I believe you. I am more worried about selecting incompatible parts, because I don’t know about all the hardware. To solve that I could perhaps get a quote from the store to see what they come up with, then just get it myself. But its a time/cost thing. Time it takes to learn how to do it all myself vs cost of getting store to do it. In my life right now, time is a little more precious than cost, so I don’t think I will learn just yet. Maybe my next machine, in another ten years time (hoping this one will last that long, Haha).
PCPartpicker can help you there. It gives for each component selection criteria, and when you select a part for your list, it will tell you about the compatibility. Start with a CPU, and it’ll offer compatible alternatives for the other parts…
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plenty of forums about the place full of people who are more than happy to not just check over your build but throw in their 2c to improve it.
it does still take time of course, and depending on where you’re located the part that takes the longest can actually be finding the retailers that stock all of the parts you want for a decent price and to minimise shipping costs.
either way have fun with it, not much can beat a new computer 
Yes, I do understand your reluctance to put together the Super Build yourself.
Yes, you will make a faulty decision here and there…
Just to make this thread more valuable for future forumers: these are my worst two goofs
in putting together my Own Computer:
- Power supply was powerful enough – but it did not have a sufficient amount of connectors for the motherboard I selected.
- Picked a Linux distro that could not handle a modern Nvidia graphics card (TU116).
My main goal was to build a silent computer having RawTherapee, darktable, and The Gimp as main tasks. Size was of no importance (I picked a tower).
Step 1: select CPU (in my case a Ryzen 3900X).
Step 2: pick a suitable motherboard.
Step 3: … follow the recommendations on sites like https://pcpartpicker.com or similar, like the Swedish Datorbyggare - Inet.se If I had followed them I would have been able to eliminate Goof #1, above.
When you have decided, watch unboxing/assembly videos on YT, dealing with exactly the same components as you picked…
Have fun!
Claes in Lund, Sweden
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And +1more
It does, even you have a high powered machine like today’s Ryzen or core i9.
For long time the 1660 had the best price performance ratio.
Today I’d start with something cheap, maybe even 2nd hand and wait for the newly announced RTX 3000 series. Like @Claes said (indirectly 
) , just make sure you use nvidia-drivers instead of Nouveau
I agree. With my Ryzen 9 and nVidia RTX 2060, I can tell a difference with or without openCL.
Ive researched more and think I’ve been convinced to upgrade to the rtx. Not sure I’ll wait for the 3000 series, prices are sky high at local stores while 2060 prices are good. Maybe the 3000 is helping bring the 2060 down. Ryzen 5 is also at a good price while ryzen 7 is not, so I’m leaning towards the 5. Either way, this is going to be a significant update on my current machine.
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If that is the case, you can just follow the spec from @Jade_NL. I saw several performance outputs and they are marvelous.
Just make sure you get a 2060super or 2070super (both where similar priced here).
For the RTX: I was a fanboy of Gigabyte, because their winddorce with 0% Fan speed where cool. Since RTX they are (still on 2070super) struggling with the oscillating fan issue. Very annoying. So stay away from that 
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Much has been said already, so just a few points I’ve noticed, which may not have been explained explicitly yet:
storage
- Storage speed is not very important. loading and saving the files takes very little time compared to processing them.
- Storage reliability might be more important. Some if the cheaper SSD options can be a bit dangerous, but there are ones with fairly long rated lifetimes.
- On that note: None of that replaces a decent backup, of course
- And on a small tangent: I’ve had dual boot setups with shared hard drives in the past, and they can be tricky because no filesystem usable by Windows supports the permissions structure used by Linux, let alone symbolic links and such. On Linux, I like to use BTRFS because it supports snapshots. That wouldn’t be possible with partitions shared between Windows and Linux.
- For the operating system, as others have said, an SSD will give you a noticeable and significant advantage.
CPU
Both RT and DT support parallel processing, so more cores will be put to use. AMD’s recent Ryzen processors are currently way ahead of the game in terms of performance, but also comparing well in terms of price. You don’t need the biggest most expensive thing of course. Depending on budget, I’d aim for the upper end of the latest Ryzen 5 range, but money permitting, the 7 series will certainly be noticeably faster.
RAM
- fast RAM is good, so take care to use RAM that’s not slower than the maximum your CPU can use, and make use of Dual-Channel configurations. The RAM on my machine was clocked at 2500MHz by default for some reason. Going into BIOS and switching it up to 3000MHz gave me 1/5 speed advantage. Photo processing is likely to benefit from fast RAM.
- 16 GB is plenty, and you will not notice a difference to 32GB, unless it’s not… For single photos, even at 45MP, I don’t think you’ll need more than 16, but if you started to do videos or large panoramas or similar, that might be different. If RAM runs full, things become slow. Very slow sometimes. I’d probably buy 2x8Gib of RAM and leave 2 sockets free in case you want to add more later.
