After four years, it finally looks like it’s time to upgrade my desktop machine.  For most things, the machine is fine, but when it comes to processing images in Lightroom, the delay involved in rendering each image (4-5 seconds per 16MP raw file) has started to be annoying.  The hope is that by jumping forward 3 processor generations, and doing some modest overclocking, I can get that down by 40-50%.

The great thing about building your own system, aside from the fact that your may actually enjoy the process of assembling it (as I do), is that you can get pretty much exactly what I want, hardware-wise.  This is particularly helpful for me because the alternative would be to buy from Apple since I run MacOS X.  Apple makes slick computers, no question about it, but they also force you to pay for additional stuff you wouldn’t otherwise get, in addition to the usual Apple markup, like a fancy graphics card where none is needed.

The machine I’m building (full specs below) will just about equal a current generation top-of-the-line $2000 iMac in the applications I use.  But because I can reuse many of the components from my existing desktop (starting with the monitor), the cost of the upgrade is going to be less than $500.  Plus I can probably sell off my old motherboard and processor for around $250, further shrinking the net cost.  The case, power supply, disks, wireless card and monitor are all being reused in the new build.

List of components.  Starred items are those I already have.