A Ryzen caps out at something like 145W by comparison.
The default AM4 socket limit's 142 W. In package power monitoring I see 146 come up occasionally and 132 routinely. With PBO, AM4 operation at 200 W is pretty typical. AM5's looking like 230 W default.

350W GPUs and CPUs pegging 250W are next-gen premium performance.
Currently around 500 and 350 W if running Nvidia and Intel desktop parts at stock, actually, 400 and 145 for AMD. Whichever companies are behind on performance are the ones pushing power to compensate. Since AMD's been designing for power efficiency for the past few years that's given them an edge for the time being but they've certainly leaned heavily on power in the past.

It’s to the point that premium CPUs will not sustain full performance under an air cooler of any size.
Umm, I've a couple 5950X builds which sustain 4.4 GHz all core AVX workloads under air while staying under 45 °C ΔT and keeping the processor at stock. If you're not seeing similar it's probably a case or cooler limitation, something off with the fan curves, the BIOS pushing too much voltage, or something like that. With Intel, yeah, it's hard to soak 360 W for the ~1 minute Alder Lake K will do it and cranking fans on 140 air for 250 W sustained gets loud.

Custom loops and 360 or 420 AIOs have their place but I'd rather just buy parts with lower turbo powers and stay on air.

I place reliability and compatibility way above both
Intel's been flailing for several years and Nvida's becoming increasingly abusive, so that's probably more AMD at this point. Cooling solutions aren't indicated for this build and attention to them, as well as LGA1700 socket warping, is likely valuable to keeping a 12700 out of thermal throttling. The Ventana's a legacy design and not a great airflow choice. Unless you've already laid plans to power limit and undervolt I'd suggest reviewing all of that. Given the DVD, Fractal Pop Air is probably the most effective airflow option.

It's not like ASRock, ASUS, and MSI are great but—so far as I know—they haven't kept trying to sell exploding products while claiming there's nothing wrong like Gigabyte's recently done. So, given the priorities, revisiting the motherboard selection probably isn't a bad idea. Cooler Master, Kingston, and Seagate are all ok. Cooler Master doesn't have anything outstanding that I know of in any of their product categories, though, and a bronze supply with a five year warranty's pretty low spec. Platinum with a ten year seems better aligned to priorities. FSP and High Power are probably the leading OEMs at the moment, though various other units are also good depending on the customizations requested.

Any thoughts or suggestions welcome.
It's unclear what's happening for the OS. If XP SP3 is the plan, it lacks asymmetric core support in addition to having a now legacy security architecture and whatever vulnerabilities have turned up in the eight years since support ended. Microsoft's, ironically, clearly in no hurry to make Win11 less of a rush job and I've had mixed results with Linux. So Zen 3 and 4 can be attractive on this aspect of compatibility and reliability.

The only thing I would suggest is getting a bigger HDD, 4TB can fill up pretty fast.
Yeah, I was surprised by the 4 TB choice. That feels tiny. Sounds like it's already purchased and operational, though.

I consider it a great problem that many (most?) modern programmers couldn't write tight, fast code to save their lives.
Speaking as a modern programmer, most of us have little to no difficulty writing tight, fast code by default and without any need to resort to mortal threat. However, we know our management will mark us down on performance reviews for spending time on that instead of shoving in new features. While this has its exceptions like every broad statement, I can't say I see things changing in general until end users get sufficiently fed up with CPU and GPU power requirements that companies like Adobe start feeling pressure to prioritize efficiency over what, honestly, are often marketing add ons to mature products that a lot of customers hardly end up using.
 
Brian, I consider it a great problem that many (most?) modern programmers couldn't write tight, fast code to save their lives. Do any of them even know what a two pass compiler is? Let alone what it does ...

Having been working for quite a while, I think this is unfair to newer programmers. Most of today's projects are network (cloud) based and like everything else, there is never enough time and money to ship projects. New projects nowadays usually optimize for network / cloud performance, not hardware - it just gives you a better bang for the buck for the time you have to develop software.

When I started I wrote pieces of code in assembly language for specific bits of optimization. Nowadays, we spend all our time optimizing network connections and round-trips. If I can reduce our network latency by 20% it is much better than optimizing our on-device software to run at a fifth of the time - simply because network latency is the big bottleneck that end-users feel nowadays.
 
You don't say what you want to do with it. I don't do video, so pretty much anything half recent works. Don't pay the Adobe drip feed tax, so don't need anything special hardware wise. I'm waiting for someone to make a decent non Adobe Chromebook/Android photo editing app, hopefully Silkypix steps up to the plate, and it will be Chromebook/Chromebox for me. It runs brilliant on low spec hardware.

