. Like I said, it couldn't be any easier. :)
 

by ronzie on Wed May 27, 2015 5:50 pm
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By investing a powered (with its own power supply)USB3 hub you can bring the ports out front in a convenient location. Keep the PC to hub cable as short as you can.

http://www.microcenter.com/product/3645 ... RRWidgetID

is brand Trendnet which I've used in the past at my workplace. Note the reviews on this product. About $40 normal price for this.

In some cases it may make a difference on which PC port you use for this hub depending on the motherboard. It has to do with the motherboard controller chip layering flow.
 

by ronzie on Wed May 27, 2015 6:05 pm
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I know I'll get a difference of opinion on this but I would not use an SSD as a scratch disk. They have a limited number of writes to each block of memory. Spare blocks are contained on the disk as substitutes with more spares as the price increases. The on board disk electronics takes care of remapping for blocks no longer usable. It might take quite a while but eventually you will run out of spares.

Most of the Win O/S files are permanent so O/S junk (temporary) data can go to other disks or use the same SSD as that amount of data change should be minimal.

One advantage of Linux and derivative type systems is that the user has control of where folders of different type of data can be placed beyond what Win offers. Executables and system config data that is seldom changed can go to the SSD with other frequently changed data going to a suitable hard disk or RAID set up for performance.
 

by ChrisRoss on Wed May 27, 2015 6:24 pm
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I would suggest the socket 2011 processor is overkill from a purely PS perspective as it gets its grunt from multiple processors, this benchmark shows a CS6 benchmark score:

http://us.hardware.info/productgroup/3/ ... estresults

you may have to select the PS test from the drop down.  Score for the i7 5820 is 21 sec and the i7 4790 is 22 sec.  You are paying more for the processor, the DDR4 RAM and the board compared to a socket 1150 processor.   The reason is down to threading capability of PS.  Now if you have another use with applications that are well threaded or want to do tasks in the BG while working on PS it may be a different story.

regarding the SSD yes they have limited read writes but there is software which spreads this load and your mother board is unlikely to outlast the SSD.  Windows uses its own scratch file which locates to c: by default, with prices for SSDs coming down it is well worth using them for scratch for the speed benefits.
Chris Ross
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