The Byte Shot

This was a really fun thing to hunt down for Joanie. Color as you all know is so important, and you want the beautiful tones you meticulously adjust to look just the way they should when printed or sent across the internet and around the world. Good monitors that can do 10 bit true color and 4k can get Crazy expensive but this is an excellent and affordable choice for professional use. Make sure your video card supports 4k and 10 bit color to make the most of this monitor.

Dell Ultra HD 4K Monitor P2415Q

If you are not on SSD drives get on them now! They make such a difference when working with large files. You really need 1 for your System (Windows I presume as Macs come standard with SSD’s these days) and whatever applications you run. If you can afford it I highly recommend getting a second SSD for your media and project files. If you still have a little scratch left after those get a cheap but reliable traditional hard drive for storage and backup.

Joanie keeps all her non-current project data on a 4TB SATA drive and then moves it over to the 1 TB SSD when she is ready to make it the current work in progress.

There is a great deal on Amazon right now for Samsung 860 EVO 1 gig SSD Drives Buy 2 today!

*Nerd Alert* Keep an eye M.2 NVMe SSD drive technology that promises to be the next level of speed in hard drives. Any of the newer motherboards should have a m.2 slot on them. Prices are really coming down lately for these drives so it may be something to plan on if your motherboard has the right socket and you see an upgrade in your not too distant future. This is actually a pretty good price on a NVMe SSD drive.

But what do you need? AMD or Intel? The question engenders hotly worded arguments among fans of either side. I am not a partisan in the Intel vs. AMD fight though. If you find a good deal on a decent AMD chip, run with that. Your AMD machine is going to crunch through your work every bit as well as those Intel chips at a significant savings for all but certain specialized tasks and even then you will not be left drumming our fingers wishing we had chosen the other chip.

Cores are all the rage in CPU design these days and all the new and quite expensive chips are just bristling with cores. You could easily be misled into thinking that 16 cores will be twice as fast as one having 8 but it doesn’t really work that way. If you are looking (like I was), to build a great system at a reasonable price, this is where the law of diminishing returns starts to kick you in the wallet. Like other components, software and other hardware are all working in concert and Photoshop, Premiere, etc. are just not designed to utilize all that potential. To maximize you dollars for photo and video work with Adobe products, just be sure you have a 6 or 8 core chip. If you are Scrooge McDuck, go bananas! 12, 15, 30 cores!!! You will see a small increases as you move up the processor ladder. But for the rest of us I will say the real world performance increase is probably not worth the expense for anything over 8 cores. Go buy a new lense instead.

If you are thinking it may be time to upgrade your processor I will say that for now the i7 line of processors seems to be the best budget buy for Intel and the Ryzen 7 series for AMD.

Here is a pretty nice deal on an 8 core Intel i7 processor

Or if you want to go AMD, this is a good value For a Ryzen 7 2700x 8 cores.

Reasonable Exceptions:

If you are going to do a lot of 4k video with lots of filters, titles, 3D animation and post-production then yes a more cutting edge generation of processor with 10 or more cores is likely going to be a fair investment for you that saves you a little time with all that rendering.

If the above sounds like you, and you want that next step up in performance then you will be looking at Intel i9 series chips or AMD Threadrippers. Again, just to warn you for the extra expense you will see only the barest increase in performance in Photoshop or Light Room, but there will be a reasonably good performance boost rendering video with these chips.

Motherboards are hard to shop for. Just be sure it is compatible with the Case you intend to install it in. Motherboards have differing sizes or “form factors” which may not fit in certain cases. Also check compatibility with the CPU and RAM that you have picked out. Look for the right speed of USB ports, (probably 3.1 gen2), Gigabit LAN or wireless Ethernet if you plan to tether wirelessly to your camera (Joanie just uses a long USB cord and is quite happy with that), 4 x SATA III 6.0 Gbps ports at least (for your hard drives to plug into), and you will likely want some kind of onboard sound (most will have this by default). Look for a major brand like ASUS, Gigabit, MSI or Intel with good reviews from your preferred parts vendor and you can’t go too wrong. Just remember that gamers are the ones who drive the market on all these components and you don’t need half of the features included on many of the more expensive motherboards so don’t feel pressured to spend a lot.

