1. Pieces Of kit to buy:
I've read online that the first thing you should start with is picking your processor chip followed by motherboard, but like most photographers, we see aesthetics first. So before we get to the guts lets take a look at the shell.
Ladies and gentlemen if you have never seen or heard of this computer case before let me introduce you to the NZXT Phantom410 midtower computer case. When I first saw this case it was lust at first sight. I just knew we had to be together. For those of you in your early thirties or older, this case just screams Star Wars Stormtrooper. With the sleek lines and hints of blue led case and fan lights, omg. This case comes standard with 3 fans. I know for sure the exhaust fan is located in the very back of the case. Upfront, in the black grated area there is an in take. There is also a top fan, but I'm not sure if this fan is an exhaust or intake. There's also room in the case to add another 3 fans is you so please. At this point the pc seems to run pretty ok with the 3 standard but I plan on adding more as i become more comfortable with going in and out of the case. The case also comes stock with a built in 3 speed fan controller and 2 usb3.0 ports and 2 usb 2.0 ports on the top of the case located along the right most black strip. If you want to find out more about this B.A.C. please google or youtube or keyword search phantom410. There is a ton of information out there on this model and other nzxt products.
Ok, so lets get back to the internals, drool session is over.
Sorry turned into a rant, see the next paragraph skip to next paragraph if your not in the mood
So next I did some research on what motherboard. Of course 99.99% of my case yielded results of overclockers and other prepubescence touting their all knowing info of gaming mods and overclocking and 20 other terms that I really have no idea of what the hell they're talking about. So thankfully my keyword searching finally yielded a photographer, yeah get this a photographer who built his pc to use to run Photoshop. You would be surprised how far and few photographers actually build there own machines or at least share the info. It kinda felt like trying to find a needle in a haystack. I'm guessing most photographers don't want the headache of dealing with camera gear, equip, models clients etc.. than to have to come home and update bios and trouble shoot computer hardware. I also understand that is the reason why most people prefer Macs. Macs, well they just work. I however am an adventurous soul, which could still prove costly and disastrous if things die prematurely or go wrong. My logic is this. I really don't have the money to buy a mac to the standards of this machine and if I do it will be to the standards of a machine that may get by for a while but then I'll still need to upgrade. But with price set aside I love macs but at heart I'm a die hard pc guy. Now My other option was to do dell again. For the machine I wanted dell was about 9-$1100 dollars out of my price range and still didn't offer a lot of the things found in a custom build. I also figured if something went wrong with my dell pc or died I would still have to play the shuffle back and forth and tech support game. Which shipping a 25-30lb pc back and forth and waiting for tech support to come and not be able to fix the problem on site priceless. So I guess I'll take my chances with me and also turn it into a learning experience. Ok I've gone off on a tangent again. I call this long winded paragraph a rant.
Mother Board
So I picked the Msi-Z77A-GD65 Motherboard. This will be the heart of my system. This board is able to hold a total at this point (which will more than likely be obsolete by this time next year-2013) 32gigs of ram. I hear the d600 and or d800 runs perfectly fine on about 8-12gigs, so with ram being cheap I decided to throw caution to the wind and instead of getting a solid state drive, throw the extra money into memory. As they say you can never have enough memory with Photoshop, and this will also come in handy as I plan on doing some video editing once I get the new camera. But I can't stress enough how much I love this board and its fairly easy to follow and simple bios and utility settings.
As a side note and helpful information for anyone reading this, I got most of my ideas from the photographers blog site which I neglected to mention in my rant above. This photographers post kinda gave me the extra gumption to get building. His work is really cool also check him out here
I don't have a link but you should also check out PCGAMER fall 2012 edition. its entitled Step-by step guide- to building your own gaming pc. It also just so happens to use the same case that I used, but in a gun metal color. Did I mention the case comes in several different colors?
Processor Chip
Basing my build pretty much to what Christian Carroll did, I built my system with the same motherboard and processor chip. The chosen Chip was the 2nd generation Intel Core I7-2600k Sandy bridge chip. The stock clock speed of this processor is 3.4ghz. The processor also has intels turbo boost technology, but If you want to push some extra performance out of this chip, the "k" means that it can be overclocked, and that my friends is where I checkout as a computer geek and as a photographer and as an investor in my pc. I don't want or have the time to play with latency's clock times droops vdroops and cooling goo and etc... That is out of my league. For the time being I will leave well enough alone as turbo boost should be more than enough for my work flow. But its good to know that the option is there if needed.
