Building a Lightroom PC

I can't imagine spending $6000 on a computer for editing photos and then saying "It also means I don't plan to buy and meticulously use a color calibration device". My computer might not be half as fast, but at least I know my blues are the shade of blue I think they are.

I use both Lightroom and Darktable regularly.<p>While DT has a bit more bumpy UX, it makes up for that by being more flexible than LR and really fast on Linux with a good GPU with OpenCL support. And there is nothing that LR can do that DT can&#x27;t.<p>I.e. you don&#x27;t need to shell out 6k for new box to make LR run fast. Just bite the bullet and learn another RAW editing app.<p>If you have thousands (or ten thousands, in my case) worth of RAWs processed in LR, just keep editing them in LR if you still have to. I often hear this as a reason why people don&#x27;t want to switch.<p>I switched to DT in 2011. Everything before is LR. I use LR when I get images from friends who use LR and want me to do some advanced stuff for them or when I have to touch one of my pre-2011 RAWs. It is always slow on the same machine, compared to DT, but it&#x27;s quite ok if you use it occasionally. :)

N.B.: the &quot;switch to Windows&quot; is from macOS and not from Linux, just in case anyone was wondering. I think it&#x27;s very interesting that the availability of Linux on Windows helped the author choose Windows.

Paul, did you consider buying an existing workstation like the HP Z840 ( <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.hp.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;en&#x2F;mdp&#x2F;business-solutions&#x2F;z840-workstation" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;store.hp.com&#x2F;us&#x2F;en&#x2F;mdp&#x2F;business-solutions&#x2F;z840-workst...</a> ) or similar?<p>I did this a number of years ago and never regretted it and dual-Xeon has really helped with DxO PhotoLab and Adobe Lightroom processing time (compared to all the other computers I had access to).<p>Even years later I still believe that this is performing better than something I could&#x27;ve built myself. I think of computers like cars, in that if you upgrade 1 part significantly for performance (i.e. the engine) that it forces upgrades to everything else (i.e. brakes, chassis, cooling). A pre-built workstation balances all of these things to give one package where all of the potential is achievable.

I&#x27;m leaning in the same direction myself. My 2017 MBP Pro has been a disappointment. The touch bar is a nuisance. The excessively large trackpad leads to a lot of phantom taps, and I&#x27;m <i>still</i> using adapters to plug things into it.<p>Since I&#x27;m wrapping up the last of my iOS client work there&#x27;s nothing really tying me to macOS any more and a PC seems to provide way more bang for the buck for the things I care about - Android Studio, VS Code, Ableton Live, ZBrush, and a bit of gaming here and there. Apple&#x27;s hardware playbook for the last few years seems to consist entirely of making things thinner for thinness&#x27; sake and making piecewise upgrades harder and harder.

This seems like <i>massive</i> overkill, but it doesn&#x27;t look like OP actually cared about money, given the $400 VESA mount and the $159 (wat) custom PSU cables. Also surprising that one would spend that much money only to get a little bose speaker.<p>But if ya can afford it, more power to you.

&gt; PCPartPicker.com is one relatively new resource that I have found to be invaluable.<p>Just the greatest site ever, if you&#x27;re into building your own PCs. Fun to browse other builds, and then it makes it so simple to put together a system.

One thing to keep in mind: Disabling UAC is a VERY BAD IDEA. No matter how you look at it. Look at it this way, if you do that, then any moderately smart ransomware will be able to do wonders on your PC.<p>That&#x27;s reminiscent of a 4chan post where the user downloads a program, tries to execute, is then warned by Firefox, but ignores it, warned by the AV Software, but disables it, warned by Defender, and disabled, and finally warned by UAC and disables it, only to get it infected and flame away because Windows sucks.

I&#x27;ve had similar a experience doing Android Development. I much prefer OS X over Windows 10 for doing work, but performance can be a real issue.<p>Over time, and with every new yearly incremental software refresh, compile times on my MacBook getting slower and slower, it started to hurt productivity. So looking at options for new hardware, I realized I could either spend $3000 on a new Mac, that on paper might not even be that much faster then my current machine, or just throw together a PC from components for a bit over $1000 and get a much faster machine.<p>There is just no good Mac option if you&#x27;re looking for a simple i7, 32GB RAM, 256 SSD for a reasonable price.

