Computers and You - A Guide in Making Choices as P

Impressive. Very nice presentation of the state of the current retail computing world as it relates to photography.

You got it on timing vs memory size. 1600mhz AND low CAS is pretty good stuff.

Disk space is so cheap these days, backing up, more backing up, and keeping a copy off line/site is about as inexpensive an insurance policy as you can get. Did I mention backing up?

Keeping a current boot image can make life a lot easier too. Restore is a lot easier and quicker than reinstall. I try to throw everything with a product key in a box, but sometimes the box is hard to find.

Haven't looked at it in awhile, but Seagate was using the solid state storage on their hybrid drives as a big cache. It was not clear how much that added to performance. Boot SSD and rotating storage seemed like the way to go, but you've said that already.



Ps: CPUID really is a neat little trick, processor, mobo, memory, bios all together in a nice tidy package. Especially useful to keep on screen to show when the CPUs wake up and come up to speed. Speedfan is another one I've used over the years.


Edited by Cliff - 24 April 2015 at 18:42

Their directions for using your higher end video card are rubbish. I will work on a writeup for how to do t properly. What they recommend will cause laptop batteries (the only systems that natively run these dual gpu setups between Intel and AMD/Nvidia) will drain incredibly fast all the time. It should be done in an application-specific way.

Excellent job. Thank you for the article.

Typically, yes. Becauuse for some excellent reasons:

1. Laptops not only use lower powered parts, but can also have more aggressive throttling (reductions in speed) when things get hot.
2. Your i7, while still really excellent, was from the first generation of Core's. The 3 digits is the giveaway. The move to 4 digit i7's came with huge improvements of power and efficiency (aside from the very top end), it is now at least three major updates behind. It is the time when youwould notice.
3. SSD's and RAM are cheap now.

Do you want to build it yourself?

Completely so. Building it yourself should get you a much better experience. You can find a setup that will work, but it tends to be very rare and fairly expensive. The typical big vendors do the lowest common denominator build= high budget = high specs = high powered GPU. It just isn't necessary for photographers. If you are interested in building it yourself, it is surprisingly easy. If you can plug in wall sockets and put the bowl and chopper blade on a blender/food processor, you can probably assemble everything. The first time, it takes a few hours. Maybe 3-4. I have done quite a few builds, somewhere in the neighborhood of 175, and it takes me a little more than an hour. Always, the hardest part has been to connect the wiring to the motherboard so all the buttons work and lights light up at the right times. But, there are also quite a few videos on YouTube on how to do it yourself, most of them are quite good. And you can always hit me up for assistance. I can usually walk people through it (over the phone, internet, skype, I've done each).

If you want, I can even help you put together a build on Newegg. Easiest way is through browsing their Barebones systems, but you can get lesser quality (doesn't mean poor, but can have higher rates of issues) motherboards and memory.

Took me a long time (Duh!) to start putting the light and button wires on last thing before putting the assembled mobo in the case. Makes it a lot easier. Labeling's gotten better in recent years too, screened on the mobo and plugs marked.

FWIW, in this last generation I've switched from Intel to AMD cpus. FX8350 and 6350 have both given good performance, as have some of the A series with integrated graphics.

I switched because Intel's vPro and other technology is awfully intrusive, tightly integrated, and with OOB it's remotely accessible even when the machine is physically turned off. Just because you're paranoid it doesn't mean no one's after you.

Intel's price/performance is clearly somewhat better than AMD's. For the apps I use it makes little practical difference, and there's a lot of processing power cheap in them all. There's also some virtue in keeping competition alive in the CPU business. Sorta like buying Sony over CaNikon in the camera business.

Here's a little more from Wikipedia on vPro to think about:
"Intel vPro is a combination of processor technologies, hardware enhancements, management features, and security technologies that allow remote access to the PC (including monitoring, maintenance, and management) independent of the state of the operating system (OS) or power state of the PC.[2] Intel vPro is intended to help businesses gain certain maintenance and servicing advantages, security improvements, and cost benefits in information technology (IT) areas.[2][3]"
Interesting stuff, huh?


Edited by Cliff - 12 May 2015 at 22:43

Freddan_6 wrote: Cliff wrote: I switched because Intel's vPro and other technology is awfully intrusive, tightly integrated, and with OOB it's remotely accessible even when the machine is physically turned off. Just because you're paranoid it doesn't mean no one's after you. .... Interesting stuff, huh? Sorry but there are two things you don't consider that are important. It is turned off by default in bios, and if you get the computer from the company then they probably turn it on. If you buy the computer privately there is no worries. It is not supported by wake on wlan, so if you are really afraid of being surveilled, use wlan, for instance 802.11ac with no speed penalty vs 100 MBit ethernet.

Hi Fredrik, Wish it was that simple. There's a load of technology, hardware and software, involved. On Intel based systems it is highly and tightly integrated, and it is not easy to turn it all off. AMD is potentially vulnerable too, but because the technology is not as highly developed there it is harder to exploit on those systems.

edit: You can unplug the network cable from a wired NIC, not so with wireless. That makes wlan more vulnerable to OOB than wired.

If anyone is interested, the terms "vPro", "Intel AMT", or "OOB" (out of band) are enough to start learning with the Google. They are remarkable engineering, and interesting in themselves from that perspective. Providing a heads up about what is baked into some of the technology people are buying is why I posted. I have zero interest in dragging this thread off into a security debate.



Edited by Cliff - 14 May 2015 at 15:09