upgrade Sandy Bridge -> Haswell for photography

[aadm]

Hi all. I've been happily using my hackmini since april 2012. Happily except for those 2-3 days of cursing when I wanted to upgrade O.S. for some silly reasons, that is. Anwyay, I moved all the way from 10.8 to 10.10.1 Yosemite.

My system as you can read from my sig is a Sandy Bridge (core i5 2500K), , 16Gb ram, Gigabyte H61N-USB3, intel ssd 120Gb plus two 2Tb WD stuffed inside a Silverstone SST-SG05B box. Oh and a Sapphire Radeon HD5450 2GB graphic card.

Now, keep in mind I mainly use my hackmini for photography; no Photoshop, only Aperture (and possibly in a near future, Adobe Lightroom since as you know Aperture is being abandoned by Apple). I have a large collection of 24 Megapixel files hence the need for a fairly speedy computer.

I wanted to get a new larger SSD (one of those Crucial MX100 512Gb) to replace my Intel 120Gb and that's when I found out about the existence of SATA3/SATA6.

Turns out I have been using all this time my SSD seriously crippling the performance with the Gigabyte H61N! I don't know why I didnt think of this when I first bought all the components and why I bought the H61N instead of the H67N (H67N does have SATA6 ports, H61N does not)... I wish I could've just followed tonymac' advice (see recent update he wrote on the forum: http://www.tonymacx86.com/yosemite-...update-sandy-bridge-customac-mini-2011-a.html).

The issue now is that I cannot find anywhere old mini-itx motherboard like H67n, H77n and the likes supporting SATA6 and my LGA1155 cpu. So a simple SSD upgrade is transforming into a major upgrade.

I see three possibilities:

1. haswell i5-4590 3.3Ghz, Gigabyte H97N = EUR 322
2. haswell i3-4350 3.6Ghz, Gigabyte H97N = EUR 257
3. haswell i3-4330 3.5Ghz, Gigabyte H97N = EUR 245

Here's a comparison table from Intel website:

http://ark.intel.com/compare/80815,77769,77480,77491

My plan is to ditch the external graphic card and just use the onboard Intel HD4600 (I haven't considered the i3-4130 which is another EUR 10 cheaper thatn 4330 because it has a HD4400 which I have no clue how different it is with respect to HD4600 but didn't want to take into account too many options).

Now the questions are:

1) should I stick with i5 or could I save money and get an i3 instead? Remember my main use: photography processing via Aperture/Lightroom; no fancy filters or heavy processing in my workflow, I need the speed to quickly go from one RAW file to another, zoom in and out, apply moderate adjustements like curves and simple basic retouchments (I'm old skool). I do also like to edit my home videos but I use iMovie and again, I simply need to cut and paste and move bits of videos around. I don't care how long it takes to export the final movies.

2) would you recommend using the on-board HD4600 with respect to this fairly old ATI HD5450? I have read somewhere that photoediting apps do not stress the graphic chips so much but I haven't understood whether it's still better to have the external card with 2Gb onboard, again for my particular use.

3) any real-life differences between those two i3 models in your opinion? again the price difference is very small but anything counts towards the actuability of my plan.


thank you all in advance for your comments! And happy hacking to everybody.

 

[YWO]

Would it be worth considering replacing your graphics card with a PCIe SATA3 card? You could keep your Intel SSD as the boot drive, use the Crucial SSD as your scratch/data drive (running off the PCIe card), and not need to replace your motherboard and CPU. Just a thought.

 

[aadm]

Would it be worth considering replacing your graphics card with a PCIe SATA3 card? You could keep your Intel SSD as the boot drive, use the Crucial SSD as your scratch/data drive (running off the PCIe card), and not need to replace your motherboard and CPU. Just a thought.

Wow I didnt even know something like that existed! Yeah that would be the cheapest way to use the SSD but I have read somewhere that it's unlikely I would get full SATAIII 6Gb/sec speed:

http://superuser.com/questions/309605/adding-a-sata-6-gbit-s-pci-express-controller-card

Also I don't understand if my m/b does have a nice and new PCIe slot... it's defined in the specs as "PCIEX16 slot conforms to PCI Express 2.0 standard", here the full specs:

http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=3963#sp

Anyway thank your for the tip, I'll do some more research into it.

