New Photoshop Workstation

I had no idea what I had been missing!

This week I've been working on setting up my new Photoshop / Lightroom workstation. It's a fairly high-end system and quite a step up from the 3 or 4 year-old Pentium 4-class system I had been running. I began the hunt a couple weeks back after importing several folders into Lightroom - the software ran fine with just a few thousand pictures, but it became virtually unusable when I grew the library to around 30k photos.

Because of the never ending battle with storage and backup I had some current hard drives as well as a decent case on hand. So, I decided to buy individual components and assemble the system myself (as opposed to buying one from Dell). Here's what I ended up buying:

• ECS NF650iSLIT-A motherboard
• Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 Conroe 2.4GHz CPU
  
• 2GB 4GB Crucial Ballistix DDR2 800MHz RAM [I ended up getting a good deal on an extra 2GB]
• EVGA GeForce 7300 GS 256MB Video Card
  
• Diamond Stealth x1550 256MB Video Card [I switched to this card due to hardware problems]
  

I decided that I didn't need anything fancier for the video card since I don't plan on playing any games. The retail boxed CPU includes the heatsink/fan combo which will be fine for my needs. The RAM was a good deal, as I picked it up with a $45 rebate. All said, I spent around $400.
Build Issues
While it has been quite a while since I built a PC, not that much has changed. But, I was pretty shocked when it didn't "just work" after I put everything together. The fans and drives would start up, but the system wouldn't POST (beep) or display anything. To make a long story short, I went through all the standard troubleshooting steps (I used to work in a PC repair shop several years ago) and had no luck. I finally noticed that the board shipped from the manufacturer with the CMOS Reset jumper set to "reset" instead of "operate"! Switching that back to the right setting did the trick & the system fired right up.

Lightroom Performance
I now understand exactly how Lightroom was intended to work. When you've got it running on fast hardware it an entirely different user experience! Changing images is instantaneous, zooming in and out is butter-smooth, and changes to develop settings are nearly real-time. Awesome!

Other applications, like CS3 and Mozilla Firefox also get a huge boost in speed. I used to think that Firefox 2.0 was a lot slower than it's predecessors since my old system had a 2 second delay to open new browser windows... turns out it was just my outdated system - new windows appear instantly on the new box.

All said, this has been a very worthwhile upgrade & the components chosen are a good balance between value and performance. I've still got some more work to do, but so far it's shaping up to be a slick system.