A new PC for DT, RT and GIMP

Hardware
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My previous PC ran using a Gigabyte motherboard. I bought it in 2008, and stopped using it in 2021. It had no problems, besides speed (or lack thereof). ‘One of Gigabyte’s key advertised features on its motherboards is its “Ultra Durable” construction, advertised with “all solid capacitors”.’ (Wikipedia) Seemed to work for me.

Gigabyte has been around for a long while. ‘It shipped 4.8 million motherboards in the first quarter of 2015, which allowed it to become the leading motherboard vendor.’ (Wikipedia)

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Thank you. Apparantly I need to get out to my local computer shop more often…

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Same I have had a few of their MB over the years…I always out grew them before they died…not like the bulging capacitors I had on a few Dell or HP machines I can’t remember that is going back a good way though…

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I can’t compare the two, but can run a speed test on the Ryzen 5 if someone tells me how.

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darktable 3.8 user manual - darktable I think the perf sounds like the switch that will log performance…although you get some CPU info in the opencl benchmarking as well…

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This was for rawtherapee.

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I think for such CPU-heavy processing, generic CPU benchmarks are relevant.
E.g. PassMark CPU Value Chart - Performance / Price of available CPUs

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Good point. As an example from the two CPUs that I’m looking at I found the following results from Passmark:

Ryzen 7 5600G
Ryzen 7 5600G891×536 50.5 KB

Ryzen 5 5600X
Ryzen 5 5600X892×542 50.7 KB

So based on the floating point scores of 52MOps/sec vs 40, then the Ryzen 7 would be around 13% faster?

(Edit: I should have said 30% faster, apologies for the stupid error)

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I think many of our tools use ‘extended instructions’ (according to https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu_test_info.html, that means vectorised computations using AVX512 and other similar instruction sets), so maybe that would be a more relevant measurement.

When evaluating the price/performance ratio, don’t forget to calculate with the total cost of the PC (that is, one CPU being 50% more expensive than the other may only influence the total price by 20%, given that you’ll be paying for RAM, power supply, etc.).

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52 / 40 = 1.3, so 30% faster

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Yes, of course. I had a brain cramp

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…as well as trade-offs within a budget. The additional $200 for a faster PC might go further on a better monitor, for example

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My five cents regarding the laptop solution… I’ve got ThinkPad T590 equipped with recent mobile Intel Core i7 and 24 gigs of RAM, 4k 15" display, fast SSD, Windows 10 and no dedicated GPU of course. And I’m biting my fingernails waiting for most of DT operations. Exporting a week long holiday stuff can easily take about 2 hours.

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No doubt you’d need a gaming laptop with a decent GPU to run DT. Rawtherapee doesn’t use the GPU, have you tried that on your Thinkpad?

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Make sure you setup DT to use most of those 24gb via the host memory limit.

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I have but I didn’t really like the UI and also being used to DT I suddenly felt like I lost control over the development process. :slightly_smiling_face:

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Yes, I get that. The DT workflow is becoming second nature to me, so I have to re-learn the process on another editor.

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So I pulled the trigger and bought my new rig. The PC is the PowerSpec G511 with an AMD Ryzen 5 5600X 3.7GHz Processor, NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 12GB GDDR6, 16GB DDR4-2666 RAM and a 500GB Solid State Drive, plus I added a 1TB SSD drive for good measure:

PowerSpec G511

The monitor is an ASUS ProArt PA278QV 27" QHD:

ASUS PA278QV 2K QHD
ASUS PA278QV 2K QHD2016×1512 740 KB

The system is as fast as I could imagine, and more. The monitor comes pre-calibrated but cannot be changed within the unit, so I’ll need to recalibrate through the PC with DisplayCal in the future. My only foible is that the NVIDIA Control Panel won’t come up. I suppose that’s one reason why that app has so many poor reviews :grimacing:

Thank you @Soupy , @priort, @heckflosse, @kofa and @Newerth for the advice. Its a lot of $$ to spend and it’s great to have a community to consult and crosscheck. All you in the community are terrific!

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Congratulations to your choice! I hope the new machine will serve you well. :slight_smile:

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Wow.