At the moment, really the only thing I use a PC for, is photo editing. Android/Chrome is great. I have an i7 Skull Canyon NUC with 16GB of RAM, a 500GB and 1TB m2 SSD installed, running W10 sitting on a VESA mount on the back of my 24" monitor. The ultimate couch/coffee table computing experience. The most intensive thing it does, is run DXO pure raw? on the odd raw file, which it spits out in about a minute, happy with that.

For storage, I have a Synology 4 bay NAS, at the moment I've only got 3 3TB drives in it, running raid 5? I think. Greatest thing I ever built, by a long shot. Not even close. Absolutely brilliant. Can access anything on it from anywhere in the world with an interwebz connection. Any bills/receipts/mail gets scanned directly into it when I walk in the door, with my WiFi printer/scanner using the Android app on my phone, don't even have to switch anything on. Phone gets backed up to it too.
The photo app on it does a pretty good job of organising and displaying photos as well. Accessible across any platform. Anywhere in the world. Did I mention it's absolutely brilliant?
 
OK. Take a deep breath everyone ;) ...

Sounds like sensible build.
The only thing I would suggest is getting a bigger HDD, 4TB can fill up pretty fast.
The existing HDDs in the box are 3, 2 and 1 TB, plus a 500 GB for system images. A 256 GB SSD for boot and programs. Plus the new 4 TB HDD on top of that (replaces the dead 3TB HDD). Roughly 11 TB in total.
Or just add another 4T as a spare for storing photos.
The new 4 TB does exactly that.
The default AM4 socket limit's 142 W. In package power monitoring I see 146 come up occasionally and 132 routinely. With PBO, AM4 operation at 200 W is pretty typical. AM5's looking like 230 W default.

Currently around 500 and 350 W if running Nvidia and Intel desktop parts at stock, actually, 400 and 145 for AMD. Whichever companies are behind on performance are the ones pushing power to compensate. Since AMD's been designing for power efficiency for the past few years that's given them an edge for the time being but they've certainly leaned heavily on power in the past.

Umm, I've a couple 5950X builds which sustain 4.4 GHz all core AVX workloads under air while staying under 45 °C ΔT and keeping the processor at stock. If you're not seeing similar it's probably a case or cooler limitation, something off with the fan curves, the BIOS pushing too much voltage, or something like that. With Intel, yeah, it's hard to soak 360 W for the ~1 minute Alder Lake K will do it and cranking fans on 140 air for 250 W sustained gets loud.
Agree. Overclocking is not anywhere on my horizon ...

Custom loops and 360 or 420 AIOs have their place but I'd rather just buy parts with lower turbo powers and stay on air.
Yes.
Intel's been flailing for several years and Nvida's becoming increasingly abusive, so that's probably more AMD at this point. Cooling solutions aren't indicated for this build and attention to them, as well as LGA1700 socket warping, is likely valuable to keeping a 12700 out of thermal throttling. The Ventana's a legacy design and not a great airflow choice. Unless you've already laid plans to power limit and undervolt I'd suggest reviewing all of that. Given the DVD, Fractal Pop Air is probably the most effective airflow option.
The Coolermaster cases are mainly case fan mounting spots with lots of air holes. Also sensible drive positions and access. Fans blow in the right direction, dust filters. I like them.
It's not like ASRock, ASUS, and MSI are great but—so far as I know—they haven't kept trying to sell exploding products while claiming there's nothing wrong like Gigabyte's recently done. So, given the priorities, revisiting the motherboard selection probably isn't a bad idea. Cooler Master, Kingston, and Seagate are all ok. Cooler Master doesn't have anything outstanding that I know of in any of their product categories, though, and a bronze supply with a five year warranty's pretty low spec. Platinum with a ten year seems better aligned to priorities. FSP and High Power are probably the leading OEMs at the moment, though various other units are also good depending on the customizations requested.
Any warranty that cannot be easily enforced is worthless ...
It's unclear what's happening for the OS. If XP SP3 is the plan, it lacks asymmetric core support in addition to having a now legacy security architecture and whatever vulnerabilities have turned up in the eight years since support ended. Microsoft's, ironically, clearly in no hurry to make Win11 less of a rush job and I've had mixed results with Linux. So Zen 3 and 4 can be attractive on this aspect of compatibility and reliability.
Existing OS is Windows 7 Pro 64. After migration and testing, this will be upgraded to Windows 10 Pro 64.

