The Ultimate PC Build for Photography Needs

Intel’s Coffee Lake architecture has been out for a while now and Cannon Lake seems to continue to be delayed, so it is time for another refresher to our ultimate build series, focusing on a very fast machine that should be able to handle pretty much anything you throw at it, including stitching large panoramas in Lightroom. While both Coffee Lake and Kaby Lake have a lot of similarities and they rely on the same microarchitecture, Coffee Lake processors are faster and come with even more cores and threads, making them more desirable to invest in. They also require different chipsets to work. For example, the Kaby Lake CPUs work on 100 and 200-series chipsets, whereas Coffee Lake CPUs require newer 300-series chipsets. This means that if you want to upgrade from a Kaby Lake build, you will need to replace both the CPU and the motherboard. For the below builds, I will assume that you are building a new machine from scratch. If you are upgrading, then keep in mind that in addition to changing the CPU and the motherboard, you might also need to upgrade your RAM, depending on how old your machine is. All other components should be perfectly compatible.

As before, I will be presenting two different builds – one based on a full tower case, which gives a lot of flexibility in terms of space, storage and future expansion options, and one based on a very compact build for a lightweight setup that occupies minimum space. Although I have always been using large cases, I have been leaning towards more compact options lately – primarily because it is now possible to build small, but powerful machines. However, you do have to make sure that you take into account proper cooling and airflow, which is a must-have if you are planning to take advantage of M.2 NVMe drives (as explained further down below).

1) Chipset and CPU

For this build, I decided to go with the Z370 chipset, paired with the Intel Core i7 8700K CPU (Amazon). This is a very powerful combination to go with, which should prove to be a worthwhile investment in the long run. With a total of 6 CPU cores and 12 threads, this CPU is far more capable compared to the Kaby Lake 7700K CPU that has 4 cores and 8 threads total, especially when it comes to applications that are optimized for multi-core performance. Speaking of which, that’s what Adobe has done with its latest Lightroom release, showing significant performance improvements when using beefier CPUs, as shown in my Lightroom Performance Comparison. While before it made sense to go with CPUs that had higher clock speeds, now that Adobe and other manufacturers are moving towards optimizing their applications to deliver better performance with more cores, it is better to invest in CPUs with as many cores as possible. In this sense, the Coffee Lake Intel Core i7 8700K will deliver a noticeable boost in performance when compared to its predecessors, even when compared to Kaby Lake.

As for the CPU cooler, I don’t think there is a better air cooler than the Noctua NH-D15, which has dual 140mm fans. Unfortunately, such a massive fan is not going to work for the compact build, which is why it is going to be best to pick something much more compact, such as the Noctua NH-L9I.

2) Motherboard

With the Coffee Lake platform being pretty mature at this point, there are lots of great motherboard options available for the Z370 chipset at the moment from many different manufacturers. When building PCs, I don’t bother with picking either a low or a high-end motherboard, since the best value is in the mid-range. I don’t look for features such as WiFi and Bluetooth, since those are not needed for photography needs. As long as the motherboard has a good layout with at least two M.2 slots and good connectivity options, it should work out great. As for the choice of brand, I have tried many different brands including ASUS, MSI, Gigabyte, ASRock, Intel and SuperMicro, and I always keep coming back to ASUS. For the past few builds, I have been using ASUS and ASRock motherboards, which have been both very stable and reliable brands to work with.

Based on the above, the below two motherboards are my top contenders for the builds:

• Full Tower Build: ASUS ROG Maximus X Hero (Amazon) – a very solid motherboard with lots of connectivity options (including the new USB 3.1 Type-A and Type-C ports), two M.2 ports and excellent audio.
• Compact Build: ASUS ROG Strix Z370I (Amazon) – a great, compact mini-ITX motherboard with two M.2 slots, dual channel memory architecture (up to 32 GB of RAM), built-in LAN, WiFi and Bluetooth. You also get a high-end audio chip and plenty of USB connectivity options.

3) M.2 NVMe SSD Selection

As with the earlier builds, I will be including an M.2 PCIe NVMe SSD drive as part of the build. If you don’t know much about M.2 NVMe drives, you should do some research and understand what you have been missing all these years. M.2 NVMe drives are incredibly fast – there is simply no comparison between SSD and M.2 NVMe SSD! Some of the best M.2 NVMe SSD drives today can deliver up to 3,500 MB/s read speed, while the best SSD drives will cap at 500 MB/s, if that. So imagine booting up your operating system in a matter of seconds and using that extreme performance for cashing and other read/write-intensive operations. Take a look at my NVMe vs SSD vs HDD article for more details. You know where your Lightroom catalog would live!

