Snow Leopard photographic/workhorse build

YWO · Jan 13, 2013

Greetings, I'm a first-time builder aiming for a cool, quiet MacOS 10.6 system for mainly photographic work (Photoshop, Lightroom, DxO Optics Pro), but with enough flexibility to last a few years as a general-purpose workhorse. Proposed build (* indicates Sandy Bridge CustoMac or CustoMac 2012 recommended parts):

Intel Core i7 2700K CPU *
www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B005X55OR6/
(seems to be the most powerful/compatible Sandy Bridge CPU overall; preferred for batch RAW image processing)

Gigabyte GA-Z68XP-UD5 motherboard *
www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0055053XE/

Corsair Vengeance 16 Gb RAM *
www.amazon.com/dp/B004RFBIUU/

Gigabyte GeForce GTX 660Ti WindForce graphics card *
www.amazon.com/dp/B008UG2W20/
(probably overkill, and I'm not sure it's supported in MacOS 10.6, but I'm aiming for something other than a low-range card; the 660Ti seems to be a 'sweet spot'; I've noted the 660Ti thread at www.tonymacx86.com/general-hardware-discussion/66611-660-ti-thread-questions-answers-here.html, but haven't read through all 496 posts yet)

Corsair HX750 power supply
www.amazon.com/dp/B0090I9VZI/
(the HX650 is recommended, but I noticed several complaints about what appears to be the current version; see www.amazon.com/Corsair-Professional-Series-Modular-HX650/product-reviews/B0090I9VX0/)

Western Digital Caviar Black 2 Tb hard drive
www.amazon.com/dp/B004CSIG1G/
(and will be adding more drives)

Fractal Design Define R4 case
www.amazon.com/dp/B008HD3CTI/

Noctua NH-D14 CPU cooler
www.amazon.com/dp/B002VKVZ1A/

Noctua NF-P14-FLX fan
www.amazon.com/dp/B002XISTXM/
(which will give 2 x in, 1 x out for positive pressure)

Already owned: MacOS 10.6, 27" monitor, 20" monitor, external DVD burner (intending to use this for MacOS installation), et al.

I've done some research and checking (socket compatibility, physical clearances, etc.), but might have missed something. Comments and suggestions welcome; thanks.

Going Bald · Jan 13, 2013

YWO said:
Greetings, I'm a first-time builder aiming for a cool, quiet MacOS 10.6 system for mainly photographic work (Photoshop, Lightroom, DxO Optics Pro), but with enough flexibility to last a few years as a general-purpose workhorse. Proposed build (* indicates Sandy Bridge CustoMac or CustoMac 2012 recommended parts):

Intel Core i7 2700K CPU *
www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B005X55OR6/
(seems to be the most powerful/compatible Sandy Bridge CPU overall; preferred for batch RAW image processing)

Gigabyte GA-Z68XP-UD5 motherboard *
www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0055053XE/

Corsair Vengeance 16 Gb RAM *
www.amazon.com/dp/B004RFBIUU/

Gigabyte GeForce GTX 660Ti WindForce graphics card *
www.amazon.com/dp/B008UG2W20/
(probably overkill, and I'm not sure it's supported in MacOS 10.6, but I'm aiming for something other than a low-range card; the 660Ti seems to be a 'sweet spot'; I've noted the 660Ti thread at www.tonymacx86.com/general-hardware-discussion/66611-660-ti-thread-questions-answers-here.html, but haven't read through all 496 posts yet)

Corsair HX750 power supply
www.amazon.com/dp/B0090I9VZI/
(the HX650 is recommended, but I noticed several complaints about what appears to be the current version; see www.amazon.com/Corsair-Professional-Series-Modular-HX650/product-reviews/B0090I9VX0/)

Western Digital Caviar Black 2 Tb hard drive
www.amazon.com/dp/B004CSIG1G/
(and will be adding more drives)

Fractal Design Define R4 case
www.amazon.com/dp/B008HD3CTI/

Noctua NH-D14 CPU cooler
www.amazon.com/dp/B002VKVZ1A/

Noctua NF-P14-FLX fan
www.amazon.com/dp/B002XISTXM/
(which will give 2 x in, 1 x out for positive pressure)

Already owned: MacOS 10.6, 27" monitor, 20" monitor, external DVD burner (intending to use this for MacOS installation), et al.