I have OEM licences for XP Pro (commercial, unlimited installs) and Windows 7 Pro 32/64 (three of, two in use), plus the official Microsoft Windows 10 upgrade ISO image, both on several HDDs on several PCs and on several DVDs.

The Windows 10 Pro upgrade has been successfully used to upgrade one W7 box already.

I do not require the latest and greatest. I also don't need warranty. We have pretty strong consumer protection laws here in Oz, and I am pretty familiar with it, as Officeworks found out recently ...

I just require a pretty fast box that's pretty reliable running at default speeds for everything, with LOTS of drive connections (minimum of 6x SATA and multiple NVMe), room for lots more RAM (128 GB is plenty, and 32 GB should be more than adequate, considering the physical RAM on the graphics card). Plenty of GPU processing power. No water cooling wanted, or needed (big volume case, plenty of fans blowing air in the right direction). I don't suffocate my PCs and I like them on the floor, where the air is cool, and the concrete slab provides passive cooling.
Yeah, I was surprised by the 4 TB choice. That feels tiny. Sounds like it's already purchased and operational, though.
I'm a contemplative shooter. Only about 100,000 images to date (about 1TB). My cameras do not output 100-200 MB RAW files ...

The older/smaller SATA drives can migrate down the line to other PCs if and when. I will always have a minimum of 4x SATA ports, even with all NVMe ports in use (unlikely), with the Blu-ray drive in one, so three open.

Almost no motherboards have 6x SATA ports, many have two ...

The 1 TB NVMe SSD is overkill, but I will put my Bridge cache on it.
Speaking as a modern programmer, most of us have little to no difficulty writing tight, fast code by default and without any need to resort to mortal threat. However, we know our management will mark us down on performance reviews for spending time on that instead of shoving in new features. While this has its exceptions like every broad statement, I can't say I see things changing in general until end users get sufficiently fed up with CPU and GPU power requirements that companies like Adobe start feeling pressure to prioritize efficiency over what, honestly, are often marketing add ons to mature products that a lot of customers hardly end up using.
Witness the sloppy programming in both Adobe and Windows ...
About the OS, there is a Swedish site that sells Win10 PRO 64Bit for less then US$8!
Of course it is a just a license no media, but they seem to be legit!
I bought my Win10 license from there and it is activated , so legit.
Bo, I've got more OEM licences than PCs at present.
Having been working for quite a while, I think this is unfair to newer programmers. Most of today's projects are network (cloud) based and like everything else, there is never enough time and money to ship projects. New projects nowadays usually optimize for network / cloud performance, not hardware - it just gives you a better bang for the buck for the time you have to develop software.

When I started I wrote pieces of code in assembly language for specific bits of optimization. Nowadays, we spend all our time optimizing network connections and round-trips. If I can reduce our network latency by 20% it is much better than optimizing our on-device software to run at a fifth of the time - simply because network latency is the big bottleneck that end-users feel nowadays.
Ron, apart from my own web site, I avoid 'the cloud' like the plague ...
You don't say what you want to do with it. I don't do video, so pretty much anything half recent works. Don't pay the Adobe drip feed tax, so don't need anything special hardware wise. I'm waiting for someone to make a decent non Adobe Chromebook/Android photo editing app, hopefully Silkypix steps up to the plate, and it will be Chromebook/Chromebox for me. It runs brilliant on low spec hardware.
Too familiar with Adobe, and too old to be bothered changing ...
At the moment, really the only thing I use a PC for, is photo editing. Android/Chrome is great. I have an i7 Skull Canyon NUC with 16GB of RAM, a 500GB and 1TB m2 SSD installed, running W10 sitting on a VESA mount on the back of my 24" monitor. The ultimate couch/coffee table computing experience. The most intensive thing it does, is run DXO pure raw? on the odd raw file, which it spits out in about a minute, happy with that.
A client has had 7 or 8 NUCs replaced under their firm's h/w and s/w contract. That's on 4 workstations, over 6 years. Of course, all local data was lost ...
For storage, I have a Synology 4 bay NAS, at the moment I've only got 3 3TB drives in it, running raid 5? I think. Greatest thing I ever built, by a long shot. Not even close. Absolutely brilliant. Can access anything on it from anywhere in the world with an interwebz connection. Any bills/receipts/mail gets scanned directly into it when I walk in the door, with my WiFi printer/scanner using the Android app on my phone, don't even have to switch anything on. Phone gets backed up to it too.
The photo app on it does a pretty good job of organising and displaying photos as well. Accessible across any platform. Anywhere in the world. Did I mention it's absolutely brilliant?
Sounds simple and great. Glad that it works for you. I find that NAS boxes and networks are too slow. Even very fast, very expensive NAS boxes ...