When shopping for M.2 drives, you must make sure to buy either NVMe or AHCI and not SATA drives (M.2 is just a form factor).

Without a doubt, the best and the most popular choice for M.2 NVMe SSD drives is the Samsung’s 960 PRO NVMe. With an impressive 3,500 MB/s read speed and 2,100 MB/s write speed, this is one of the fastest drives you can buy today. If you don’t mind the slower write speeds, the Samsung 960 EVO NVMe drives are also great and cost a tad cheaper.

Size-wise, I would not settle for anything less than 500 GB. Yes, that’s pricey, but 250 GB won’t cut it for large catalogs, especially if you are planning to generate full size JPEG previews (and you should, if you want ultra-fast Lightroom performance – see this article for more details).

One word of caution – these M.2 NVMe SSD drives get incredibly hot. In fact, I have reported about my Samsung M.2 NVMe failure and I have seen other people report overheating issues as well, especially in smaller and tighter cases with insufficient airflow. When building the PC, make sure that you are not placing the M.2 drive in odd locations where there is insufficient airflow. Make sure to keep it somewhat isolated from other hot peripherals, and ideally, place a fan on your case so that it directly blows on the unit (a side case fan would do a good job at this). In addition, also make sure that the airflow is properly regulated, so that the air that gets sucked from the front of your case goes out from the back.

Another option is to install a heatsink that would help dissipate the heat coming from these M.2 drives. I would not recommend to remove the label from the Samsung drives, as doing so will void your warranty. However, some heatsinks can be installed on the drive without removing the sticker and you should definitely look into those options. While I personally haven’t installed heatsinks on my M.2 drives, others report success with using them. Here is an example of an M.2 heatsink that is specifically designed for M.2 NVMe drives.

4) SSD / HDD Storage

If you don’t mind the high price tag, my top choice would be the Samsung 860 EVO 1 TB SSD (Amazon) drives. Until faster and larger drives hit the market, the 1 TB 860 EVO gives the best value at the moment, going for just $280 a pop. If budget is not an issue and you want to double that storage, the 2 TB version currently retails for around $650.

If you don’t have a lot of photos, go for the 500 GB version instead, which is much cheaper. Why not go for the 860 Pro series? Because it is overkill for photo storage in my opinion. However, if budget is not an issue, go for the 860 Pro line instead, as you will get a bit more performance and a better warranty out of those. If you find other brand SSD drives with similar performance, those might be worth looking into as well – sometimes you will find great deals on Crucial, Intel, SanDisk and other brand SSDs. Another advantage of SSD is that you won’t have to worry about heat dissipation issues, as they do not get as hot as M.2 NVMe or regular hard drives.

If you have a lot of photos that you like keeping on the same volume and you do not want to buy expensive 1-2 TB SSD drives, then go for two 8+ TB hard drives. Just make sure that you don’t buy one of those green drives – go for 7200 RPM drives with a good amount of cache, similar to HGST 8 TB drives. For the full tower build, I would recommend to get four of these drives to use as backup / RAID 1 / RAID 5 storage if you have a lot of photos to store. If you need more, it is always ideal to go for an external storage array, as explained in my Storage Considerations for Photographers article.

5) RAM

Just like with Kaby Lake, you will need to go for DDR 4 memory for this Coffee Lake build, and depending on whether you are building a full tower build or a compact build, you will need to get between two to four RAM sticks. Personally, I would go for at least 32 GB of RAM (choose 2×16 GB sticks for either build). If you want to future-proof your build, go with a 64 GB configuration that can handle anything you can throw at it. If you stitch huge panoramas, you will benefit from a 64 GB+ configuration. It is also worth noting that the performance of the Coffee Lake build will scale better with faster RAM, so the higher the clock speed, the better. Unfortunately, RAM prices have gone up significantly in the past year thanks to the crazy cryptocurrency mining business, so if 64 GB is too expensive, just go for a 32 GB build for now, then you can add more RAM later when the prices get lower (hopefully). To make this work, make sure to get 2x 16 GB sticks. If you go for 4x 8 GB sticks, you will have to replace all memory later, which will cost you.

