"Fastest" Photo Editing Machine -- What is it?

Burbank · Sep 14, 2014

I’ve been using my machine based on Slugnet's Video Editor for two years. It’s rock-solid. Here’s a quick summary:

Motherboard: GA-Z77X-UP5-TH
Processor: i7-3770K Quad-Core 3.5 GHz 6 MB Cache (Overclocked to 4.4 GHz)
RAM: 32 GB Memory (4x8GB) DDR3 1600MHz
Power Supply: Corsair 850 Watt HX850
Box: Corsair 500R
Video: EVGA GeForce GTX 680
Mac OS X Mavericks 10.9.4
Several SSD drives

I use this machine to edit several thousand photos weekly. Lightroom and Photoshop are my two primary apps.

My Geekbench 3 64 bit multi core scores tend to be a little higher than 16,000.

QUESTION:

I want to build a new machine (or upgrade mine) that’s significantly faster than the one above. By faster, I think I mean I want much faster single-core CPU performance as that seems to be my bottleneck. My budget is around $3,000. After hours of looking at golden builds and user builds I’m not finding a machine that fits the bill. Any suggestions?

trs96 · Sep 15, 2014

Sometime in the next 3-6 months you'll likely be able to follow a User / Golden build
for an X99 system. We are just starting the testing right now and it looks promising.
The I7-5930K overclocked would probably be your best choice although you could easily get
very high Geekbench scores with an overclocked 6 core I7-5820K. Added bonus with X99 is
you will be able to use more than 32 GB of ram in your system. For a Pro video /photo
editing system it's the best you'll soon be able to get. When the Mac Pro gets it's next
refresh would be a good time to get onboard with an X99 system. Hope that it's sooner
rather than later. If history is any guide it may be later.

Burbank · Sep 23, 2014

Thank you for the thoughtful answer, trs96. I really appreciate it.

AndyAndreas · Sep 23, 2014

I am little bit off topic but I was wondering which monitor do you use for edit your photo?
Does it work well with Mac OS X and the Hackintosh?

Burbank · Sep 23, 2014

AndyAndreas said:
I am little bit off topic but I was wondering which monitor do you use for edit your photo?
Does it work well with Mac OS X and the Hackintosh?

Yes. A little bit.

I use the NEC PA271W-BK 27" Widescreen Professional Graphics Desktop Monitor. I edit in the AdobeRGB (1998) color space and this monitor is great. I run a two monitor system on my hackintosh.

Motherboard: GA-Z77X-UP5-TH
Processor: i7-3770K Quad-Core 3.5 GHz 6 MB Cache (Overclocked to 4.4 GHz)
RAM: 32 GB Memory (4x8GB) DDR3 1600MHz
Power Supply: Corsair 850 Watt HX850
Box: Corsair 500R
Video: EVGA GeForce GTX 680
Mac OS X Mavericks 10.9.4
Several SSD drives
32 TB total local storage

CaptainBallistic · Sep 24, 2014

Burbank said:
I’ve been using my machine based on Slugnet's Video Editor for two years. It’s rock-solid. Here’s a quick summary:

Motherboard: GA-Z77X-UP5-TH
Processor: i7-3770K Quad-Core 3.5 GHz 6 MB Cache (Overclocked to 4.4 GHz)
RAM: 32 GB Memory (4x8GB) DDR3 1600MHz
Power Supply: Corsair 850 Watt HX850
Box: Corsair 500R
Video: EVGA GeForce GTX 680
Mac OS X Mavericks 10.9.4
Several SSD drives

I use this machine to edit several thousand photos weekly. Lightroom and Photoshop are my two primary apps.

My Geekbench 3 64 bit multi core scores tend to be a little higher than 16,000.

QUESTION:

I want to build a new machine (or upgrade mine) that’s significantly faster than the one above. By faster, I think I mean I want much faster single-core CPU performance as that seems to be my bottleneck. My budget is around $3,000. After hours of looking at golden builds and user builds I’m not finding a machine that fits the bill. Any suggestions?

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"Fastest" Photo Editing Machine -- What is it?

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