DBP's "lammergeier": i7-3770K / GA-Z77X-UP5-TH : photography beast

[DBP]

Yep, hot-swap (well, you have to eject/unmount the filesystem first via Finder) works on all of:

• All eSATA ports
• Front three bays
• FW800 docks
• USB3 dock

Note that all the eSATA ports and front SATA bays are being fed by either the onboard Marvell controller or the ADM1061-based PCIe cards, and I'm using the "3rd Party eSATA" kext. None of the Z77 SATA ports are marked in the BIOS as hot-swap because they're all attached to internal devices.

 

[DBP]

Overclocked the CPU's TurboBoost from 3.7 GHz (for 4 active cores) to 4.2 GHz. It's been running for hours on Prime95 without the temps getting over 70 C, and Geekbench has climbed to 15800. I suppose I could keep upping the clocks and testing, but I really couldn't be bothered.
It'll do for now! (until I start tinkering again )

 

[thinknotforever]

hey thanks for your insight towards moving for a hackintosh, im currently looking at your lammergeier build and it looks killer seemed like we were coming from a similar place.

Currently im running an early 2011 15" Macbook Pro 2.2 quad i7 with 128gb SSD + 1TB 7,200RPM drive in the optical bay along with 16GB of Ram.

would you say its really that major of a step up considering where im coming from if i went for the lammergeier build...

oh and how come no graphics card?

 

[innadark]

Thanks for the detailed summary of this build and that of your HTPC.

Its a concise roadmap that is easy to follow.

 

[bucket772]

How do you like the onboard video? I am looking at almost the same build for Lightroom and PS work. I play around a little with video from my GoPro. I was looking at the 660ti GeForce card but I notice you dont use one other the the onboard. I don't game. Just mainly photo and some video.

Any recommendations

Thanks in advance.

 

[DBP]

Currently im running an early 2011 15" Macbook Pro 2.2 quad i7 with 128gb SSD + 1TB 7,200RPM drive in the optical bay along with 16GB of Ram.

would you say its really that major of a step up considering where im coming from if i went for the lammergeier build...

I have a 2010 15" MacBook Pro 2.67 dual i7 with 8 GB RAM, 240 GB SSD + 1 TB HDD. I have been aware the RAM was limiting me. Earlier in the year at one of my jobs I started using a 2011 i5 Mac mini with 16 GB, SSD+HDD, and the added RAM was great (but I was aware I was still using most of it, and I don't even use Photoshop on that machine). I had been hanging out for and planning to get one of the 2012 minis with quad i7 and 16 GB RAM, and I probably would have been happy with that. But lammergeier is so much more capable. Sure so far I usually have >16 GB RAM free, but that's "headroom" to grow into. Now I don't have to get fussy about shutting Lightroom down while running big pano stitches to save on RAM, and this makes the integration between Lightroom and Photoshop/etc much neater.

The CPU in your machine might be the i7-2670QM, which runs at 2.2 GHz but "turbo"s up to 3.1 GHz. But that's probably 3.0 GHz or 2.9 GHz when all four cores are active (which is most of the time in OS X). lammergeier is currently running with turbo set to 4.2 GHz (default is 3.7 on the i7-3770K). And the cache is bigger, and the memory is faster, etc. And lammergeier's CPU runs a lot cooler than a MBP's, even when flat-chat. No thermal throttling getting in the way!

Even with the huge increase in processing speed, where you'd probably notice the most difference is in I/O. For me the single SSD boot drive was where I stored my active Lightroom catalogs for maximum speed, but with only 8 GB of RAM some of my panorama stitching needed lots of Photoshop/PtGUI scratch space, and I had to put that on the 1 TB HDD. Now I have a separate SSD for that.

Now some of my home directory is on SSD (as before) but the rest is on a striped pair of drives giving fast performance too (previously some of it was on the laptop's HDD). And when it came to checking my backups and making new backups, the 30-50 MB/s average speed of FW800 disks (remember the source drive and the destination were on the same bus) meant big jobs could take hours or sometimes days. The average throughput per disk I see now ranges from 50-110 MB/s: yesterday I was running the monthly backups and lammergeier was pumping a sustained 250 MB/s through the system (and it still took a while!).