I also go out of my way to avoid any possibility of external access to my internal computer network ...

Thanks everyone for your time and well thought out replies.
It's now a done deal, so will let you all know how it goes.

I absolutely loathe changing phones, tablets and computers ...
 
Too familiar with Adobe, and too old to be bothered changing ...

That's exactly the reason Adobe keeps ripping you a new one. Fear of change.
A client has had 7 or 8 NUCs replaced under their firm's h/w and s/w contract. That's on 4 workstations, over 6 years. Of course, all local data was lost ...

They must have been the cheapest, nastiest, cr@ppiest NUC's you could find. We've got quite a few at work, they live in a pretty harsh environment (metal fabrication shop with lots of metallic & carbon dust floating around that gets into everything) and I don't recall ever losing one over many years. My own personal home one must be 5 years or so old now, been flawless.
Sounds simple and great. Glad that it works for you. I find that NAS boxes and networks are too slow. Even very fast, very expensive NAS boxes ...

For what? You still haven't said what you use your system for. Plug an ethernet cable in, and they're as fast as a local spinning disc as far as I'm aware. I've got a 500GB m2 SSD with the OS & all programs on, and a 1TB m2 SSD for recent storage/access, anything that's been processed goes straight to the NAS. Access time is not a problem.
I also go out of my way to avoid any possibility of external access to my internal computer network ...
I don't even run any anti virus software, never have, never had a virus since I started computers with Windows 95. Golden rules. Don't download cr@p, or visit dodgey sites. Use genuine software. Not downloaded, cracked copies. Trouble for sure. For my NAS, I use the supplied 2 factor authentication software, if someone somehow does manage to hack into it, good luck to them. Not sure what they'd want with my Canola & Wheat field photos, gas & electricity bills or tax receipts, but anyway................. If they did somehow manage to try & hold my data ransom, once again, good luck to them. It's all backed up on a separate drive anyway. Convenience factor is right off the scale.
Thanks everyone for your time and well thought out replies.
It's now a done deal, so will let you all know how it goes.

I absolutely loathe changing phones, tablets and computers ...

Edit -here ya go. 5 1/2 years, still going good as new. I didn't pay that much by the way, bought it (shock horror) off eBay on a % off sale. Scanned from my Android phone directly to my NAS, shared on my Chromebook while laying in bed :)
NUC receipt .jpg
 
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@Lumixdude I'm not bothered by change. However, the sort of familiarity I have using Adobe products has taken 18 years to acquire. I'm not about to ditch that in a hurry.

Capture One Pro is the nearest contender, and it is expensive - even more than Adobe - and has absolutely crappy DAM features. For all its faults, no other non-standalone DAM comes close to Bridge. In fact, the main reason for my upgrade is Bridge. And the ability to run 50-60 open browser windows while running Photoshop and Bridge. That, and the fact that my hardware is tragically outdated, even though it still works just fine.

Doing a cost/benefit analysis also shows that Adobe's subscription model is both the cheapest and most up to date of all the contenders.

If I were you, I would run RAID 1 on two disks, and backup to your third ... Far safer than RAID 5 . Use NTFS for all of them. IMNSHO RAID 5 is not really worth much more than a single high quality HDD that's backed up. My data was only recoverable because it was on an NTFS volume, and mostly backed up.

How do you know that you haven't got any viruses/poxware if you don't run any antivirus software? I use MalwareBytes Premium on all our PCs. Plus Telstra's real time poxware analysis, plus the modem's built in firewall, plus good old Windows Defender.

Ransomware (in Windows) uses a native admin level background encryption service, which MalwareBytes Premium monitors, and prevents. For just one example. I agree about avoiding dodgy sites ...

I have said (several times) that my main use is internet browsing and research, and photo stuff. But also WP, Spreadsheets, Acrobat, etc, etc. It is a general purpose computing device, after all.

As regards NUCs, the exception does not prove the rule. My (still) client is getting main h/w and s/w support from Australia's largest provider of such services. I'm still the troubleshooter of last resort.

I just bought SYNCBACK SE yesterday, having used it for about 16 years.

A NAS is good for 1 to 2.5 Gbps. My SATA3 HDDs are good for at least 6 Gbps, not allowing for the huge cache (512 MB on the new one). The NVMe SSD runs at 7,000 MBps write speed, 7,300 MBps read speed ... It will be interesting to see real time performance in Bridge, Photoshop and FastStone Viewer. FSV keeps its cache on the system disk - the 7,000 MBps one ...