So, the main reason he switched to a Windows machine was to use the latest&#x2F;fastest hardware with Adobe Lightroom and Premiere, but then he goes on to say the Lightroom and Premiere don’t take advantage of many core CPUs, the fastest GPUs, fastest SSDs, etc...<p>And Windows is fine after tweaking and adjusting dozens of settings.<p>I’ll just stick with a Mac.

This is a brilliant post. The ability to navigate around the article easily and then parachute into a section and revel in detail is beautifully executed. Using links to add asides is another excellent touch.<p>When scowls complain that the Web is crap, this is where you take them to see what the Web could in fact be.

I love the detail that the author goes into, it&#x27;s a nice change of pace from the normal articles on the web. His travel photography is also stunning, almost makes me want to do something with my travel photos as well, but once I see how much time he puts in, I think I&#x27;m not going to do it until I&#x27;m well retired.<p>At any rate, I&#x27;m glad he enjoys what he&#x27;s doing and shares i with the world, the photography really gives an effect of how he saw it, which is all to rare with people&#x27;s vacation photos.

Word of caution 4K@27&quot; is still pretty terrible in Windows. It&#x27;s fine if you stay in specific apps for 99% of the time (such as a cad workstation or a Lightroom machine as in this case) but 27 requires scaling and many apps simply don&#x27;t scale well.<p>The &quot;simple&quot; solution is to run 4K at 32&quot; or larger where you can run att 100% scaling. Unfortunately, if you want a screen with decent color you are adding serious money to get to 4k@32&quot;.

[offtopic] show me a 1080ti for $799 and I&#x27;ll buy it on the spot.<p>Effing miners devoured everything even for twice the price...

Well, if you think water cooling is cool, try passive cooling.<p>A few years back I build my current PC:<p>- Core i7-4770S (Haswell, so you see its not that new anymore)<p>- 32GB RAM<p>- SSD 840 EVO 1TB (not that new either)<p>- some passive PSU<p>Last year I added an<p>- AMD Radeon 460<p>So the whole thing is completely passively cooled.<p>So no noise at all and I am pretty happy with the performance. I don&#x27;t know what &#x27;instant&#x27; performance in Lightroom means, but so far my experience with Darktable was just fine (actually, I was wondering why some options have a &#x27;slow&#x27; or &#x27;fast&#x27; suffix). That said, I am just a casual Darktable user, so I take all my photos in RAW and JPG and view them most of the time in the JPG version, but when I would like to create a photo calendar of some sort I use Darktable to get the most out of the pictures.<p>The only downside is that hardware doesn&#x27;t age that good :-&#x2F;<p><pre><code> $ grep -m1 bugs &#x2F;proc&#x2F;cpuinfo bugs : cpu_meltdown spectre_v1 spectre_v2</code></pre>

Both me and my wife recently realized something: the JPEG produced by the Pentax cameras we own are 90% of the time better than what we achieve with hours of raw conversion tweaking.<p>Given that I&#x27;m not doing retouching most of the time, dealing with raw files becoming more and more a pain, without an actual gain.<p>Had anyone else thought about this?

A lot of the photos are great! And a lot of them..meh. Which is fine! I&#x27;m no star shooter, and far be it from me to judge someone wanting to show off their holiday. But he&#x27;s spent an inordinate amount of time editing quite a bit of photos that surely could be left on the hard drive, or simply given a batch auto-touch-up by Lightroom in a matter of hours. And it&#x27;s even stranger that the hobby would drive him to such a monumental and costly upgrade.

Looks like he built a really fancy and nice gaming machine. Makes sense to switch to Windows if you are a gamer.