Single SSD + single HDD is a nice system for a mobile machine, but it really can't compare when you try to use that machine as a processing workhorse. I'm amazed I put up with it for so long (16 GB would have helped a lot).

Oh, and I was originally thinking I could put up with one 24" screen (having got used to the MBP's LCD as a secondary) but that was a struggle. But the cheap LG 23" screen has turned out to have excellent quality and now I feel I've got more than enough screen space.

Exactly which bits have the most value for you will of course depend on the work you do with your machine though.

oh and how come no graphics card?

There is one, it's built in! Seriously, the HD 4000 is currently driving one 1920x1200 24" panel and one 1080x1920 23" panel, and it's got more than enough grunt for the things I do.

I ran the Unigine Heaven gaming video benchmark yesterday on the 1920x1200 and it only got <9 fps. So that would be a bit sad if I was going to game on it. But it's about the same speed as on my MBP (with 1680x1050 LCD) which has a GT 330M in it, and the video on that has always been fast enough for me even when driving the external 1920x1200 screen.

For Lightroom and for Photoshop CS6 the graphics is more than fast enough. Note that I'm not doing fancy 3D things in CS6, which might benefit from more GPU power, but my system does meet the new minimum specs for Photoshop CS6 Extended.

How do you like the onboard video? I am looking at almost the same build for Lightroom and PS work. I play around a little with video from my GoPro. I was looking at the 660ti GeForce card but I notice you dont use one other the the onboard. I don't game. Just mainly photo and some video.

See above. For Lightroom and Photoshop it's great. I don't use Premiere for editing my videos: I'm fairly basic in that regard. I figure if I get into that seriously in the future I have the option of adding a CUDA GPU, but by the time I do that there will be new price/performance choices.

 

[bucket772]

Thanks. I think you just saved me a few hundred. I was looking at a mac mini but wasn't sure if the built in card would suffice.
Another question, as I understand the vram is shared with the system memory. I seem to recall seeing that if the memory on the mac mini board was upgraded to 16gb that that increased the vram from 512 to 768mb. Does this hold true in this situation? I would like to dump all 32gb in at once.


Thanks again. I'm kicking myself for not doing this earlier.

 

[DBP]

On a mini with 16 GB RAM the vRAM will go up over 800 MB. On the CustoMacs it seems to top out at 512 MB, but that's fine for me.

 

[DBP]

Hit a problem where one of my old WD My Book drives connected to a SATA port would occasionally disappear, and I'd need to power-cycle the drive to get it back.

Found the answer here. It's an incompatibility between these drives and Marvell eSATA controllers. Who knew?
Anyway, I've moved the drives to the ASM1061 controllers and have my fingers crossed.

 

[DBP]

Latest news on this build:

My other MyBook eSATA drive (which had originally been used as a FW400 drive) dropped offline a couple of times. Tracked down the latest firmware for it (had to connect the drive to USB to apply the update - within OS X so no reboots required) and so far it's been stable.

At the start of January we did our monthly off-site backup swap, and I took the opportunity to clean the case. Shut the machine down, removed the dust filters on the bottom and front of the case for cleaning. Quite a bit of dust, but not too bad. Going to make it a regular monthly thing.

Decided to re-do the monthly backups from scratch, as I changed the disk encryption keys (off-site disks get encrypted). Wiped the disks and started the backups going. This was about 4 TB of data. Whereas this would literally have taken days on the old FW800-based MacBook system, it finished overnight on lammergeier.


Here's the icon view of the drives on the system.

• lamm_01 and lamm_02 are the striped RAID partitions (lamm_02 being on the slow parts of those drives and just contains iTunes).
• I made custom icons for lamm_04 (SanDisk Extreme 240GB) and lamm_HD (Samsung 830 128GB).
• The orange drives are my "primary" storage, whether they're eSATA or FW800. Basically I leave these with default icons.
• Store10/11/13 (the green drives) store the daily backups.
• TM_Store_41 is red because it's part of the monthly backup set (this partition contains the networked TM volumes for everything else on the LAN). The other drives in the set (which contain essentially another copy of what's on the green drives) are also red.
  The alternate monthly set (currently offsite) have blue icons.
• Videos is a share off the NAS.