 

[YWO]

It is indeed likely that you wouldn't get the best possible speeds out of a PCIe SATA3 card, but that route is mainly a strategy to extend the life of your current machine (assuming that everything else about the machine is fast enough for you). If you really need the best possible SSD speeds, you'd want a new motherboard and PCIe-based SSDs. The question for yourself is whether you would notice the difference in everyday usage. (For whatever it might be worth, I have Samsung 840 Pro and Samsung 840 EVO SSDs running off both motherboard and PCIe SATA3 ports, and in practical use I don't notice any differences in speed between the two drive models or between the ports.)

 

[aadm]

It is indeed likely that you wouldn't get the best possible speeds out of a PCIe SATA3 card, but that route is mainly a strategy to extend the life of your current machine (assuming that everything else about the machine is fast enough for you). If you really need the best possible SSD speeds, you'd want a new motherboard and PCIe-based SSDs. The question for yourself is whether you would notice the difference in everyday usage. (For whatever it might be worth, I have Samsung 840 Pro and Samsung 840 EVO SSDs running off both motherboard and PCIe SATA3 ports, and in practical use I don't notice any differences in speed between the two drive models or between the ports.)

YWO, thanks very much for your feedback. My system feels very much alive and competent for my normal usage, so yeah, if that's a strategy to make it last for another 2 year then I will try that, also considering the very low cost of this upgrade.

My concern is about the graphics card; I have to check if there is any decrease in performance between using the external graphics card I have now (HD5450 with 2Gb onboard) vs the on-board HD3000.

Any idea on how the HD3000 runs in that kind of applications i mainly use (photoediting with software like Lightroom, Apple Aperture etc)?

I still wonder what's the improvement between my 2011 i5-system and a current Haswell i5 system?... I mean cpu benchmarks only tell you so much, and I couldnt find comparison in using Photoshop or other apps between these two cpus so spaced apart in time.

Thanks once again to everybdy for your comments. I will report my findings as soon as I decide on the upgrade route.

 

[YWO]

I haven't tried using HD3000 for photographic editing, but am guessing it would be noticeably slower. (When I did use HD3000 briefly while setting up my machine, my impression was that it was slightly but noticeably slower even with basic everyday tasks.) If you have time for testing, you could of course just pull out your GPU and try using HD3000 for a while.

I suppose the key question is whether HD3000 will be sufficient for you. If yes, then you can put in a PCIe SATA3 card and run with two SSDs. If no, perhaps you should plan for the longer term and build an i5 or i7 system (with mATX or ATX motherboard) instead of considering an i3 system. (I do realise that a completely new build was not what you were originally aiming for, though.)

Just a few thoughts.

 

[aadm]

Ok another good advice. I was going gung-ho and buy this PCI-SATA3 card but yeah I can wait a bit longer and try how is the situation for my normal everyday tasks with the HD3000.

I won't delete my amazon wishliist of haswell cpu and motherboards just yet....

 

[aadm]

update #1: I deactivated my ATI HD5450 and used the onboard HD3000 and despite what some benchmarks said, I couldnt notice any practical difference in my normal usage. Scrolling, fluidity etc are the same as before, playing HD video too, and most importantly no lag or anything annoying when using Aperture. Need to try Lightroom and do some more tests but I will get that PCI SATAIII card and set aside my graphic card.

 

[aadm]

Little update for anybody who may be interested:

I got this little PCIe SATA3 board for 22 euros with the chipset ASM1061 that I have read here on tonymac was compatible out of the box with our hackintosh. And also a brand new Crucial MX100 512Gb (which I wanted as a replace to my previous Intel 520 120Gb where I have my OS installed).

Yesterday I took out my Ati HD5450 and now am using the onboard HD3000 to run the graphics; no problem at all, with the things I do on my computer (photo editing with Aperture) I really see no difference from before.

Anyway, I put the PCI SATA3 card in, attached the new drive and evrything runs perfectly with no messing around with drivers and kext etc. I can see from a quick benchmark I've run that the increase in performance is in line with the expectations, i.e. from ~250Mb/sec of my old SATA2 interface to 350.

Tonight I will rsync my OS X installation to the new drive, do some more tests and then I'll be happy ever after.

Thanks to YWO for the advice to go this route, it was quick and very light for my wallet!

 

[YWO]

Glad to hear it's worked out well for you. Although I've not relied on HD3000 for any serious work, it's interesting to hear your experience (i.e., no practically observable difference from the ATI). It sounds like you've received a useful and cost-effective boost to extend the working life of your current machine, and I suppose that gives you some time to save towards a completely new machine in the future ... which I am confident you will enjoy both building and using.