NEED YOUR HELP IN an ASSIGMENT

[VAP810]

I really need your help or any suggestion to build this system. Thx alot!

 ABC is a company planning to open a small branch in London, the aim of the company is to train professionals in graphic design and video editing, the company planning to run courses for the following software:

  Adobe Photoshop CC 2014

  Adobe Premiere Pro CC (2014)

  PaintShop Pro X7 Ultimate

The company approached you as computer expert and asked for help in designing and creating the specification of the 20 computers for the class room.

[spartaman64]

small company so nothing too expensive maybe a mid ranged i5 computer with a 500GB hard drive and 8GB/16GB of ram. honestly though they should get prebuilts and an IT company to manage the computers

[don_svetlio]

Without a set budget it's pointless to even try to do. Each person has a different understanding of value.

[minibois]

i5 6500 PC, with 16GB DDR4, GTX 950 or whatever GPU (because some programs like Photoshop use it and because CUDA rendering on Premiere), 256GB SSD for boot drive and the programs, another 256GB drive for files someone is working on, 2TB HDD (like a WD Black) for mass storage. silent mid tower case 

 

I would probably also think of just making some NAS system with daily backups and scrapping the HDD's entirely. 

[Electronics Wizardy]

Your buying 20 systems, your best bet is to get something like a dell precision. Why not get a 20 dell precision 3420's for about 1500 you can get them with xeon e3 1240 v5's and k1200, 256gb ssds and 16gb of ram. You also have the benifit of getting on site support so if something goes wrong, you don't have to do anything.

 

Then id get a dell t430 as a server for about 3000 to run active directory and a file server where all the file will be stored. This will make it so any person can use any computer and get the same login and files.

[NumLock21]

I don't think ABC is a small company. Wait are we talking about the same ABC?

[spartaman64]

18 minutes ago, Minibois said:

i5 6500 PC, with 16GB DDR4, GTX 950 or whatever GPU (because some programs like Photoshop use it and because CUDA rendering on Premiere), 256GB SSD for boot drive and the programs, another 256GB drive for files someone is working on, 2TB HDD (like a WD Black) for mass storage. silent mid tower case 

 

I would probably also think of just making some NAS system with daily backups and scrapping the HDD's entirely. 

i dont think they would need a ssd

 

17 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Your buying 20 systems, your best bet is to get something like a dell precision. Why not get a 20 dell precision 3420's for about 1500 you can get them with xeon e3 1240 v5's and k1200, 256gb ssds and 16gb of ram. You also have the benifit of getting on site support so if something goes wrong, you don't have to do anything.

 

Then id get a dell t430 as a server for about 3000 to run active directory and a file server where all the file will be stored. This will make it so any person can use any computer and get the same login and files.

they are teaching people how to use the programs they dont need to set up a work flow

[minibois]

6 minutes ago, spartaman64 said:

i dont think they would need a ssd

For OS and the program I do think it will be very helpful for the workflow.

[spartaman64]

4 minutes ago, Minibois said:

For OS and the program I do think it will be very helpful for the workflow.

they are just teaching people they dont need to set up a full editing workflow 

[Electronics Wizardy]

1 minute ago, spartaman64 said:

they are teaching people how to use the programs they dont need to set up a work flow

As a buiness yould be crazy to build your own systems or to not run ad. Diy systems might be cheaper, but support costs more. Also ad is nice as you can monitor you users and keep there files separate.

[spartaman64]

4 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

As a buiness yould be crazy to build your own systems or to not run ad. Diy systems might be cheaper, but support costs more. Also ad is nice as you can monitor you users and keep there files separate.

yes see my first post it is a much better idea to get prebuilts but i dont think they need quite that caliber of hard ware nor can they afford it

[MilfShake]

Budget? And the end goal of these systems: to be budget friendly or to render as fast as possible?

 

The 2 most important information and you didn't provide.

[minibois]

6 minutes ago, spartaman64 said:

they are just teaching people they dont need to set up a full editing workflow 

Yeah, they are teaching people thus it would be nice if a new group of people come in for a class, they can just start the PC up, it boots in 20 seconds, they start their program (Photoshop or Premiere or whatever) and it opens in a second. They have to get a file because that is the lesson of the week, they can easily grab it off the NAS and put it on their second SSD (which I would recommend would be wiped everytime the PC shuts off) and they can just do their lesson on that piece without slow copy times or whatever.. Maybe not that because it's coming from a NAS, but I hope you get where I'm coming from with this

[Mark77]

Cheapest and probably easiest to maintain -- 20 NUCs.  No real need here for full-sized desktops.  The NUCs can be screwed right to the back of the monitors through the VESA mounts provided. 

 

The NUCs can have SSDs installed into them, or you can remote boot them through iSCSI to a server with a few 1Tb SSDs to provide the space required. 