I've done some research and checking (socket compatibility, physical clearances, etc.), but might have missed something. Comments and suggestions welcome; thanks.

If you are going to run 10.6.x then the 660Ti won't work - thee is no support for it. IIRC you can use the nVidia kexts in MultiBeast and get a GTX 4xx and some GTX 5xx cards to work, AMD HD 5xxx are supported in 10.6.7 and some AMD HD 6xxx in 10.6.8.

YWO · Jan 16, 2013

Going Bald · Jan 16, 2013

Looks like you have it covered.

Good luck with the build.

YWO · Jan 16, 2013

Thanks, Going Bald. I've been considering building for a while now, but only started investigating this path seriously a few weeks ago. There is an enormous amount of useful information on this website; now that I've gotten some bearings, I think things should be fairly straightforward from here.

DBP · Jan 16, 2013

YWO said:
Greetings, I'm a first-time builder aiming for a cool, quiet MacOS 10.6 system for mainly photographic work (Photoshop, Lightroom, DxO Optics Pro), but with enough flexibility to last a few years as a general-purpose workhorse.

It looks like a solid build, but I'm curious about your combination of OS and future plans.
Snow Leopard is now 2 major releases old. Lion came out in July 2011, with the last Snow Leopard update five days afterwards. It's now early 2013. In "a few years" time SL will be another 2 releases out of date, and probably well into the "unsupported" category.
It took me a year to be ready to move my photography systems off Snow Leopard (basically I skipped Lion) due to software compatibility issues, but once I moved to Mountain Lion I don't really want to go back.

At some point vendors will stop supporting SL (and already there are functions available only in later OSes). I don't think it's about to happen tomorrow, but at some point even Adobe will drop support for SL.
On Apple hardware you need to take extra steps to get SL to start in 64-bit mode (otherwise apps are limited to 2 GB each). I'm not sure what's involved in doing this on a CustoMac. It is possible to run 64-bit apps with a 32-bit SL kernel, but I've measured it: there's a performance impact compared to all-64.
The last thing SL-only thing I had was Airport Utility 5.6 (the new one is dumbed-down too much for me) and Apple haven't released it for ML (yes for Lion). But once I worked out how to manually install the SL version into ML that problem went away.
Just in the last week X-Rite finally updated i1Profiler to support scanner profiling (which previously they'd had in their PowerPC-only i1Match software). But there have been other software choices for me to generate scanner profiles in the meantime.
A while back I moved my photo printers/etc to be networked, as I was sick of USB/FW driver mismatches between OS versions and the printer drivers (Epson, I'm looking at you). So that issue went away too.

The only reason I can think of to build a new system running SL is that you have some software which is still PowerPC-only. But there's very little of that still around (and you didn't list any). If I was forced into building an SL system I would be hoping to upgrade it to a later OS at the first opportunity: the hardware design would have that in mind.

Like I said it looks like a solid build, but I'm just scratching my head because I would hesitate making the same decision. But presumably you've thought it through carefully, so maybe I should just pull my head in.

YWO · Jan 17, 2013

DBP: I can understand your curiosity. I suppose the answer comes down to personal choice, and possibly being an atypical user (or perhaps more accurately, possibly an atypical participant in these fora). Reflecting on the past, I've usually changed software/hardware only for compelling reasons. At this point, I've used MacOS 10.6 for a few years, I'm content with how it supports my tools/workflow (and I don't expect that situation to change over the next few years), and I haven't yet seen a compelling reason to move to 10.7 or 10.8. Others might have different desires, requirements, or views, of course. The limitations I'm starting to encounter with my current system (Mac mini) are hardware-based rather than software-based. From my perspective, if I can have a 10.6-based system that addresses those limitations, then that is sufficient. If that system also costs less than any equivalent Apple option, is not significantly less capable than 10.8-based systems (i.e., Sandy Bridge compared to Ivy Bridge), and may be able to run new versions of MacOS produced within the next few years (should I choose to make that change), then all the better. If it turns out that I've misunderstood any of the main issues, this project will be a useful skill-building exercise for future endeavours ... it's already been an interesting learning exercise so far.