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I was under the impression I could use ext 4 for linux drive/partition, ntfs for windows drive/partition, and ntfs for shared files and folders? First time I’ve heard of btrfs
The nVidia driver for CUDA/openCL is now available. It is version 455.38. I can confirm it is working on Arch Linux.
Yes, you can use NTFS, and it’s the file system I’d recommend for a
shared partition, too. It will probably work fine for you, but it’s
useful to know the limits.
Linux can use ntfs alright, although it has to map file permissions to
the Windows world. This is fine as long as you’re not doing anything
fancy with file permissions. On a single user system I wouldn’t expect
it to cause trouble. I did try doing this on a multi-user system, where
the Windows installation was centrally managed by IT department (and
used by multiple users) and the Linux installation by me. Every once in
a while it caused issues with files I had gotten via Windows from other
colleagues. I could work with them fine on Linux but then they couldn’t
open them on the Windows end (although I could). I also like to use
symbolic links in Linux, and that won’t work with NTFS, of course –
this might all not be relevant to you, of course. On a single-user
system and the use case you describe, I think it should be fine.
BTRFS/backups: I love me my btrfs, but if you’re not too familiar, it’s
probably easier if you don’t try to get into it too far… Snapshots
basically store the changes to the partition made between two points in
time, so you can undo them later, return to any previous snapshot, or
look at the partition as it was when snapshot X was made, copy files
back over which were overwritten/deleted in the meantime etc… That
said: Snapshots are not backups (because they still vanish when the
drive breaks), and it’d probably be good to have backups. If you use
something like Duplicati (Windows/Linux) or Backintime (Linux), or a
similar tool, you can have “versioned” backups that way, which provide
very similar functionality. I think some of them even integrate with
Windows’ “previous versions” feature.
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NTFS also has problems with date-time based file synchronization, as its encoding of file-modified time stamps doesn’t correlate with the unix convention. rsync is vexed by it, to the point that it has parameters specifically for relaxing the date-time comparison precision.
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Have you tried GitHub - maharmstone/btrfs: WinBtrfs - an open-source btrfs driver for Windows? A btrfs driver for windows.
You can (and I do) incrementally send btrfs read-only snapshots to another drive or network location for backup.
Oohhh, that looks nice!
However, knowing how long it took plain old BTRFS on Linux to become
stable and reliable and recommendable for nontechnical users (could
still be improved for some use cases…), and with a look at the issues
list, I would not try to use that on anything important at the moment.
I’ll make sure to keep an eye on it, though, thanks for pointing it out!
Yes, single user system. Not doing anything fancy.
Will setting Linux to use local time instead utc help fix this issue?
It doesn’t have to do with local time versus UTC time; it has to do with the precision of the time stamp.
" –modify-window
When comparing two timestamps, rsync treats the timestamps as being equal if they differ by no more than the modify-window value. This is normally 0 (for an exact match), but you may find it useful to set this to a larger value in some situations. In particular, when transferring to or from an MS Windows FAT filesystem (which represents times with a 2-second resolution), –modify-window=1 is useful (allowing times to differ by up to 1 second)."
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So… 1 year later I’m finally going ahead, and have these items in the quote:
cpu: AMD AM4 Ryzen 7 5800X 8 Core 4.7GHz CPU (No Cooler)
cpu cooling: Noctua NH-D15-CH-BK Chromax Black Multi Socket PWM CPU Heatsink and Fan
gpu: MSI RTX2060 VENTUS GP OC 6GB PCIe Graphics Card (nvidia)
motherboard: ASUS AM4 ATX ROG STRIX B550-F WIFI Gaming DDR4 Motherboard
ram: 32GB DDR4 G.Skill (4x8GB) 3600Mhz Trident Z Neo
ssd: 1TB Samsung 2.5" 870 QVO SATA 6Gb/s SSD
ssd: 500GB Samsung 980 M.2 PCIe SSD
case: Corsair ATX Carbide 275Q Quiet Gaming Case Black
power: 600 Watt Thermaltake ToughPower GX1 Power Supply
Anyone see any glaring issues? I would have preferred 2x16 sticks for the 32gb ram, with the ability to upgrade to 64 in the future, but they are really limited in stock selection. There was a stock shortage on a hell of a lot of items, limiting choice, and its only going to get worse leading into Christmas.
The motherboard is something I know nothing about. He was limited to find something compatible with Win11… I’ll be dual booting, and don’t feel a particular need for Win11 over 10, except that I best start by being up to date.
Same with the cooling, I don’t know if it is overkill. He suggested that cooler required a big case, and it might be too big to sit atop a desk. That surprised me - the pictures certainly don’t give that indication, nor does the longest dimensions of 460mm, so I’m not sure what he meant by that.
Anyway, If I want to try and save a bit more money, motherboard, cooler and case are the areas I could look.
EDIT: The other option is to downgrade the Ryzen 7 5800x to Ryzen 5 5600x (The 7’s extra oomph is probably a luxury I don’t need). That’s a significant price reduction, and it comes with its own cooler, which might in turn enable to remove or downgrade the current heatsink.
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