The setup is nice but I&#x27;m long over the tower on the floor. I actually wanted to go back to the start of my computing journey (Commodore128, then 286, etc) and get a desktop[0] again.<p>It&#x27;s very unfortunate that while Intel was still probably the right call for Adobe software, the I&#x2F;O impact on from Intel&#x27;s Meltdown patches are going to be significant on that machine. Once it all settles down and is finalized in a few months that is.<p>As well, the watercooling thing was pretty neat back in at the turn of the millenium. That&#x27;s when the Celeron 300A and custom machined watercooling was big. I lost interest once CPUs became mostly no longer thermally limited (exception for Intel&#x27;s current CPUs with the +~18C IHS issues). In general I prefer air cooling because I tend to always go for simplicity. A fan on a chunk of metal is pretty easy to troubleshoot and repair upon failure and reliable.<p>I did get my 80&#x27;s form factor desktop again. I built a Ryzen system[1] back in March 2017, the first new computer I put together since 2008 and I love it. I get by at least.<p>[0]Back in the day, horizontal desktops were referred to as desktops and towers were towers.<p>[1]<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;JpgeAje.jpg" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;JpgeAje.jpg</a>

There are lot and lot of advices in this article you SHOULD PRECISELY NOT FOLLOW when you build an editing PC.<p>&gt; Watercooling<p>Watercooling addicts will try to argue that you can achieve a better cooling performance than with aircooling. The truth is that watercooling is at best only 1 or 2 degrees cooler than a proper aircooling system, or even worse in some tests. Then they will argue that watercooling provide a better performance&#x2F;silence ratio, which also falls short when you consider that top aircooling systems are basically dead silent. You really don&#x27;t want to deal with water in your PC (even with all-in-one systems) for nothing to gain.<p>&gt; Not using a calibration device<p>I don&#x27;t even understand how you can come up with the idea of writing an article about building a PC for photography&#x2F;video editing while you don&#x27;t already use and don&#x27;t even plan to use a calibration device. The point is not even if you plan to publish, print or whatever, what is at stake is the way you view your own images. And there is ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE in buying a top of the line monitor if you don&#x27;t calibrate it.<p>&gt; Buying the best performing components<p>For 60-70% of the price of the top of the line product, you will get 95-99% of the performance of it. The same best performing product will anyway be &quot;obsolete&quot; (compared to the new best performing product) in a couple months and its price will drop 20-30%. This has always been true and will always be true for any PC building. This is even more true for an editing station since the top of the line will not even give you the 1-5% performance benefit you should expect.<p>&gt; Buying a gaming video card<p>Particularly the top of the line. Your editing software will never use the processor and the memory that comes with such a gaming video card. And only pro cards will provide you 10-bit workflow, which is what you need if you bought an editing monitor with 10-bit panel and 99-100% Adobe coverage. You can buy an entry-level pro card, it will be more than enough for Lightroom&#x2F;Capture One&#x2F;Photoshop&#x2F;Premiere&#x2F;etc. IF you don&#x27;t buy a pro card, then why do you buy such a monitor?<p>&gt; Bothering with huge overclocking or with RAM latencies (!)<p>I agree it&#x27;s quite easy now to do some overclocking, but you should not aim for the extreme. It&#x27;s your work machine, you want stability.<p>&gt; Delidding your CPU<p>What?! Just don&#x27;t that. Let&#x27;s be serious a minute.

&gt; I wanted to place the more active drive that I would install the OS on there, and leave the less active Lightroom scratch drive in the standalone M.2 slot.<p>&gt; I couldn&#x27;t quickly ascertain how each slot was identified in the UEFI and I didn&#x27;t want to mistake installing Windows on the wrong drive. To solve this I only installed the SSD under the heatsink first and would install the other one after I had Windows up and running.<p>I&#x27;ve found this to be the best way to install Windows whatever the circumstance as it will often install the bootloader on whatever the BIOS says is attached to slot 0 and then the rest of the operating system to the disk you specified.<p>By only having one disk installed you save the hassle of sorting it out later.

It was also a good investment. After recent spike in RAM and GPU prices he can sell it and make good money.

I use Lightroom in VirtualBox which seems to work ok for me<p>(I don&#x27;t really do that much fiddling with the photos though).<p>The photos are actually stored on my Linux filesystem and provided to Windows via VirtualBox&#x27;s file sharing feature.<p>And then I just rsync the photos to a backup computer.

I believe Capture One Pro will take better advantage of all that hardware than LightRoom.

This is really interesting. Reminds me to a degree of John Siracusa&#x27;s OSX reviews. I am struck by how customizable windows is. Is it possible to customize osx to such a degree?

