There are lot and lot of advices in this article you SHOULD PRECISELY NOT FOLLOW when you build an editing PC.
> Watercooling
Watercooling addicts will try to argue that you can achieve a better cooling performance than with aircooling. The truth is that watercooling is at best only 1 or 2 degrees cooler than a proper aircooling system, or even worse in some tests. Then they will argue that watercooling provide a better performance/silence ratio, which also falls short when you consider that top aircooling systems are basically dead silent. You really don't want to deal with water in your PC (even with all-in-one systems) for nothing to gain.
> Not using a calibration device
I don't even understand how you can come up with the idea of writing an article about building a PC for photography/video editing while you don't already use and don't even plan to use a calibration device. The point is not even if you plan to publish, print or whatever, what is at stake is the way you view your own images. And there is ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE in buying a top of the line monitor if you don't calibrate it.
> Buying the best performing components
For 60-70% of the price of the top of the line product, you will get 95-99% of the performance of it. The same best performing product will anyway be "obsolete" (compared to the new best performing product) in a couple months and its price will drop 20-30%. This has always been true and will always be true for any PC building. This is even more true for an editing station since the top of the line will not even give you the 1-5% performance benefit you should expect.
> Buying a gaming video card
Particularly the top of the line. Your editing software will never use the processor and the memory that comes with such a gaming video card. And only pro cards will provide you 10-bit workflow, which is what you need if you bought an editing monitor with 10-bit panel and 99-100% Adobe coverage. You can buy an entry-level pro card, it will be more than enough for Lightroom/Capture One/Photoshop/Premiere/etc. IF you don't buy a pro card, then why do you buy such a monitor?
> Bothering with huge overclocking or with RAM latencies (!)
I agree it's quite easy now to do some overclocking, but you should not aim for the extreme. It's your work machine, you want stability.
> Delidding your CPU
What?! Just don't that. Let's be serious a minute.
I think you are misinformed about the current state of watercooling (even AIO). I'm running a very hot overclocked machine running extra voltage than normal. A 280mm radiator is an improvement over even the largest copper hsf.
As for the gaming card - it's not top of the line (that would be Titan Xp and Titan V) - but yes it's very high-end. So why did I opt for that? Why not? I do a ton of 4K gaming and VR as well. Definitely not the primary goal but a nice side benefit. I mention some of the games I play in the setup section.
As for the pricing - obviously monetary concerns were not much of an object with this build but the price of my graphics card has doubled since I purchased it. And RAM has gone up another $100.
But yes - it will get outdated in just a few weeks. The benefit of the PC is that I can just swap out an upgrade to the next high-end thing over a weekend when I want. I already did that once - this build started out as a 7700K cpu/mobo and I swapped them out for an 8700K before publishing this.
> I think you are misinformed about the current state of watercooling (even AIO). I'm running a very hot overclocked machine running extra voltage than normal. A 280mm radiator is an improvement over even the largest copper hsf.
I'm not saying it's not an improvement, I'm saying the improvement is marginal, meaning it's not worth it.
> I do a ton of 4K gaming and VR as well. Definitely not the primary goal but a nice side benefit. I mention some of the games I play in the setup section.
I think that's my point, it's more a gaming/overclocking station than an editing workstation. The article is fine and well written from this perspective.
Oh, and a small bonus for you: you should move your cpu watercooling radiator from front to top. In your configuration your radiator is basically heating your whole computer, including you graphic card. Since the graphic card is warmer and usually louder, this is not what you want.
Absolutely wonderful article. Your blog in general is incredible - nice to see folk maintaining such great blog content outside of Medium. Also gotta say - the quality of your photo sets, in particular NZ are just jaw dropping.
Regarding your LR benches any ideas why your 7700K setup was so much slower than your iMac and MBP in Lightroom? Seems odd how much faster the 8700K OC is...
On a related not I ran a similar test comparing a 7700K build with a GTX 1070 vs a maxed out Macbook Pro 2015 15". The Macbook Pro was 25% faster which is bizarre given that the 7700K is ~30% faster in single and multi-threaded performance.
The guy went to great pains to share a very detailed article. Perhaps you could be a bit more helpful with your opinions rather than dismissive of his.
As for delidding and water cooling, while yessir, water cooling doesn't normally offer much benefit, that is because you are still cooling with ambient air. If your processor overclocked, you will likely see larger improvements with water cooled. And for the i7 8700k, there seems to be quite a lot of anectodal evidence so far that it is difficult to keep cool at 5ghz+ is difficult without delidding.
I am in the process of designing a new dev rig and in the past, I have always stuck with stock speeds. But the ability to overclock 6 cores from 3.9ghz to 5ghz seems worth it.
And you can purchased pre-delidded, guaranteed, and tested for stability CPUs from various reputable vendors online for an upcharge.
> Watercooling
Watercooling addicts will try to argue that you can achieve a better cooling performance than with aircooling. The truth is that watercooling is at best only 1 or 2 degrees cooler than a proper aircooling system, or even worse in some tests. Then they will argue that watercooling provide a better performance/silence ratio, which also falls short when you consider that top aircooling systems are basically dead silent. You really don't want to deal with water in your PC (even with all-in-one systems) for nothing to gain.
> Not using a calibration device
I don't even understand how you can come up with the idea of writing an article about building a PC for photography/video editing while you don't already use and don't even plan to use a calibration device. The point is not even if you plan to publish, print or whatever, what is at stake is the way you view your own images. And there is ABSOLUTELY NO SENSE in buying a top of the line monitor if you don't calibrate it.
> Buying the best performing components
For 60-70% of the price of the top of the line product, you will get 95-99% of the performance of it. The same best performing product will anyway be "obsolete" (compared to the new best performing product) in a couple months and its price will drop 20-30%. This has always been true and will always be true for any PC building. This is even more true for an editing station since the top of the line will not even give you the 1-5% performance benefit you should expect.
> Buying a gaming video card
Particularly the top of the line. Your editing software will never use the processor and the memory that comes with such a gaming video card. And only pro cards will provide you 10-bit workflow, which is what you need if you bought an editing monitor with 10-bit panel and 99-100% Adobe coverage. You can buy an entry-level pro card, it will be more than enough for Lightroom/Capture One/Photoshop/Premiere/etc. IF you don't buy a pro card, then why do you buy such a monitor?
> Bothering with huge overclocking or with RAM latencies (!)
I agree it's quite easy now to do some overclocking, but you should not aim for the extreme. It's your work machine, you want stability.
> Delidding your CPU
What?! Just don't that. Let's be serious a minute.