This is my rig: Bill Howard’s million-photo $10,000 digital photography workstation

The quest for my new rig started with the need for more speed and fewer crashes. No surprise there. I wanted to edit photos without the lag as Photoshop ambled to life and pulled a big photo off a slow hard drive, or the 20-second wait for Photoshop to blur the background of a photo. I’d do almost anything — buy almost any CPU or SSD — to avoid the annoying pauses that happen a hundreds of times a day.

I wound up building a rig with a six-core CPU on a workstation-class motherboard, dual SSDs and a four-drive RAID array, a single graphics card, and dual monitors. It has a keyboard so powerful it needs two USB cables, and then three scanners and an eight-bay backup server. The rig stores a million photos inside the system unit, twice that on a NAS.

Some of this may sound like overkill. It is and it isn’t. Here’s why.

Wanted: A PC that executes in the blink of an eye

Previously I was working with a four-year-old PC — upgraded but still slow — and a three-year-old iMac. A refresh was overdue. The main PC was painfully slow handling photos, worse as I’ve worked my way into video editing. GoPro video cameras and DSLRs may be small but they churn out a prodigious amount of data.

My goal was blazing fast speed for photos and secondarily for video. How fast? Intel founder Andy Grove said of benchmarks, “Fast is when something happens in the blink of an eye.” In other words, like obscenity, you’ll know fast when you see it. I wanted to be able to instantly flip through 100 full-screen images with no hesitation. I wanted to render a blurred background in five seconds not 15 or 20. I didn’t want to wait 45 minutes for Lightroom to import 1000 photos and create full-size previews.

A million photos takes up 6TB-8TB, so I wanted 8TB, minimum, of internal storage for direct access to all of them. I also wanted data redundancy on board, meaning some for of RAID. I wanted twice as much backup storage on a server. I wanted a system that stayed cool, a comfortable keyboard and mouse since I’m also a writer, and video conferencing for talking to clients, friends, and organizations that have discovered Skype and Google Hangouts.

My research included checking with tech-savvy friends in the industry and at ExtremeTech. Here are recommendations I heard:

• SSD is mandatory. Get a second SSD as a hard disk cache or data drive, but you need an SSD for booting up.
• Load up on RAM. With 16GB-32GB of RAM, no Photoshop project will spill out of RAM to a scratch disk and a cause of lag on hard drive systems.
• For Photoshop, the number of processor cores matters more than CPU speed. Performance improves noticeably with 4-6 cores. Beyond six, price goes up faster than performance. Also, in addition to Intel’s Core i7, consider Xeon.
• For Adobe software, a midrange graphics card works well. Just make sure it supports OpenGL.
• Don’t skimp on backup. You need a couple external drives or a NAS with room to store at least twice the data you have today.

With that in mind, I went to work. I actually started building two rigs since I needed to update two systems. I built one near-ultimate system and one bang-for-the-buck system. (More on the second system at the end.)

CPU: Intel Core i7-3930K CPU

My main apps, Photoshop and Lightroom, are heavily multithreaded, meaning the CPU can execute multiple tasks simultaneously within the same program. That means they benefit from lots of physical CPU cores. The newer Ivy Bridge and Haswell architectures focus on dual- and quad-core CPUs. So I went with a more established (read: older) CPU technology with six physical cores and 12 threads: the Intel Core i7-3930K Sandy Bridge-E using the LGA 2011 socket ($550). The K suffix means it’s unlocked and can be overclocked to 3.8GHz.

There was little need for the sibling Core i7-4960 for gamers, almost twice the price to step up from 3.2 to 3.6 GHz base clock speed. PCMag.com said in its Core i7-3930K review, “For all but the most rabid enthusiasts, Intel’s Core i7-3930K processor represents an unparalleled combination of price and performance for use on the X79 Express platform.” This fit with my belief that you often want to shop one model down from the top.

Atop the CPU, I mounted a Corsair H100i liquid CPU cooler ($110). Its dual-fan radiator replaces one of the case fans. The two hoses obstruct motherboard access less than a cheaper CPU-mounted fan but it’s tougher to mount. It uses an internal USB connector for power.