For my needs Lightroom loves the highest clock speed it can get, as opposed to a ton of lower clocked cores. While I was initially concerned this case might be a bit larger than I wanted, I ended up being rather pleased with it, especially the mostly black/gray theme with the internals. Once you are done, you will have a much better idea about how computers work and how you can troubleshoot them in the future, which is another plus. Depending on the camera you use and Lightroom's support for it, you will see different options here. and set a camera profile other than the default Adobe Standard. Video editing work relies more on CPU cores and its processing power compared to a graphics card. While I plan on getting a graphics card brace to help with this, it would definitely be nice to have if the motherboard had a stronger PCIe "SafeSlot" as Asus calls theirs. 45 I also found it harder to use catalogs across Windows and Mac. With modern Intel machines the memory controller resides inside the processor itself and it's much less common to overclock the base clock (BCLK) when RAM speed can be manipulated entirely on its own easily. And as I had mentioned earlier, Lightroom and other Adobe applications I use frequently are more optimized for Nvidia cards at this time.13. The new Magic Keyboard has keys with limited travel and some folks may not feel comfortable typing on it. You may also see the latency listed as a CAS latency or CL value, that simply refers to the first and most important number for us of those four timing numbers. I didn't have time to try to find a replacement if I ended up cracking this one. Finally, I wanted to point out a color space called ProPhoto RGB. As for why I wanted two — more on that in the section below. Operating systems are sold on USB sticks now. What would make Lightroom really fast is the software itself receiving dramatic optimization and performance updates. This is only good if your HDRs are from the same scene and fairly similar as the headless mode skips the HDR Merge Preview dialog and just goes with whatever setting you last used. For the merge to HDR benchmarks, I selected 15 RAWs (5 3-bracket photos) and timed merging a single 3-bracket stack to an HDR in headless HDR mode. I could downgrade to a Chromebook, 12" MacBook or Microsoft Surface Pro. Cheaping out on the power supply can result in random computer stability issues and restarts. Another area this manifests itself is high-DPI display support. A good chunk of my footage is now captured in 4K. So if you can wait until then to build a computer, you might have some impressive CPU/chipset options at your disposal. Cortana is Microsoft's "truly personal digital assistant." And again when I used Google Earth VR for the first time. The h115i ships with a questionable thermal pad affixed to it, so I cleaned that off first. There's some extra clarification to be made here: Turbo Boost does not mean every core gets that speed. NZXT also has a newer model called the H700i that seems interesting and has a bit better internal cable management but I'm not a fan of some of the perforated panels it has on the top. He is recognized as one of the leading educators in the photography industry, conducting workshops, producing educational videos and frequently writing content for Photography Life. Internet: Internet connection and registration are … I've been really happy with this machine so far. There are so many kinds of devices running Windows 10, especially convertible 2-in-1 tablet/laptop hybrids like the Surface Pro and Surface Book 2, that Windows has invested quite a bit in making the experience on any device smooth. I'm not the only one with this mindset. I went with the hexa-core Coffee Lake Intel Core i7 8700K processor running at 3.7GHz (4.7GHz with Turbo Boost). :-). The Develop module can to a degree but the performance makes it obvious that it's not terribly efficient. First I needed to enable Developer Mode and the WSL feature. Fortunately, all you have to do is enable a memory setting in the UEFI settings called XMP (Extreme Memory Profile) — this will automatically bring your memory up to their rated speed and memory timings, adding a bit more voltage if necessary.19. For your SSD choice, you want something big enough to cope with your OS, current workflows, perhaps your Lightroom catalogue and any other software. There are pages and pages of discrete settings, voltages, frequencies and more that you can adjust and test. Otherwise, you're better off with fewer cores with a very high clock speed. There's one more thing. 9 Which doesn't seem like a priority for me right now as very few games and applications can actually take advantage of SLI graphics cards. With the computer now up and running with all required drivers, it was time to tweak a few things that I wanted to feel more natural to me coming from macOS or just fix things that annoyed me: Disable User Account Control: Every time I install a new program in Windows 10, I get this really annoying confirmation dialog that takes over the full screen. I talk about this in more detail below, but this is changing and it may be a good time to wait a bit longer. Ideally, I would be able tag photos in Photo Mechanic from a set of photos I had already imported into Lightroom, and be able to see the new selections automatically appear in a rating filter I had in Lightroom. I don't see myself entirely leaving Lightroom for one of the many competitors: notably Capture One but there's also DxO PhotoLab, Affinity Photo, Luminar and ON1 Photo RAW. This push for UWP apps makes sense for the grander vision for Windows 10. Second, the Z370 chipset on this motherboard only supports dual channel so there would be no performance benefit going with 4 sticks. Given that this is with a delidded CPU running higher voltage than normal and on water, it seems unlikely that such a high overclock could be sustained without a good liquid cooling system. You at least need good enough RAM so you don't have stability issues. You would have to read a bunch of reviews for motherboards, graphics cards, RAM and so on. Even though it seemed fine at first and definitely did exceed the sRGB color space, I began to want more control over my photos and be more future-proofed. There was nothing particularly noteworthy about the Windows 10 installation process, it did it's thing and went by pretty quickly. There's no need to have 20 extra power cables taking up space in your case if you don't need them. OLED displays bring a lot to the table: a ridiculously fast response rate, an insanely high contrast ratio and impressive color accuracy including very dark blacks. 