Thanks for your input anyway.
 
@Lumixdude I'm not bothered by change. However, the sort of familiarity I have using Adobe products has taken 18 years to acquire. I'm not about to ditch that in a hurry.

Capture One Pro is the nearest contender, and it is expensive - even more than Adobe - and has absolutely crappy DAM features. For all its faults, no other non-standalone DAM comes close to Bridge. In fact, the main reason for my upgrade is Bridge. And the ability to run 50-60 open browser windows while running Photoshop and Bridge. That, and the fact that my hardware is tragically outdated, even though it still works just fine.

Doing a cost/benefit analysis also shows that Adobe's subscription model is both the cheapest and most up to date of all the contenders.
Ha ha ha ha ha. Some VERY creative accounting going on there. It costs me around $50 a YEAR to keep my Silkypix developer studio Pro completely up to date. And it still works -forever, even if I don't update it. It's also what Panasonic bundles with their cameras, and the best I've found for accurate colour reproduction between in camera JPEGs, and developed raw's. Of which I use both. As for DAM, I'd much much MUCH rather look after that myself. The amount of time and effort I've lost (and I'm definitely not alone here) due to those stupid LR catalogues is something I never want to think of again. SP is beautifully simple and elegant. It simply creates a folder with all the processing data in it, in the same folder as your raw/jpeg files. You simply copy the lot -or as many or little as you desire, wherever you want -any system you like, it's all right there. All my photos are simply filed under year/camera/month/day, once edited the edits are stored in lens or event folders. Very very quick and easy to find anything as they're (the edits) stored in the photo app of my NAS. Which tells you the link back to the original file. Too easy.
If I were you, I would run RAID 1 on two disks, and backup to your third ... Far safer than RAID 5 . Use NTFS for all of them. IMNSHO RAID 5 is not really worth much more than a single high quality HDD that's backed up. My data was only recoverable because it was on an NTFS volume, and mostly backed up.

How do you know that you haven't got any viruses/poxware if you don't run any antivirus software? I use MalwareBytes Premium on all our PCs. Plus Telstra's real time poxware analysis, plus the modem's built in firewall, plus good old Windows Defender.

Ransomware (in Windows) uses a native admin level background encryption service, which MalwareBytes Premium monitors, and prevents. For just one example. I agree about avoiding dodgy sites ...

I have said (several times) that my main use is internet browsing and research, and photo stuff. But also WP, Spreadsheets, Acrobat, etc, etc. It is a general purpose computing device, after all.
Your proposed system sounds like massive overkill just to do that. To me anyway.
As regards NUCs, the exception does not prove the rule. My (still) client is getting main h/w and s/w support from Australia's largest provider of such services. I'm still the troubleshooter of last resort.

I just bought SYNCBACK SE yesterday, having used it for about 16 years.

A NAS is good for 1 to 2.5 Gbps. My SATA3 HDDs are good for at least 6 Gbps, not allowing for the huge cache (512 MB on the new one). The NVMe SSD runs at 7,000 MBps write speed, 7,300 MBps read speed ... It will be interesting to see real time performance in Bridge, Photoshop and FastStone Viewer. FSV keeps its cache on the system disk - the 7,000 MBps one ...

Thanks for your input anyway.
 
@Lumixdude

If I were you, I would run RAID 1 on two disks, and backup to your third ... Far safer than RAID 5 . Use NTFS for all of them. IMNSHO RAID 5 is not really worth much more than a single high quality HDD that's backed up. My data was only recoverable because it was on an NTFS volume, and mostly backed up.
Nah. Then I have no separate off site backup, & would still have to backup another disc/copy. I think the only way I'd lose data is if I lost 2 drives simultaneously. I'm comfortable with the miniscule chances of that happening. The NAS runs a drive test every week? and lets me know if there's any issues, such as bad sectors and failing drives, so should have plenty of time to swap out a drive if required.
 
@Lumixdude I think that what you might be misunderstanding is that I do all these things at the same time. My current PC is ATM running Word (3 documents), Excel (5 documents), Outlook, about 50-60 windows in 3 different browsers, FSV, Bridge, Photoshop, Acrobat about a dozen invocations of Windows Explorer, and SYNCBACK. That's off the top of my head, without looking. My wife's PC is running a fair few other tasks, including Bridge CS5 and Photoshop. I tend to use both in tandem at times.

BTW, my new box costs me about the same as your NUC when one compares like for like. However, my new box will be massively more powerful, and hopefully last me the rest of my life.