 

On the server side, you could even use bcache and SSD caching of HDDs. 

[Electronics Wizardy]

2 minutes ago, Minibois said:

Yeah, they are teaching people thus it would be nice if a new group of people come in for a class, they can just start the PC up, it boots in 20 seconds, they start their program (Photoshop or Premiere or whatever) and it opens in a second. They have to get a file because that is the lesson of the week, they can easily grab it off the NAS and put it on their second SSD (which I would recommend would be wiped everytime the PC shuts off) and they can just do their lesson on that piece without slow copy times or whatever.. Maybe not that because it's coming from a NAS, but I hope you get where I'm coming from with this

Active directory and group policy my friend. You can store the userprofiles on the server and nothing on the base system.

[spartaman64]

6 minutes ago, Minibois said:

Yeah, they are teaching people thus it would be nice if a new group of people come in for a class, they can just start the PC up, it boots in 20 seconds, they start their program (Photoshop or Premiere or whatever) and it opens in a second. They have to get a file because that is the lesson of the week, they can easily grab it off the NAS and put it on their second SSD (which I would recommend would be wiped everytime the PC shuts off) and they can just do their lesson on that piece without slow copy times or whatever.. Maybe not that because it's coming from a NAS, but I hope you get where I'm coming from with this

or just leave the PC on. and yes i understand where you are coming from but 256GB for 20 machines imo is too expensive to justify the benefits. and they can probably preload the lesson files on the computers and save money on not getting a server

[Linky]

I would say a average Xeon cpu around 200$-300$ then a 1tb we blue hdd with a gtx 950 maybe a micro atx motherboard with a small case like the nano s so the computers don't take up too much room

[SeanAngelo]

19 minutes ago, VAP810 said:

I really need your help or any suggestion to build this system. Thx alot!

 ABC is a company planning to open a small branch in London, the aim of the company is to train professionals in graphic design and video editing, the company planning to run courses for the following software:

  Adobe Photoshop CC 2014

  Adobe Premiere Pro CC (2014)

  PaintShop Pro X7 Ultimate

The company approached you as computer expert and asked for help in designing and creating the specification of the 20 computers for the class room.

is there a budget assigned?

[spartaman64]

also are the monitors, keyboards, mice needed also

[minibois]

7 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

Active directory and group policy my friend. You can store the userprofiles on the server and nothing on the base system.

Yeah, that's possible too. But that just depends on the company, if they want to give people their own profile or just have standard accounts which get wiped or whatever

6 minutes ago, spartaman64 said:

or just leave the PC on. and yes i understand where you are coming from but 256GB for 20 machines imo is too expensive to justify the benefits. and they can probably preload the lesson files on the computers and save money on not getting a server

Just kind of depends on the budget they have. Maybe their budget is twice of that what I suggest, or maybe it's half. I just made a suggestion on what I thought would be a good options for a build that can be upgraded or downgraded easily (What I mean by that is that if it's too expensive, he can substitute the i5 for an i3, 16GB RAM for 8GB RAM and indeed, choose to go for the two SSD's I suggested or just 1)

And you don't know the 'workflow' of their lessons. Maybe people come into the building for a lesson right after people leave from their lesson. If you have to, in the meantime, load up the lesson files on 20 different PC's it can be kind of... Well just not a good way of working

[Klasta]

In all honesty, the only serious way to do this is by using Active Directory. I'm a bit rusty the subject so you'd have to ask someone else about the hardware (maybe ask over at Servers and NAS).
Just keep in mind that in any business, power consumption becomes something you will have to deal with as it could end up costing you way more money in the long run. Noise will also be a deal breaker if you're trying to teach a class.

[brob]

Agreed on using units from a reputable company like Dell. Should have a discreet gpu.

 

MS server based LAN to simplify security and workstation management.

 

Smallish ssd on workstations. Added speed means faster workstation reconfigs, much better classroom experience, and less course time wasted waiting for i/o completes.

 

[VAP810]

Srry guys i forgot about the budget. He said that the budget is around 1000-1500$.

[brob]

31 minutes ago, VAP810 said:

Srry guys i forgot about the budget. He said that the budget is around 1000-1500$.

Presumably that is per workstation. A little tight if that includes peripherals.

[VAP810]

On 7/1/2016 at 0:44 AM, Mark77 said:

Cheapest and probably easiest to maintain -- 20 NUCs.  No real need here for full-sized desktops.  The NUCs can be screwed right to the back of the monitors through the VESA mounts provided. 

 

The NUCs can have SSDs installed into them, or you can remote boot them through iSCSI to a server with a few 1Tb SSDs to provide the space required. 

 

On the server side, you could even use bcache and SSD caching of HDDs. 

Not bad, but i'm still wondering about its power,cause we're talking about graphics program here.