Ryzen 5 is also really good. They main difference between the Ryzen 5 and Ryzen 7 is that the 5 has less cores and slightly less threads. For instance in the 3000 series the 5 has 6 cores 12 threads and the 7 has 8 cores 16 threads. I would not think there would be a significant difference in Photo processing between the two probably just minor and barely noticeable.
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ok, I just looked up some hardware components and it seems that self built is indeed at the moment as expensive as pre-built or slightly more expensive. The processor + the GPU alone are almost as expensive as a pre-built. Plus, Windows isnāt free. But I will have a closer look.
I have a question concerning graphics cards: I am confused. Often I see Asus Geforce xyz or MSI RTX xyz - are those Nvidia cards or not? What kind of driver do they need?
Scary! I find my i5 8th gen, 8Gb quite ok, actually very sufficient for darktable. Even 130Mb TIFF edit fine. Gāmic as Affinity plugin is no fun though. Same for Blender. Yours should be much better than mine!
What generation is your i7?
I plan a new laptop this year and was thinking like i7, 11th gen, 16Gb - or better 32Gb RAM (not many 32Gb around). So I take your comment seriously.
BTW, for desktops itās usually no problem to stick more RAM. If there are no slots one can usually use a full new set (and sell the old RAM)
PS: Have an eye on what Hofer is doing, from time to time there are good power gaming PCs from their northern twin brother.
10th gen
Yes. The RTX are the more current models. They can use either the open source nouveau driver or the proprietary nvidia driver. For openCL support, you need the nvidia driver.
I bought a pre-built Ryzen 9 3900X system (12 cores, 24 threads) last year for about $2200 USD. It had 16 GB of RAM, but I later replaced it with 32 GB. It has an nVidia RTX2060 display adapter using the proprietary nvidia driver and associated openCL modules.
I did not mean that. I meant: why is Asus or MSI before Geforce GTX or RTX? Shouldnāt it be Nvidia?
NVIDIA builds chips. Asus, MSI and others build boards which integrate those chips. Thus the very long names which include the board maker, its board reference, the chip included, and often a mention of the onboard memoryā¦ 
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ok, thanks. So a GPU is basically a computer inside the computer.
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Yea basically except optimized highly for parallel math computation. Nvidia does make OEM boards but very few usually 1 or 2 per model those are reference cards that the other OEMās take and modify for various price points and performance levels.
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GPU = Graphics Processing Unit. GPUs are also in short supply at the moment! Earlier on this year I bought an Nvidia GTX 1660. Ā£240, wheras a year or two ago the same card would have cost Ā£150!
For a photo editing system Iād do the following.
A small SSD for the operating system(s) to sit on (e.g. 256gb SSD), then a standard mechanical hard drive for storage of files / user data.
With regards to future upgrades, Iād go for what you need now, as there is a chance in a year or two, standards have changed.
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+1 to @chewyās pcpartpicker recommendation in post #20. Iāve used it for my last three builds; good compatibility checking.
How much RAM you need is somewhat dependent on the size of image your camera produces. I have 16GB and my max image size is 24MB, and that works well even with rawproc, which is a horrendous user of memory (a copy of the image for each toolā¦). But, having the two extra memory slots is just prudent planningā¦
In my recent build, I maxed out the CPU, a 12-core Ryzen 9. If your software is not using a GPU and is multithreaded in the image ops, CPU scaling has a non-linear marginal benefit as your images reduce in size. Thatās due to the overhead of dividing the image vs the size of the divided image chunks, up against the CPU speed -
IMHO: simply, 8-cores should be more than sufficient to expeditiously process images up to 24MB; >8 cores will show significant increase in marginal performance for larger images, while the smaller images will start to run into the multithreading overhead vs the small chunks.
Iām not familiar with such dynamics using a GPU.
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This is probably already much better than 95% of users here have.
Makes me a bit curious, what are exactly your performance issues? What processes are slow for your? You use a Fuji APS-C, right?
What worries me is that I plan to get something similar for performance reasons that you want to get rid of for performance reasons.
@betazoid what about the Display? Do you have one already? Do you include one in our calculations?
Form my experience the proper graphic monitor eats large portion of your budget. In my case Eizo CS2420 costed 75% of the new PC and I have purchased brand new miniITX (Node 202 case based).
Overall it was like 2000Euros but like 2-3 years ago. Now it will be different.
May be of interest. GPU and CPU performance with darktable:
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I have an Olympus E-M2 Mark 3, 20 megapixels.
Well, I guess I would gain the most performance with a proper GPU for darktable. Usually, darktable performs quite ok for me on this laptop, except when I switch on denoise, then it takes 1 or 2 seconds until is see the result (preview). RT performance is quite good, but I guess it would be instantaneous, I mean live 100% live on a Ryzen 5 or 7. The performance of both programs is acceptable. Ok, maybe when I combine in darktable denoise and retouch, then I guess it gets quite slow.
I used to use an i5 laptop with integrated GPU, before the intel neo OpenCL driver, that was really really slow. But I made tests with Intel neo on this i7 laptop without Nvidia and the performance is not so bad actually. Maybe the Nvidia is twice as fast as Intel neo.
Keep in mind, this laptop is an i7 10th gen with 4 cores, but since itās a laptop each core has only 1.something Gigahertz.
As mentioned above, I have 2x24 inch full hd screens. One is a BenQ wide gamut photography screen, the other is an Iiyama sRGB screen. Both are suitable for photography work, they are not so old. I bought the Benqā¦ I think 2 years ago, and the Iiyama 1 year erlier or so.
So I am not planning to throw those away in the near future. Of course a wide gamut 4K Eizo would be much better, butā¦ as said, why produce so much waste?
Hi Anna,
I recently upgraded my PC. I replaced the motherboard, the CPU and the RAM, left the rest (GPU, power supply, case, SSD/HDD) as they were.
I built the new system on an ATX motherboard (ASUS ROG STRIX B550-F GAMING, 190 CHF) and used a Ryzen 5 5600X CPU (400 CHF) with 64 GB of RAM (320 CHF). The motherboard needed a BIOS update to support the CPU, but it has a feature allowing one to update the BIOS without a supported CPU.
I kept my second-hand NVidia GTX 1060/6GB GPU (it had cost me about 150 CHF), and I do not have the impression that itās a bottleneck.
Note that with more threads you need more RAM (typically, each thread will need some RAM to process a chunk of data), but, since most of the memory usage is independent of the number of threads (e.g. your OS, and āstaticā data, such as already completed processing results), you donāt need to double the RAM if you double the number of threads. With more RAM, as others have said, you can run multiple apps in parallel, and if you plan to spin up VMs (to try a different version of Linux, or Windows), RAM is definitely useful.
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@betazoid be aware that ventors like Lenovo or Dell have costum build motherboards and power supplies. This power supplies are not ATX compatible. So if the power supply fails, you can only replace it by the vendor specific ones. The motherboards from this vendors have limited connectors e.g. SATA for additional drives and so on and are cheaper therefore.
So, comparison between self build and pre-build systems by mentioned vendors will be hard in terms of price and real features beyond CPU, RAM, GPU specs.
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What @pk5dark says also means that you may be better off with a custom-built PC; youāll have more options to replace components (e.g. I was able to keep the power supply, the case, the disks and the GPU). Good for oneās bank account, as well as for the environment.
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