ravensloft

Hi all I'm hoping for some help here. I recently had an Epic computer crash with all of my photos stuck inside. I had backed up some of the files but not all due to lack of sd card space ( needed to get another just slipped my mind I Know, I know bad photographer!) So I'm interested in buying a new computer and the reason I'm asking this question here is I know photographers like a certain amount of things running their photos. I'm looking at an Alien Ware Aurora with 460 watt multi GPU approved power supply with high performance liquid cooling, Nvidia GeForce GTX 1070 TI with 8Gb GDDR5, 32GB Dual channel DDR4 at 2666MHz; up to 64GB additional memory, 128GB M.2 SATA SSD (Boot) + 2TB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s (Storage), Tray Load DVD-RW Drive (Reads and Writes to DVD/CD), Qualcomm DW1810 1x1 802.11ac Wi-Fi Wireless LAN and Bluetooth 4.1, and Adobe Photoshop. Here's my problems, 1. Do I need anything else for me to have a almost top of the line computer to do my work? 2. Having issues on what Photoshop to purchase, ( not doing movies and want to avoid Adobe CC like the plague)? 3. Is there a Lightroom that is not hooked up to CC and if so is it a good editing software to use with Photoshop and does Photoshop support it? Any suggestions would be great and appreciated beyond belief.

BebuLamar

You need good monitors. I would spend at least as much money as you spend on the computer for monitor/monitors.

letmedance Loc: Walnut, Ca.

Alienware computers are considered the top gaming computer, you probably don't need to spend that much to get a good graphics package.

DWU2 Loc: Phoenix Arizona area

Just out of curiosity, why do you back up to SD cards instead of a free-standing hard drive? Cost per GB of hard drive storage is probably 1/10th of SD cards.

robertjerl Loc: Corona, California

Answer(s)
1. that should be more than powerful enough
2. add another internal drive just for pictures (I have an SSD 'C' drive for the program and OS, HDD 'D' drive for documents and misc, HDD 'P' drive for photos and videos, external 'G' drive for whole computer auto back ups (I keep one complete set of a full backup + 6 days of incremtntals and the current full + daily incremental series-I manually delete the older backups since I don't want the auto delete to handle it-I may have a reason to keep it for a while) I also have another external drive for an extra copy of the 'P' drive that I plug in every so often and make a clone of the 'P' drive manually. If it isn't plugged in it can't get corrupted by some on line virus/trojan/malware/ransomware etc. And I use one active all the time anti-virus, one active anti-malware and at least once a month I run two other apps just in case they catch something the others miss-I have seen it happen- App B catches something App A missed or the other way around. It helps that my provider has a robust protection system running also.
3. get one or better yet two external drives and use an automatic backup program like Acronis to do a full system backup weekly on one and a backup of the photo drive to the other. (or do it manually like I do for the photo drive)
4. do not depend on SD or any other small memory cards for your backups - they can get lost, you need a lot of them and if one gets put too close to magnets and certain electronic devices it can get corrupted or erased.
5. if this seems to be too much trouble, well you aren't really serious abot backup security, or you don't know Mr Murphy of Murphy's law fame. Before I retired from teaching I had 5/6 copies of my electronic Roll Book, updated each day: 1-teachers desktop at school, 2-My personal laptop, 3-a copy on removable media I put in the file cabinet and locked at the end of each day. 4-a copy on removable media I took home in my briefcase each day (I had a set of 2-I left one at home with the previous day's copy and took the other back to school for that day's copy), 5-I put a copy on my desktop at home. If I did any work like grading etc at home I took a copy back to school to update the teacher's desktop and had it on my desktop at home, laptop and the media I carried back and forth and updated the media in the file cabinet when I got to work.
A bit of work but I never had to redo a Roll Book from memory and Wild Ass Guesses like I did once when a student knocked my coffee over on the old fashioned paper Roll Book - Oh forgot - I STILL kept a paper roll book as a last ditch backup with only the grades but not the attendance - that was on the school's backup server(s) - that is right there was a backup of the whole Roll Book on the school server also.

And NO there is not any current LR or PS that is supported. It is CC or go to Corel or some other company's PP apps.

drklrd Loc: Cincinnati Ohio

What would be great are to add several 1 or 2 terra byte external drives to store two copies of all of your images on when not working on the shots in Adobe or any other editor program you plan to use. Having two external drives that are duplicates of each other will keep you from losing shots when you have another epic computer crash. I use two external drives for storage and I only put programs on the internal drive. I also use two internal drives, one for swap disking and one to put programs on. Swap disks will help some programs to run faster when ram memory is at a low point although with the computer you mention you may not need a swap drive. They also have 6 core now instead of dual core. Even if you do not ever do movies you can get Adobe elements 18 which does not require a monthly service hook up and it does raw format and it has a photo organizer built into it. Oh and this time make sure you also get a really good anti-virus program. I use a fix me stick once in a while to get rid of the crap that builds up from being on-line but an anti-virus is a must.

rgrenaderphoto Loc: Hollywood, CA

Yes, something without liquid cooling. LQ is only necessary for hard core gamers who overclock their CPUs. Plus, and they don't tell you about this part, Liquid Cooling systems require regular maintenance. Alienware is a Dell company, look at their Precision Workstations for a comparable system. 32 Gb is great for RAM, and the dual boot SSD/SATA starts quickly. If you can afford an SSD main drive, go for it, but you'll need minimum 2 Tb. The RAM is what makes a difference for Lightroom and Photoshop.

