Outstanding value with a high performance workstation

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Calson

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In checking for a way to upgrade my current tower computer I hit a wall as there are only 2 PCIe slots available on the motherboard so despite its 1000W PSU none of the new graphics cards will fit, in particular HP deciding to limit board height to 4.4 inches which limits one to a nvidia Quadro board.

I learned that I needed to go with a gaming desktop to get a high end graphics card and this meant either the HP 45L or the Lenovo Legion Tower 7i computer. Each have their slight advantages but decided to go with the Legion with its cooling system. The price out the door at Lenovo or its resellers was $3,300 plus tax for the one with the nvidia RTX 4080 16GB graphics card included. At this time the same configuration is being sold by BH Photo for $2449 and with their Payboo account one can avoid paying sales tax. Total savings with BH Photo was $1,245.

Anything comparable from Apple was going to cost me over $8,000 which is more than I care to spend on what is a hobby.
 
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If you have the experience (I do, in addition to being a pro photog I spent over 25 years as a software architect) you can start from scratch. I was getting dismal performance from an Nvidia GeForce RTX 2070 with a Ryzen 5 3600X 6-core and 64gb of memory. It would take Photoshop 90 seconds to open the print dialog box. I started with a bare box and boosted my performance with an AMD Ryzen 9 5900X 12 core with 128gb of memory. The newer Nvidia Geforce RTX 3060 has given me all of the processing speed I need in any editing tool. What used to take 90 seconds now happens in under 2 seconds.

If you've never built a box from the ground up it can be a daunting task for the first time. I've been building them since the late 80's. I use Samsung SSDs for storage. It is blazingly fast.
 
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Just helped my son build a gaming PC, he used https://pcpartpicker.com/ to verify compatibility between the components, ordered everything off Amazon. If anything was confusing like CPU cooler and case front panel connections to the motherboard we just searched on YouTube. It was amazing how easy it was to assemble. He reused his old boot drive so we were up and running in no time.
 
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Completely agree with all the comments above. Building your own PC is the way to go and you can do it for far less than $3300, plus you can get the parts you really want. You'll find that some of the parts in the pre-configured systems are WAY more than you really need for photo processing, so you can trade cost from one component to another component to maximize what you really need. I just did this recently and love my system. LR came out with their Denoise upgrade about 3 months after I built my system so now I wish I had spent more on the GPU, but that's something I can upgrade later if I want.
 
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Doing it yourself can allow for different component selection but one pays more in the end. Every single component is purchased at full retail and costs 3-4 times as much as a OEM computer company will pay. My last computer purchase was a HP Omen 45L that comes with the Nvidia RTX4090 graphics card that retails for around $2,000. The Intel i9 CPU retails for $600. The entire HP computer cost me $3,200 and that includes a warranty and ongoing driver and firmware updates.

My first computer in 1980 used Unix and I had to create dot strings and make my own RS 232 cable to run a dot matrix printer. I oversaw engineers building industrial computers from the the circuit board up along with the firmware coded in Assembly. So I appreciate it when with a computer I can run an application that scans every internal device and determines which drivers and if the BIOS needs to by updated and makes this relatively fast to do.

Something that few people consider or begin to appreciate is that the more prevalent a computer the more likely that others will have encountered and reported a bug and that others can therefore get a patch from the vendor. With a white box and your own mix of components that is not going to be the case and one will spend days searching on forums for help to diagnose and hopefully find a fix for a problem. If someone has time to kill then a white box DIY project computer is an excellent way to go.

When I had two Xeon powered computers with one running Windows and the other running the Mac OSX the Apple computer ran my batch job in half the time. The operating system was far more efficient. With Windows 7 all computers lost 50% of their performance compared to Windows XP. Subsequent versions of Windows are still very inefficient and people have bought new computers to avoid taking the hit.
 
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Off lease workstations can be stellar deals. I picked up a Dell Precision tower, it's a couple generations old (still had a year of its warranty left on it too!), but it hammers through tasks well enough for me. Enterprise grade hardware is sold off cheap when most places move on to the latest tech.
 
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Hi. I'm a computer builder, maintainer, networker, etc. FWIW, you can build one in an afternoon for under $2k. Just don't get stupid about the graphics card. Look at a current generation i9, get a new motherboard with DDR5 RAM (32Gb or more) and PCIe 5.0 support for a 2Tb M.2 NVMe Gen5 drive. At this time, a FireCuda 2Tb is likely a best choice for the primary drive. You should also have a big storage drive and a backup process (Amazon, Backblaze, etc).

If it's for just photography and not gaming, a moderate graphics card is fine. Make sure your case will house your cooling system (dimensions). Ignore the pretty lights, have fun, wait 12 months, repeat.
 
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I found a local, well-established PC shop with a good reputation and had them build me one. They have a good warranty and good support. Saved me a good amount of money and I appreciate dealing with a local small business.
 
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