Power Supply
After looking at both Christians Blog post and the article from pc gamer, I chose to use the Corsiar Tx750psu. I've read this is great for gaming enthusiast, so it should be great for my needs. I also believe I could have gotten about with about 550-600watt unit, but I believe its better to air on the side of caution. To much power not such a bad thing. To little and you could damage parts of your system or have them not work at all. There are sites online you can research to determine your exact needs, but finding a gamer or overclockers website forum should yield some pretty good answers. This pic is also a little deceiving, the odd octopus of scary ass wires and connectors that await you are not displayed here :-) . But once you get everything sorted out its not so bad.
Memory
Corsair Vengeance. I choose 4 sticks of memory with each stick being a total of 8gbs (32gbs total). in almost any information I found about Photoshop from photography forums photoshop is a memory hog and the more the better. Which means I actually really could have went with an i5 processor and been fine, but for the sake of my chosen motherboard I had researched I was fine with my selection. Having extra memory will not hurt to have around, and if you moonlight playing video games or video editing it might be more than welcome. But I think my pc might be able to stand up to higher mpix medium format say 80gbs(maybe Im pushing it)with the specs I have but who knows.
Hard drive
I picked 2 western digital 1 terabyte each drive. given me a total of 2 drives. My inital plan was to have 3 hard drives and 1 solid state drive.
The 1st would be for the operating system
2nd was for applications Photoshop, Lightroom etc..
3rd for media and photo storage.
lastly the solid state drive would be used as a scratch disk.
Well Like I said, I had a budget to keep to $1500 or under. So I traded my scratch disk for extra memory and the third drive for the time being, will be my external seagate black drive which already hold all of my lightroom and p.shop treasures. If your in the same boat I would most definitely try to have at least 2 hard drives. one for the operating system and 1 for applications.
Video Card
This video card is not top of the line. It is an EVGA GTX560 (not the ti version shown above)
The budget was crying and had I did more research I may have skipped the card altogether. What do you mean what about photoshop and the entire open gl thing?
Well from what I gather online there are some tricks and tips and things that photoshop will use the video card for but with the 2nd and 3rd generation of intel chips, I understand you can do pretty well with the on board graphics built into the processor chip. This particular card has a modest (gamer standards anyway) 1gb of memory built into the card. This card also runs on Nvidia software. I believe even cs6 only really requires 512mb of dedicated graphics memory. So, if you do light photoshopping and not to much gaming try to find a card that still supports the open gl standards for photoshop but at a smarter price point than I did. This card was also almost the death of me, well the card anyway it was the single component that gave me a headache and was almost sent back as broken :-( , but I'll save that for the wrap up in the 3rd and final portion of this 3 part on my pc build.
Cpu Fan
I also would like to add that I used the boxed version cpu fan cooler that came with the chip. right now I'm running temps between 39-50 degrees Celsius So about 80-120 degrees Fahrenheit. It wasn't so much the 35 bucks I would have had to smack down for this coolermaster ev0 212, but I did some reading and figured that since I have no plans on overclocking my cpu this would be just fine, but with hindsight being 20/20 I should have picked up the much better ev0 212. Heat is most definitely an enemy of pc components and the cooler you can keep this puppy the happier it will be. So I would highly suggest you dump the standard and go right to the coolermaster. Because now I have to try and disconnect my fan maybe move some ram around and then try to add the new cooler. And know I also have to remove the thermal paste and clean the top of the chip off this sounds very dicey.
Disk Drive
I also picked up this cheap drive, i'm not even sure if it will play dvd's but for $30 bucks it was more than adequate to get my system up and going to install windows and a host of drivers and p-shop & lighroom
So look forward to my thoughts and some problems that I ran into in my 3rd and final post on building a pc to run photoshop and handle d800 and or d600. As always please keep shooting.
And remember if you have a few bucks and have always been thinking about building a pc why not give it a try. I'm not the most technical person and with a little help and online tutorial you can do it also. Remember baring all factors for the most part we are the only thing that holds up back.
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