I believe that you are significantly overestimating the level of data integrity that your RAID 5 NAS is giving you. And what if the NAS box itself fails ... ?

I've been doing this for over 40 years. I have some idea of risk analysis, failsafe designs and failure control. And I've seen all sorts of "highly unlikely" scenarios occur.

And as for "creative accounting", I am a CPA with over 30 years experience and about 20 years of accounting and systems analysis, design and troubleshooting before that. So yes, pretty experienced in accounting matters, particularly cost accounting and investment and risk analysis. Forensic accounting is one of my specialisms.

Most of what you are doing with your phone, NAS and NUC, I'm doing with my phone and a fairly high end tablet (or three ... ).
 
@Lumixdude I think that what you might be misunderstanding is that I do all these things at the same time. My current PC is ATM running Word (3 documents), Excel (5 documents), Outlook, about 50-60 windows in 3 different browsers, FSV, Bridge, Photoshop, Acrobat about a dozen invocations of Windows Explorer, and SYNCBACK. That's off the top of my head, without looking. My wife's PC is running a fair few other tasks, including Bridge CS5 and Photoshop. I tend to use both in tandem at times.

BTW, my new box costs me about the same as your NUC when one compares like for like. However, my new box will be massively more powerful, and hopefully last me the rest of my life.

I believe that you are significantly overestimating the level of data integrity that your RAID 5 NAS is giving you. And what if the NAS box itself fails ... ?

If my NAS box fails, I simply pull the 3 drives, pop them into a new Synology box and away I go again. If the drives are corrupted as well, I simply plug in my backup drive, hit restore, and away I go again. Believe me, I looked into this before I spent anything, and the Synology looked like the simplest and easiest way to go. A NAS is NOT A BACKUP. It's just a centralised, easy to access from anywhere, storage device.
I've been doing this for over 40 years. I have some idea of risk analysis, failsafe designs and failure control. And I've seen all sorts of "highly unlikely" scenarios occur.
Which is why I also have a backup. On a completely separate disc.
And as for "creative accounting", I am a CPA with over 30 years experience and about 20 years of accounting and systems analysis, design and troubleshooting before that. So yes, pretty experienced in accounting matters, particularly cost accounting and investment and risk analysis. Forensic accounting is one of my specialisms.

Most of what you are doing with your phone, NAS and NUC, I'm doing with my phone and a fairly high end tablet (or three ... ).
So am I. Amazing how far phones have come isn't it. Did you miss the bit where I wrote that the only thing I use my PC for is my Silkypix photo editing on a 24" monitor. Waiting for an Android/Chrome app that does what Silkypix can, and I'm ditching the PC. Have you tried a Chromebook? I'm staggered at how snappy they run on very very basic hardware. It wasn't all that long ago you needed a multi million dollar supercomputer and billion dollar software to do CAD work. Now I can do 3D CAD modelling on my phone, with free software. You can't/couldn't dream this stuff up. Sure, for work I use a high end gaming laptop with Autodesk Inventor, but the boss pays for that, claims it on tax, so not my worry. I see Adobe in a similar light.
 
I think we are in heated agreement, just different approaches.

When I look at the specs of my current two main tablets, with 256 GB RAM and up to 1 TB on the microSD card ... Just bloody unreal! And a USB-C plug in microSD/SD reader or anything else one can buy a card reader for.

One real trap with NAS boxes is that intergenerational ones may not be compatible with each other! Progress?? I've had this happen to a client. Solution was to take the working drive (NTFS), plug it into one of my PCs and transfer everything onto the new NTFS volume (RAID 1) in the new box.

Same brand of NAS, BTW. Trap for players of any age.

BTW, I'll always have a desktop PC ...
 
I think we are in heated agreement, just different approaches.
Ha ha. You completely misunderstand me. I'm not in a heated argument over anything. Just really really happy with what I've managed completely self taught, and haven't lost or screwed up anything. Yet. Worst thing that's happened was I had my Laptop stolen about 10 years back, & the newer version of Windows didn't like the older version backup I had. Dived in with Linux I think, & rescued pretty much all of my photos & documents. There was a fair bit of backlash at Windows back then, they eventually updated stuff to get it al compatible, but took them a while.
When I look at the specs of my current two main tablets, with 256 GB RAM and up to 1 TB on the microSD card ... Just bloody unreal! And a USB-C plug in microSD/SD reader or anything else one can buy a card reader for.
I don't even take a tablet or laptop with me for storage when travelling any more. Just pop an OTG USB-C hub into my cheap Chinese Android phone, & transfer files wherever I like. Near instantly. And get previews of the files. Crazy. In something that fits in your shirt pocket.
One real trap with NAS boxes is that intergenerational ones may not be compatible with each other! Progress?? I've had this happen to a client. Solution was to take the working drive (NTFS), plug it into one of my PCs and transfer everything onto the new NTFS volume (RAID 1) in the new box.

