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Comment by stegosaurus | Hacker News Reader

4000USD is a lot of money. That seems like an odd setup.

Not having ever wanted to buy a machine for that amount of cash, I'd expect to do better with multi-socket systems.

Anyone care to chime in? I struggled to spend over 1K GBP with my latest machine. (I think 'Extreme Edition' is basically like buying the S version of a car, mind). i7-5820K, 64GB ram.

One thing that does stick out is an odd monitor comparison. There's an expensive color repro "low" (in comparison) res monitor for the PC, against the standard iMac retina. Aren't there cheaper 4K monitors/TV's about?

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Lightroom has a single core CPU bottleneck, multisocket is pointless for the this use case.

The rest is on the GPU

I suspected that, but what's with the monstrous 8 core thing then? Couldn't you equally overclock a 4 core CPU and save hundreds of dollars?

Basically, is the whole article just nonsense? :)

Absolute nonsense.

This stinks of a cross between attempting to do PR and having someone who didn't make a spending decision justify it.

As I said elsewhere, the place to improve is in their human workflows, or there is no improvement to get.

In their situation I think processing time is the bottleneck or at least a major factor. They probably see every penny back in productivity gains.

I'm sure. Are Xeon systems just super expensive, though? Is 8 cores the best you can do for 4K?

The CPU gets progressively expensive; and yes, more than 8 cores will probably blow the $4k budget. However, two things to note:

1) High-end i7 and Xeon with the same core count hover around the same price. However, Xeon are not made for overclocking whereas the i7 can be overclocked (easily).

2) The application they used for benchmarking relies on high CPU speed. Normally what you find is the more cores a CPU has, the lower their clock speed (I assume to keep it within the TDP).

Also, CPU is all but one price component in a Xeon system:

- The base motherboard would cost the same to a high-end consumer motherboard. If you're looking for dual-CPU motherboard it will cost almost twice as much.

- (Most) Xeon systems will require ECC RAM, which is more expensive than the regular RAM.

That $480 gaming motherboard does seem rather excessive too ...

If you want to have a stable system when overclocking 3GHz --> 4.5Ghz, it's a good choice.

Wow, you need to spend that much for decent voltage regulators?

Yeah, the ROG does command a premium. Good hardware quality but I think most of the extra cost is due to all the add-ons (e.g. premium onboard sound chip). It is a gaming motherboard after all.

However, never ever skimp on motherboard if you're planning to overclock :)

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