Have you seen the photos on my website? They are beautiful, colourful, moody, photos of the Wirral in all of its glory. I’ve processed them in Adobe PS and LR on my Lenovo ideacentre, Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-6400T CPU with 8GB of RAM with a beautiful glass touchscreen and it has served me well. Until I bought a Nikon Z7 (cough) and now, well to say that it just doesn’t like the size of the files is an understatement. Luckily I’ve had enough money put by to buy myself a new computer and after arguing with my children, who seem to know everything about computers and what I need (lol) trying to tell me an all in one computer isn’t worth my time and I should get a tower and having looked at SO many on the internet, ‘I decided to build my own!’ 😲 Yeah I had a brain fart and decided I was perfectly capable to do it myself.
This year, 2022, has been all about things I can do for myself, that stretch me, take me out of my comfort zone and I think everyone should try it at least once. Anyway, everyone knows by now how computers work, what they need in them to work and there is so much on the internet these days that you can find out whats necessary at the click of a few buttons. So me being me I just jumped in and after a few conversations with those in the know ( the kids) and went onto the corsair website. It has its own build your pc page, you choose what you need and buy it, my first effort came to nearly £5000 😂 Yeah, so I went back and chose some different stuff, ordered it and when it arrived, well, there was only half of the things I’d ordered, then I realised, I’d only bought the Corsair stuff, no Windows etc 😢 for £1.400, erm NO. So I sent it all back and went onto Amazon. Three weeks later and a few phone calls to America I had my refund.
Part 2. After that disaster of a start and the feeling that certain young people were laughing at me I tried again only this time I googled EVERYTHING. 🤓 ‘Best Graphics Card for photography,’ ‘best cpu’ etc and in the end and not too painfully came up with the following; an AMD Ryzen 7 Processor , AMD as it is slightly faster than Intel, a Nvidia Geforce RTX 3050 graphics card, I weighed up between the 3050 and the 3090 and found there wasn’t a significant difference for my needs apart from cost, an MSI MPG B550 motherboard, a Seagate Barracuda 4 TB internal Hard Drive HDD, 16 gig of memory, 1TB SSD, an MSI MPG A750GF power supply, Corsair RGB triple fan kit, an MSI Vampiric 010 tower, Windows 11. I chose a BenQ monitor as I have had several in the past and know they have a good build quality and they have a great image quality too. Wireless keyboard and mouse but I have to say I am disappointing in the mouse and will be replacing it. Phew, then it all has to be put together!
So I Googled it! 😉 and watched MANY YT videos and when Amazon had finished delivering all of the parts I set out to begin the build. There is a video of Henry Cavill on instagram showing him building his monster computer, it took him several days to get everything installed and running and I kind of thought that he took too long, I thought it could be built in a day and that I would be zooming around Adobe LR like no ones business, oh how wrong I was!
Time is very important when your doing something like this and to get time when there are no expectations of yourself was difficult. I think in all it took me a week, maybe more as I had to return a part I’d ordered by mistake, swap it out for what I really wanted then had a part that was broken and had to be replaced but all in all, I did it with a little help from the kids. I haven’t named it yet and wish I had been recording myself when I opened Adobe LR for the first time because that was a moment, it was so fast! Now I have a shiny, super fast computer, bring on the editing!
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