Same brand of NAS, BTW. Trap for players of any age.
Synology does seem pretty good in this regard, from what I've read anyway. They seem to have a really good name -there's a bit of whinging when they update their System manager at times, but it all seems to keep working. I'm not too worried, as I'm familiar enough with Linux to boot something off a USB stick, dive in and salvage/copy whatever off onto another drive. Linux seems to be able to read most things.
BTW, I'll always have a desktop PC ...
I haven't had one since about 2010. Bought a really nice i7 17" quad core HP way back when they were actually good, & ditched the PC. The closest I've come is my NUC, which I'm really enamored with. Yeah, lots of hate for them out there for some reason, I think mine is fantastic. No, they're not cheap if you get a good one. Wherever you go, there's a spare monitor or even TV kicking around that you can plug into, I've got a couple of smallish Bluetooth keyboard/mouse combos that I throw in a bag & off I go. One will even sync with your phone, & make typing actually enjoyable. Used to take it (the NUC) to work all the time before they got me a decent lappy. I'd still much rather carry that around -super small & light, than any laptop. Yeah, they run mobile processors, but they kill lappy's because of much better thermal management. Plain old air volume for better cooling. And no throttling.
 
Having looked at this review cited below (having already placed my order), I've zero reason to change anything ...

The reviewer uses components that I would not even consider (basically, in the cheap and nasty parts bin at my preferred supplier), specifies DDR5 RAM (both motherboard and RAM too expensive at this point in time. I've specified a Z690 motherboard, but DDR4 RAM), then uses the on chip GPU (I've spent a lot on a decent graphics card, because I have always known of the shortcomings of on board graphics).

He then goes on about very minor differences in gaming performance between i9, I7 and i5 and their various Ryzen counterparts, and barely a word about general performance ... He mentions that the i7 is faster at Photoshop as an aside.

So, IMVHO, he has entirely missed the point I always strive for - BALANCE!
This concept applies across the board IMO. New computers are not exempt.


Again IMHO just the addition of a respectable graphics card could upend his overly precise numbers.

I'm still happy with my choices.
 
I just require a pretty fast box that's pretty reliable running at default speeds for everything
Given the lack of attention to thermals thus far—that list of what a case does gets most of the items but is substantially incomplete for airflow—the best mitigation at this point's probably monitoring for throttling. Not that running the processor into thermal protection exactly qualifies as reliable operation at default clocks. But maybe it'll be fast enough you don't care if the 12700's downgrading itself to a 12500, particularly if workloads are short, bursty, and with low duty cycle.

After migration and testing, this will be upgraded to Windows 10 Pro 64.
Which also doesn't fully support asymmetric core as Intel's limited the thread director to Windows 11. Benchmark data is still pretty sparse nearly a year after launch but what I know of mostly shows average Windows 10 performance penalties of a few percent and somewhat larger power efficiency penalties compared to Windows 11. As with everything perf it depends on the workload, some being agnostic and some getting hammered if they land on an E rather than P cores.

Zen 3's more power efficient regardless from the smaller node and, also being Windows 10 based, we ended up concluding it's not that hard to end up cancelling out Alder's architectural advantages in IPC and clocking. So there's been no good engineering reason to cool 250 W instead of 145 and clear carbon reasons not to.

Almost no motherboards have 6x SATA ports, many have two ...
Haven't paid much attention Intel chipsets lately but I just glanced through two different manufacturers' LGA 1700 lineups and they're all four, six, or eight SATA. Six ports are also common on AMD B550 boards and I actually can't think of any with less than four—depending on PCIe lane allocation the chipset gives either four or six and, even on ITX boards, four SATAs are consistently brought out to connectors. AMD X570 boards tend to be eight SATA.

Witness the sloppy programming in both Adobe and Windows ...
Windows, like any large codebase, has worse parts and better parts. Platform code, such as operating systems or database engines, is more likely to see some funding for performance work. The Windows investments I'm aware of are mostly in the kernel and lower level .NET components, which is logical as those locations broadly maximize return on investment.

Most of the Windows versus *nix benchmark suites I've looked at over the years tend put Windows a bit ahead. For some workloads macOS or one Linux distro or another will be substantially faster, for some Windows is, a lot of the time there aren't major differences but Windows is preferable. All data I have suggests this is attributable to Windows being a broader ecosystem and therefore having more resources, in an absolute sense, to allocate to performance.