Monitors, yes by all means. I prefer the Dell Ultrasharp Wide/Narrow product, since you can get 2 application windows side by side without switching. Mine is a Dell U2913WM, which is probably an older model #, but something similar still available. Resolution is 2560 x 1080. I am certain you can get 4K monitors now.

Purchase the Adobe Creative Cloud Photographers bundle for $9.99/month. Install Adobe Lightroom Classic CC for the Lightroom you are used to. Your Adobe Creative Bundle comes with a cloud (storage) account, which you do not have to use unless you want to. The cloud will come in handy if you have the mobile version of Lightroom on your Smartphone to sync with your desktop. Just forget about Lightroom CC.

Gene51 Loc: Yonkers, NY, now in LSD (LowerSlowerDelaware)

Why are you backing up to SD cards?

You don't need 8 gb vram, 2 is generally enough unless you are running dual or triple 5K displays or lots of 4k video editing -
128 gb boot drive is kinda small m.2 NVMe PCIe is the fastest spec out there at the moment
2 TB spinning drive is slow and you will run out of room on that fairly soon as well.
You make no mention of what cpu you are getting - Lightroom in particular benefits from more cpu cores - which many of the 8th gen i7 cpus offer. Faster still would be one of the 8 core XEON cpus.

In reality, this is a just above entry level computer these days - at least with the specs you have listed. It is a far better gaming computer.

You might want to see that Puget Systems is spec'ing these days for an almost top of the line machine:

https://www.pugetsystems.com/labs/articles/Photoshop-CC-2018-NVIDIA-GeForce-GPU-Performance-1139/

Take note of the performance differences between the 12gb Titan graphics card and the 2 gb 1050. Certainly not worth the $$$$ for use with Photoshop or Lightroom.

Photoshop and Lightrom CC are your best bet if you want Adobe software. It is an industry standard (that doesn't happen by accident). LR 6 and Photoshop CS6 are old tech, and could present a problem if you get a new, unsupported camers one day. Adobe is no longer supporting them and will orphan them soon enough. CC is not a plague - as you have chosen to characterize it - it works smoothly, reliably and is unparalleled in the industry for third party support ranging from tutorials to plugins. There is no rationale that suggests that there is anything better at the moment, and this has been the case for a while now.

Take the $350 you'll save by NOT buying the 1070 Ti and getting a 1050 Ti with 2 gb instead and buy yourself almost 3 yrs of Adobe CC subscription - it's an infinitely better use of your $$$$.

My $.02
I've been spec'ing and building engineering and graphics workstations since 1983.

ravensloft

That's already covered, didn't think it was part of my problems list but thanks for the heads up on it.

ravensloft

I backed up to cards due to all the problems I had gone through with my photography work. Figured it was better to have the original photos them no photos at all and at the time I couldn't afford a external hard drive.

ravensloft

I have to laugh because in order for me to get the computer I want to go well with my photography I have to share it with the hubby who wants to use it for gaming.

PeterBergh

With the large amounts of space required by today's software, 128 GB SSD may be on the small side; I'd suggest at least 256 GB or, preferably, 512 GB. For reasons of speed, I would put all installed software on the SSD.

I also agree with RobertJerl and Gene51: you need several backups and to use external disks -- NOT SD cards -- for the backups. As the crash may have made you realize, it is not a question whether hardware will fail, it's a question of when.

ravensloft

I feel I need a class on backing up information from you. Wow that's a whole lot of what I haven't done. I ran my PC to the max it's 10 years old and there were so many things that would no longer run the software I currently had. It finally gave out and I'm blind to the the new software for pertection. I've only had Norton on the old computer and it originally came with McAfee.

ravensloft

At the time I worked with what I could afford. Much easier to drop $15.00 on a card then to drop $100 at once. Figured better to have the original photos then have no photos at all.

PeterBergh

The important thing is to actually do the backups regularly (at least once a day and after you've worked on significant files or on many files).

Backing up files on a PC can be done in several ways:

1. Backup the Windows 7 way (Go to Control Panel and open "Backup/Restore (Windows 7)").
2. Use Windows 10's File History.
3. Use XCOPY in a DOS window (requires a bit of technical savvy, but gives you total control).
4. Buy a backup program.

The first three ways are free; the fourth way costs money. Unless you're a computer whiz, I would suggest one or both of the first two methods.

Some 10 years ago, Norton destroyed my Outlook address book. I haven't used Norton since then and have been very satisfied with McAfee, YMMV.

In computers, having both belt and suspenders is almost mandatory.