Here are a couple of good options I found:

• Full Tower Build: G.SKILL TridentZ Series 32GB DDR4 3200 (2x16GB) or G.SKILL Ripjaws V Series 64GB DDR4 3200 (4x16GB)
• Compact Build: G.SKILL TridentZ Series 32GB DDR4 3200 (2x16GB)

6) Video Card

Since Lightroom and many other applications can take advantage of GPU rendering, the speed of your video card certainly does play a role in how fast applications render images / video and respond. If you want to take advantage of this additional benefit, I would get a solid video card that can easily handle the load. While those with deep pockets and a desire to run a 30-bit workflow should look into NVIDIA’s Quadro-series video cards (which can get pretty expensive), I would recommend GTX-series video cards for most photographers instead. I personally chose the NVIDIA GTX 1060 video card, which is super fast and easily handles the load I throw at it. At this time, I do not see the benefit of a 30-bit workflow setup for my needs and I cannot justify spending over $1K on a Quadro-series video card, which is why I went this route. So here are my two top recommendations:

• Full Tower Build: EVGA GeForce GTX 1060 SSC 6GB
• Compact Build: EVGA GeForce GTX 1060 3GB

I chose a smaller profile video card for the compact build, because it leaves plenty of space for cooling and cables.

Unfortunately, we can once again thank cryptocurrencies for making video cards so darn expensive. Personally, I would not waste my money by buying a high-end video card that will cost you a lot of money. Until prices come down, it is simply not worth it.

7) Power Supply

Lots of options for power supplies too and you certainly want to make sure to get a solid power supply that is modular. With a modular power supply, you only add as many cables as you require and you don’t end up with a lot of dangling cords inside the case. My personal favorite has been Corsair CX and RM series PSUs, which are solid performance and are of great value. Here are the two I would recommend for the two setups:

• Full Tower Build: Corsair RM650x Modular PSU. A great choice with plenty of power to connect SSDs and Hard Drives.
• Compact Build: Corsair RM550x Modular PSU. An excellent PSU and should be sufficient for the compact build.

8) Case

Now that we have picked a motherboard, CPU, PSU, RAM, storage and a video card, it is time time to pick a case for each setup. Again, the below choices are based on my personal preferences. If you like other brands and models, please feel free to share you opinion in the comments section below.

• Full Tower Build: Cooler Master HAF X (Amazon). I have been using Cooler Master HAF-series cases for some time now and I love these. Lots of room, plenty of cooling and many options to add lots of storage. If you do not want to go with a tall tower, another recommendation is to go for the HAF 912 mid-tower (Amazon), which is also a very nice and much more affordable case.
• Compact Build: Cooler Master Elite 130 mini-ITX case (Amazon). I have done a lot of research before picking this case. So far I have not found a case that I like better and I have already built 3-4 machines with this case, with impressive results. For the price, it is the best mini-ITX case in my opinion.

9) Monitor

Although a monitor is optional and you can use the current monitor you already have, having a nice 4K monitor with an IPS panel would be sweet for such a high-end setup. I have been personally using Dell’s IPS monitors for the past few years for photo editing and I really like them, but they do have their problems as highlighted in our article on calibrating Dell monitors.

If your budget allows, go for a solid NEC PA-series monitor like the NEC PA243W. While it does not have 4K resolution and other fancy features, it is a superb professional monitor with excellent color reproduction and hardware calibration options. If you can step up to a 27″ monitor, the NEC PA272W is also a superb choice.

10) Assessing the Damage

Let’s take a look at both setups and assess the damage:

That’s pretty close to the previous Kaby Lake build, but keep in mind that I actually ended up reducing the number of M.2 drives to 1, since storage prices, RAM and video card prices have gone up significantly. To be honest, one M.2 is more than enough if you put your OS and Lightroom catalog, so there is really no need for a dual M.2 setup. Plus, those things get pretty hot and you are better off keeping your files in SSD / HDD storage anyway.

Now let’s take a look at our compact configuration:

Just like the full tower PC, this small-factor PC will obliterate pretty much anything out there, except for configurations with more powerful CPUs. The setup is pretty much identical to the full tower, except you are going for a smaller PSU and a video card with less memory.

Please note that I did not include the cost of the operating system.