A more photographic specific example is GIMP, which has Linux centric development and thus is decidedly faster on certain benchmarks on Linux. As far as I know, nobody's doing Windows specific performance work on it, so that follows. Might be the case for darktable, too.

Oh, and I just checked the Ryzen Threadripper CPU. It's twice as fast as the CPU I've chosen, and a mere 12x more expensive, at ~ AUD 5,714 ...
That is the joy of entry level workstation pricing. I build for more compute intensive workloads than most and typically we can get 90+% of the performance from an upper end desktop build at 25–33% of the hardware cost.

Threadrippers sit in a comparatively inexpensive niche, though. Benchmarked a 5950X at 150% the performance for around 20% of a Xeon-W's cost a couple weeks ago.

there is never enough time and money to ship projects
Yeah, tell me about it. For the big tech companies like Adobe it is, on some level, a choice to have that be a shortage, though. Their 30–50+% profit margins, very stable business situations, and billions of dollars would easily cover engineering time to go back over code after you get it working. And taking the refactoring to sort out those architectural penalties which always get deferred. But that's not how capitalistic corporate governance rolls, either for servicing financial markets or the companies' inability to recognize their hiring limitations as a problem they could solve if weren't too cheap to invest more broadly in people.

It's my sense too some of the perceptions shared in this thread are unrealistic. In most codebases I work on the easy optimizations for data, algorithms, and thread and instruction level parallelism have been taken. Even without network latencies, in cases where I've been the one with an opportunity to make large changes in modernizing a codebase there's been a tendency to stall out after 2–3x speedup. Sometimes there's an especially poorly coded loop and an order of magnitude's possible but opportunities like dropping O(N²) to O(N) have been uncommon.
 
Yeah, tell me about it. For the big tech companies like Adobe it is, on some level, a choice to have that be a shortage, though. Their 30–50+% profit margins, very stable business situations, and billions of dollars would easily cover engineering time to go back over code after you get it working. And taking the refactoring to sort out those architectural penalties which always get deferred. But that's not how capitalistic corporate governance rolls, either for servicing financial markets or the companies' inability to recognize their hiring limitations as a problem they could solve if weren't too cheap to invest more broadly in people.

It's my sense too some of the perceptions shared in this thread are unrealistic. In most codebases I work on the easy optimizations for data, algorithms, and thread and instruction level parallelism have been taken. Even without network latencies, in cases where I've been the one an opportunity to make large changes in modernizing a codebase there's been a tendency to stall out after 2–3x speedup. Sometimes there's an especially poorly coded loop and an order of magnitude's possible but opportunities like dropping O(N²) to O(N) have been uncommon.
Problem, in my experience, is not the coding, it's the testing and retesting (QA) to get to release. We all know that in such big code-bases, every change you make can have so many side-effects that even if it is very cheap to develop, it is still not that cheap to release. All I am saying is that the developers I get to work with today are just as capable as any from the good old days, in some cases better (as you would expect people that have been exposed to more stuff to be). The fact that products are not optimized the way they were in the past is not an indication of the developers, it is on the places businesses put their emphasis on and frankly, on the state of technology (when the hardware is so powerful and so cheap, sometimes it just does not make sense to put the emphasis on squeezing every last bit of performance of the software as it will not be something the end-users will really feel, so why bother).

When you had slow cpus and memory, a 2x improvement might be very noticeable. When you have cpus and memory as fast as we do today, a 2x improvement would be a move from insanely fast to even more insanely fast...
 
Of course I forgot something ...

An Asus Blu-ray recorder/player. $149, will add it to the order on Monday.

This one:

Ordered this this morning (Monday here). Had a nice chat with the fellow. He said they love 'gamers' because they spend up big on totally unnecessary stuff.

He also echoed my thoughts on DDR5 and DDR5 motherboards. Too expensive, and often unreliable. He offered that without my specifically asking. Interesting. Also too much heat in normal use. Basically ratified my choices for speed and reliability as well as value for money. Also lack of choice and features. All without my asking him ...

As one of Melbourne's biggest wholesalers/retailers, they have vastly more experience with what works and what doesn't than any individual has. I have relied on them checking my specs against their experience for about 20 years now. They know their stock far better than I do! They will occasionally suggest an alternative part that will better fit what they know I am seeking to achieve. I value their very wide ranging expertise and knowledge.

And just BTW in reply to some suggestions made, here in Oz we often don't have parts that are freely available in the USA. Our market is too small, with a population less than California.
 
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