*Nerd Alert* Don’t let the gaming nerds around you talk you into overclocking, or buying parts targeted at overclockers. It can sometimes make your computer a little faster, but at the price of stability and I am guessing you are trying to run a business here not a Cheeto and Jolt fueled all-night LAN party.

Honestly, Video cards are not as helpful in editing video in Adobe products as one might think and does very little for you most of the time in Light Room or Photoshop. If you are editing video in certain other packages and maybe doing some 3D modeling and design too then yes, there are other programs out there that are written to move the processing load from the CPU (where Adobe products rest the bulk of it) to the video card’s graphics processors. For now, don’t go crazy here. A decent mid-tier gaming card will be great for most. Just be sure it has support for multiple monitors on the back and one of them should be a “DisplayPort 1.4” plug. Do be sure to check the specs to be sure that it will have capacity for higher end 4K monitors.

Something like this will work quite nicely for a user who will be primarily using Photoshop and Light Room: EVGA GTX 1060 SC

If you want something a little beefier for video work, the card I got Joanie is still quite competitive in price and performance: EVGA GeForce GTX 1070

I sprung for this RAM because at the time it was a good deal even though it is fancier than Joanie really needs. This is another place where manufacturers of hardware squeeze the duckets out of you selling you more than you really need; and they can get away with it because RAM is confusing to shop for. You get these long strings of numbers that don’t seem to make any sense and confuse you as to what the heck you are getting. Check the specs of your motherboard to be sure, but for a desktop what you almost certainly need is “288-Pin DDR4”. And in a speed of at least 2666Mhz.  Don’t spend a kit of extra money just to get RAM that is 3600MHz or 42000MHz + if you don’t have to. You can catch these things on sale for cheap sometimes and that is fine, but speed tests by the experts show that there is very little benefit to paying more for ram faster than 2666MHz.

Let is come down to what you can find a good deal on. Again, look at reviews to be sure that reliability won’t be an issue. You should be just fine with any of the major brands, Corsair, G.Skill, Patriot, OCZ, etc.

As for how much ram you need, I’d recommend no more than 32GB and honestly 16GB would probably suit most just fine. It doesn’t really matter if you do this in a single stick or in multiples (1x16GB or 2x8GB or 4x4GB) the main thing is to know that if you use up all the slots on your motherboard you may have compatibility issues when you upgrade in the future.

Here is a good deal on 2 sticks of 8GB ram if you want to upgrade to 16GB

Here is a good deal on 2 sticks of 16GB ram if you want to upgrade to 32GB*

*You could just buy 4 of the 8GB sticks from the link above, but this will give you a little more elbow room if you are the paranoid type like me that thinks maybe someday you will want to upgrade to 64GB even though you know you probably never will.

This little case slips into the empty blanks on the front of the computer and is a pretty cool place to put all those tiny memory cards. I always wanted one but my computer won’t fit it so I got one for Joanie. That’s how love works!

I got this front mounting card reader so Joanie would stop borrowing my portable USB one. If you get one make sure it is USB 3.0 at least. These will need to be connected to your motherboard so don’t get one of these unless you are 1) Comfortable cracking open your computer and 2) Know you have a space for it both in the array of 5.25” bays on the front of your computer’s case and the necessary connection ports free on your motherboard inside.

Why did I get this water cooling system for Joanie’s PC? Well, here is a secret about Joanie you may not know. She… Hears… Everything! Seriously it is freakish how sensitive her hearing is. I may be chewing gum four rooms away and she will hear and be deeply annoyed by it! So, instead of having a big fan whirring noisily away cooling the CPU of the computer that sits right next to her all day, I got this super quiet water cooling unit. Happy wife happy life. 🙂

*Nerd Alert* After a decade of watching the technology improve, this is the first time I have installed a water cooler in a PC that I have built for myself and it was super easy. The unit comes pre-charged with coolant and sealed so you don’t have to mess with any of that. However, this is something that takes a good amount of geekery to pick out (it needs to work with your case and other components) and while affixing it to the CPU is not hard, it will break your most expensive component (the CPU) if you screw it up.