DBP · Jan 17, 2013

You've still only listed one HDD for storage. For the system use you've described, I think a single HDD is a handicap.
For a photography machine I regard one SSD plus maybe one HDD as an excellent starting configuration.
Before lammergeier my photo system (which for a long time ran SL) had a 240 GB SSD and a 1 TB HDD as the internal drives.

A 256 GB SSD as the boot drive will have a massive impact on the responsiveness of the system, and should have enough room that you can keep the Lightroom catalogs on it. Keep your photos on the HDD, but the catalog on the SSD.
The Caviar Black is a nice fast drive, but it can't compete with the SSD for either RAW throughput or transactions/sec.
Lightroom does lots of little operations to the catalog, and having that on an SSD is a massive performance win.

Next issue is where you would tell Photoshop to put its scratch files. Ideally it would be somewhere fast, but also somewhere with lots of room. Unfortunately the boot volume is also used for the OS's virtual memory paging and lots of temporary files, and Bad Things happen if it fills up. On my old SL system I made the mistake once of putting the scratch file on the SSD, but it filled up during some big pano stitches in Photoshop. I ended up putting it on the HDD instead. A bit slower, but a whole lot safer.
In lammergeier you'll see I've now got two SSDs: one for the boot volume, and one for the catalogs and Photoshop scratch.

Bottom line: adding a 240/256 GB SSD to your build would give you a major boost.

Also, where are you planning on mounting that extra 140mm fan? It has 120mm and 140mm mounting points, but it wouldn't fit in the front of the R4 case. At the side? At the rear and move the included fan forward so you have two pulling air in at the front?

Going Bald · Jan 17, 2013

If you can afford it, a 120Gb SSD for system drive, apps and libraries, 256Gb SSD or larger for a scratch drive, and a couple of TB platters for longer term storage is more what I would consider optimal for speed.

Or you can use a WD Velociraptor for a scratch drive, depending on the size of the files you work with they are available in 250 Gb 300Gb, 500Gb, 600Gb and 1Tb

YWO · Jan 18, 2013

Thanks for your comments, DBP and Going Bald; valuable advice. Actually, I'd noted in my first post that I'd be adding further drives (but it was a brief note, and easy to miss). I've considered drive configurations before, but as it was clear that some 10.6-compatible parts are becoming rarer, I wanted to post the core components for initial advice. The CPU and graphics card are now on their way, but I haven't committed to the rest of the build yet. It's probably worth mentioning that, for overall system design, I've mainly been influenced so far by:
- Lloyd Chambers macperformanceguide.com/index_topics.html
- Jeremy Daalder www.imagescience.com.au/kb/questions/141/Build+a+powerful+PC+for+Photoshop+and+other+imaging+applications

Many months ago, and bearing in mind I was planning in the context of a possible Mac Pro at the time, I'd come to settle on an SSD (lower optical bay) and four HDDs (2 x dual-drive striped RAID, each divided into 'fast' and 'slow' partitions). This would yield a very fast volume (A), two fast volumes (B, C), and two slow volumes (D, E), which I could use as: A - system, B - data, C - scratch, D - primary backup, and E - secondary backup (a clone of D or, possibly, a Time Machine volume). I already have an external drive, networked drive, and optical media for further levels of backup. With the Define R4, I will have more drive bays than I'll need for some time, and will be able to set up something based on everyone's best advice.

Any comments on striped RAID? Some say it's well worth it, but others not. I suppose it comes down to the individual user's requirements and usage pattern, but I'd be interested to hear your views.

Moving on to case fans: as far as I can see, the R4 has seven fan mounts (2 front, 1 rear, 2 top, 1 bottom, 1 side) and they're all capable of taking 140 mm fans (and some can also take 120 mm fans). Originally, I'd been planning to have 3 intake fans (2 front, 1 bottom) and 1 exhaust fan (rear), or else 3 intake fans (2 front, 1 bottom) and 2 exhaust fans (1 rear, 1 top), but then I came across noise concerns with the current version of the HX650 PSU. I changed the PSU to an HX750, but it's a physically larger unit and (I believe) will block the R4's bottom fan mount. Currently, the plan is for 2 intake fans (front) and 1 exhaust fan (rear).

Any comments on what might be the best fan configuration? As mentioned above, I will be adding at least a few drives, but I doubt I'll be adding a full set of PCI cards. While it would be ideal to have a build that's both cool and quiet, the former is the higher priority. Thanks.

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