Great write up, and incredibly impressed with your post on New Zealand.<p>I recently upgraded from a 5d2 to a Mark4, and the integration with the iphone made for an interesting workflow. As I shoot, I take mental notes about what type of adjustments I&#x27;ll make in post processing, and with Lightroom Mobile, I was able to take a handful of shots, and share them via social media.<p>I&#x27;m considering switching a workflow from my heavy duty gaming rig, to using something like a Surface Pro.

Great article. I have almost the exact same components and I&#x27;ll definetly get use of the overclocking segment when I get around to it.<p>Why did you go with a water cooler?

Is it really worth using 6K on a non work PC, even if you have the extra cash?<p>I think, personally, I would prefer a 3K machine that I replaced twich as often.

What I want to know about is that lovely desk

Question for Paul, if you could use a Windows machine for work, would you? If not, why?

Anyone can be an amazing photographer - but there is a distinction between a camera nut, and a photographer, to this end, Ken Rockwell makes a really interesting point:<p>&quot;You need to learn to see and compose. The more time you waste worrying about your equipment the less time you&#x27;ll have to put into creating great images. Worry about your images, not your equipment.&quot;<p><a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kenrockwell.com&#x2F;tech&#x2F;notcamera.htm" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.kenrockwell.com&#x2F;tech&#x2F;notcamera.htm</a><p>You can guess which category I feel this fellow falls into.<p>I hope he got a great deal of pleasure building his system - it does look very impressive (if not downright pretty), but it doesn&#x27;t make me think any more, or less of his photography.

Isn&#x27;t this a good use case for the iMac Pro?

<i>Then I installed my essentials:</i><p>Atom text editor (Give vsCode a try too). Also look at FileSearchEX, the proper way to find files.

<i>I have little use for any of the features included in Windows 10 Pro</i><p>Except securing it with Software Restriction Polices.

very nice and informative... i also think you like to write a lot :D

Step 1. Be wealthy :P<p>I am always enamored with the simplicity of one&#x27;s living space being directly proportional to wealth. I try hard to not have much stuff, but my living options are seemingly always going to be working class style places with pretty much the antithesis of what is apparent in this photo.<p>Of course the camera lies, and I shouldn&#x27;t compare my insides to some else&#x27;s outsides. There&#x27;s probably a new puppy being paper trained just behind the camera, or a bunch of pocket change and random pens in a pile usually on that desk, but I do lament that I may never have such a simple, clean, and uncluttered living space. The spaces I may ever have will have things like unvaulted ceilings, windowsills, trim, standard door size passages between rooms, probably <i>carpet</i> heh...<p>I do wonder if such things prevent clarity of thought.

Not related to the blog post, but I think Paul has one of the best looking personal websites on the web. Simple and clear, but very delightful to read. Also he has amazing travel posts with nice photos. For example, his Japan post triggered me to travel to Japan three years ago. Keep up the good work Paul.

Paul (and anyone else who uses Sony cameras) I would like to suggest that you test out Capture One for processing your RAW files.<p>I have found it does a better job of handling the Sony files than just about anything else. Also is GPU accelerated.<p>My experience is based on the Sony RX10 files, and a friend of mine who uses it for handling his A7Rii files.<p>A free version is available for use with Sony RAWs; or you can upgrade to the full version of the software at a low price. Just a happy user, I have no financial interest in the company.

The first item in the ‘Tweaking Windows’ section is <i>Disable User Account Control</i>. Can someone share a clear explanation of what this means and the nature of the risks involved?

The only issue I have with this glorious build is the totally inadequate Apple keyboard. It doesn&#x27;t have so many keys I need to be productive. Not to mention it&#x27;s simply too small to use. Also it fits in with the rest of his setup like an apple in a bucket of oranges.<p>Also, OP should take a look at VS code. It integrates very well with GNU&#x2F;Windows.

Really expected more when i read the title. It&#x27;s a stretch to call this a &quot;water-cooled machine&quot;, when it&#x27;s just one all-in-one CPU cooler.<p>Water-cooled machine should be a custom loop. It&#x27;s a lot more hassle, but that&#x27;s exactly why it&#x27;s interesting. All-in-one systems are just like traditional air systems with big radiators, the only big difference is that you can move the radiator around.