Performance build

[denisl]

I'm looking to build a new system that is going to certainly be overkill for my needs.

I do some basic Adobe LR stuff and the occasional complex excel work that is cpu/memory intensive. 

Budget is to keep under $2K.  I already have gskill 4x8GB ripjaw dimms and a PNY 4GB GPU.

 

I was leaning towards AMD threadripper because it includes RAID but read that Ryzen isn't all that great for LR.

The Intel 2066 supports VROC RAID but this appears to be far from baked and likely will not get RAID setup out of the gate.  Also requires some RAID key that apparently doesn't exist yet.

 

I would like 2 m.2 NVMe 500/512GB drives (RAID1). 

If intel, then it would need to be Optane to support the mythical RAID.  AMD can be any NVMe and I would go with Samsung EVO.

Booting from NVMe is a must.

 

Any recommendations on which way to go?

 

 

[Streetguru]

42 minutes ago, denisl said:

 

Why RAID 1? RAID 1 is not a back up solution and likely isn't worth doing.

Lightroom seems possibly broken on Ryzen in some things given how the 1800X is behind the intel 8 cores, but tied with the desktop chips. Dunno if there's any news for an update.

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Lightroom-CC-2015-10-1-CPU-Comparison-Skylake-X-Kaby-Lake-X-Broadwell-E-Kaby-Lake-Ryzen-7-973/

Do you do anything else that would justify a 1950X? as other than lightroom it's multi-threaded performance is amazing for the money, you'd only get 10 cores from intel at the same price point if I'm not mistaken.

What's your budget? And monitor set up? And do you do any gaming?

[brob]

@denisl

 

An i7-8700K is probably the optimal cpu, see the link posted by @Streetguru. 

 

Unless there is a very high downtime cost per hour, an NVMe RAID 1 array doesn't strike me as worth the expense. You might consider instead going with a single larger drive.

[Streetguru]

1 minute ago, brob said:

@denisl

 

An i7-8700K is probably the optimal cpu, see the link posted by @Streetguru. 

 

Unless there is a very high downtime cost per hour, an NVMe RAID 1 array doesn't strike me as worth the expense. You might consider instead going with a single larger drive.

Sounds like he needs the PCI-e lanes of X299/X399 though, doesn't need the 10 core in any event. 8 core at most for just lightroom.

[brob]

Just now, Streetguru said:

Sounds like he needs the PCI-e lanes of X299/X399 though, doesn't need the 10 core in any event. 8 core at most for just lightroom.

OP will have to decide how important more PCIe lanes are. I concluded RAID 1 NVMe was not justified by the added cost. But if downtime is expensive enough, it could be. 

 

I just realized that the article link was not the one I originally considered. https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Lightroom-CC-2015-12-CPU-Performance-Core-i7-8700K-i5-8600K-i3-8350K-1056/ runs the same benchmarks with Coffee Lake cpu.

[Streetguru]

6 minutes ago, brob said:

OP will have to decide how important more PCIe lanes are. I concluded RAID 1 NVMe was not justified by the added cost. But if downtime is expensive enough, it could be. 

 

I just realized that the article link was not the one I originally considered. https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Lightroom-CC-2015-12-CPU-Performance-Core-i7-8700K-i5-8600K-i3-8350K-1056/ runs the same benchmarks with Coffee Lake cpu.

Looks like the scaling stops around the Skylake X  8 core

 

Lightroom hasn't had a major update since it's 2015 version?

[brob]

2 hours ago, Streetguru said:

Looks like the scaling stops around the Skylake X  8 core

 

Lightroom hasn't had a major update since it's 2015 version?

I believe Lightroom Classic CC has just been released. It is subscription only. Relative cpu performance does not appear any different, https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Lightroom-Classic-CC-is-it-faster-than-CC-2015-1065/.

[Streetguru]

4 minutes ago, brob said:

I believe Lightroom Classic CC has just been released. It is subscription only. Relative cpu performance does not appear any different, https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Lightroom-Classic-CC-is-it-faster-than-CC-2015-1065/.

You'd think if they hold basically a monopoly on this stuff, they could get it running well and scaling with many cores.

[brob]

1 minute ago, Streetguru said:

You'd think if they hold basically a monopoly on this stuff, they could get it running well and scaling with many cores.

Export scales well. Typically older software requires total re-engineering to exploit n cores. If a company owns most of a market there is little incentive to invest so heavily in a product. 

[denisl]

Appreciate everyone's input.  

My monitor is a LG 34" ultrawide and I do not do any gaming. 

I've read those articles on pugetsystems which is what is steering me away from AMD.

Regarding NVMe RAID1, It's more of an overkill thing but just for the fun of building redundancy in the system drive.

I have a separate system I use for backup to another computer/NAS.

 

I was thinking about the i7-7820X simply due to the specs.  4 channel memory and 28 pcie lanes.  

For the motherboard was thinking ASRock Taichi x299.

I can start with a single non raid NVMe drive and down the road when VROC gets figured out I can add it.