35 The USB link for the liquid cooler doesn't power it but simply provides a data connection to the PC so that the Corsair Link software can control the pump and fan speed. But since Boot Camp is intended for Macs that have Windows installed, by default it will want to install a bunch of other hardware drivers that I don't need. Hello folks, planning a new PC build primarily for use with Lightroom and Photoshop with the occasional Premiere Pro editing project. When it came to picking RAM I was concerned about the height of RAM sticks and how they might interfere with various cooling options for the CPU, so I went with low-profile RAM from Corsair that was made for confined spaces and didn't have overly tall heatsinks. Install Wox as a better launcher over Cortana: One school of thought is to rarely use profile corrections as they can reduce detail and also lead to some minor cropping at times. Great, so am I. But if DCI-P3 was originally intended for the cinema, why should we care about it and why did Apple even push forward with it for their hardware? I also work with my site on my laptop here and there so I prefer to install the exact same ruby version on both machines. What exactly do I do to my photos? There's not too many ways for Cortana to learn about me aside from just what I use Cortana for: finding files and launching applications. This is a long blog post. However, some more advanced power supplies have what they call a zero RPM mode — they don't even need to spin the PSU fan(s) until the load reaches some percentage of total output. RAM overclocking: While memory overclocking is covered sufficiently in other guides, here's a much deeper dive on the topic for those interested. Is history set to repeat itself? 500GB will do the trick. As a general app launcher Cortana is fine. The single-fan blower style cards tend to be fairly loud and lack some ideal thermal characteristics that I'd want for such a card, especially one I will overclock. What you learned: Build your own presets. For example, I ended up running my DDR4-3200 CL14 at 3333 CL14.). I also realized the Dell Display Manager executable accepts command line arguments, letting me easily script something basic using AutoHotkey.44. If there's one thing that will make even the most powerful computer feel like a 7 year old rig, it's Adobe Lightroom paired with RAW files from any high-megapixel camera. 16 SLC flash stores one bit per cell (a "memory cell" is a floating gate transistor) and is the most expensive and fastest kind of storage. It's really expensive for the time being but very fast and something to keep an eye on in the future. Furthermore, sometimes I don't know whether I should keep a photo until I tinker with basic Develop settings in Lightroom like tone and cropping. I ended up upgrading both the CPU and motherboard at that time. 8 My first summer job when I was in high school involved building tons of computers at a time for a local computer parts e-commerce retailer and installing them in schools. I even remember when the beta of the first version came out in 2006! a product interface, there's just as much work if not more that goes into keeping things simple and have it communicate effectively. Even with those new debugging tools and safeguards, your first time overclocking can still be a nerve-racking experience. And also improves airflow from having fewer cables obstructing it. First, we need to use the true data rate, which is half of 2666MHz. My site is all static flat files and based on the static site generator Jekyll so I needed to set up a ruby environment. There are two programs that come to mind for quick RAW viewing and culling: Photo Mechanic and Fast Raw Viewer. However, AMD’s newest processors have shown that competition is great in the CPU market and some processors such as the AMD Ryzen 7 2700X have a lot of great value when compared to Intel, especially for a photography PC build! That means that things like opening a new tab in Chrome would use the same finger position for me if I was on my MacBook Pro or my Windows machine. However, it gets a bit more complex behind the scenes. With my iMac I casually played a few games on Steam, but with paltry settings. We're in this weird time of a transition away from DisplayPort 1.2 to 1.3/1.4 so if you want to run 5K at 60Hz on a PC now, you're likely going to need to use two cables. HBM2 has some benefits over GDDR5X like lower latency, better efficiency for the supplied bandwidth, smaller chip footprint and less power draw. Do not buy into the current HDR hype with computer monitors. You can only specify the coordinates of the hot corner zone, the action to be done on activation, the delay before it triggers and so on. Nothing is really holding me to macOS on the desktop. Yes, this Photoshop Lightroom … There's not much I need to do aside from tweak a few settings and install one thing to get Lightroom to my liking. With the brace installed and motherboard screwed in to the case, it was time for the delicate act of installing the CPU, applying thermal paste and then fastening the h115i's pump head. I should have cross posted - but it did not occur to me at the time. When it comes to RAM, there's a lot more to look at beyond just the number of gigabytes. Install Seer for macOS-like "Quick Look" spacebar file previews: Because I've gotten way too used to selecting a photo and hitting the spacebar in macOS to preview it. Because of this, they would rather buy a retail computer, or a computer that has already been built by someone else. No longer do you need to buy a cheap optical drive just to install the operating system and never use it again. Remove the Recycle Bin from the desktop: I prefer to have a clean desktop. Then we have Rec. That would let me select a photo in Photo Mechanic, see it appear in Lightroom and then tinker with Develop settings or further zoom into the photo if it's one of those shots where I'm not sure I want to keep it yet. While I definitely wouldn't mind having more RAM, 32GB is more than sufficient for my needs and performance is a higher concern for me. I ended up going with one of Asus' many Z370 options. Second, maybe I'm doing something wrong but the times on the Macs were faster than I was expecting. With the main components installed it was time to connect the remaining power cables, attach the front panel LED and power switch cables, the front panel USB cable as well as a micro-USB cable for the Corsair AIO pump.35 The Kaby Lake overclocking guide: Yea I know this is not a Coffee Lake guide for an 8700K but it's a thorough guide written by ASUS themselves that is a fantastic primer for navigating around the UEFI BIOS on ASUS Maximus boards and more. Since it's hard to find regular prosumer monitors right now that even list their P3 accuracy, you'll probably just want to find something as close to 100% Adobe RGB as possible.