PC for manuscripts - help needed!

R

Rogerius

Member
Dear All,
I am an IT caveman and would need your help! I work mostly with ancient manuscripts, which means that I often have a few (five to ten) very heavy (about 1GB each) PDF documents open at the same time. I would need a desktop able to support them without much trouble, and possibly to use 3 or 4 screens together.
I was told to go for an i7 intel, an Asus Prime Z490-P motherboard, 32 RAM (Corsair Vengeance 2666 MHz), and a Nvidia Geforce GTX 1660 6 GB graphic card. Would you think it's appropriate? Thanks so much for your help!
 
Charlas

Charlas

Enthusiast
Adobe acrobat is famously single threaded, so intel high clock speed is the way to go, 10th gen i5 and i7 parts will cover you off there (have a look at gamers nexus resent reviews as they do an acrobat/pdf test as one of their benchmarks), memory will be your friend though, if a pdf file is a gig in size, it will be bigger once loaded as pdf uses zlib compression at rest. Depending on text and images will depend on size of file/memory, lots of text = lots of memory (I know not intuitive, but text compresses much better than images) if they are scanned pages (images) then that's different, as it's not text.

Best way to check is open just one typical, bring up task manger and see the memory usage once opened. The times that usage by 4 and add 4gb for windows to run, and should be in the ballpark, get 2933 ram (or faster not 2666 if possible on the board cpu, only z boards will allow 'non-standard' speeds but all 10th gen support 2933 (besides i3 parts, but shouldn't run them on a z board anyhow)

Besides that a 1660 will be fine, if not gaming a 1650 would do, heck 3ven the on board intel will do the job just fine with a decent Thunderbolt hub for the extra displays.

Disk space, only you will know how much you need as you store the files, see how much you have at the moment, try work out how much you have increased in the last 6 months, and multiply it out for another 18months. But external storage is easy enough with USB3/Thunderbolt and won't suffer too much on performance from a good external enclosure down the line (keep current local, and worked on on external, how I do my video source files, back up anything important to a cloud service as well, make sure 2 copies of needed stuff)

Hope that helps, besides that an i7-10xxx with 32gb ram and a gpu sounds sensible.

If Adobe ever sort out their single thread issues with acrobat (and there has been complaints about it for at least 10 years) then AMD Ryzen would be the way to go, but at the moment, Intel is king of single core.
 
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Charlas

Charlas

Enthusiast
Oh one thing so the guys that know a little more about PCS's desktop offerings, let us know a budget and styling (i.e RGB, Cool, subtle, office) and sure they will point you to a specific product set
 
R

Rogerius

Member
Thanks so very much, Charlas! This is truly helpful! I heard suggestions to go for AMD Ryzen, but I had no idea about the issue with acrobat - and for me not having acrobat functioning properly would be a disaster!
I am afraid I have no idea what computer styling means (I really am a total beginner, and so far mac user), but I would mostly use my desktop for work. As for budget, I'd hope not to go beyond 1.5k.
Thanks very much again for your help!
 
Charlas

Charlas

Enthusiast
Rogerius said:
Thanks so very much, Charlas! This is truly helpful! I heard suggestions to go for AMD Ryzen, but I had no idea about the issue with acrobat - and for me not having acrobat functioning properly would be a disaster!
I am afraid I have no idea what computer styling means (I really am a total beginner, and so far mac user), but I would mostly use my desktop for work. As for budget, I'd hope not to go beyond 1.5k.
Thanks very much again for your help!
Click to expand...

To be honest, you could happily get away with an AMD Ryzen part as long as it's in the i7 kind of league, and for 1.5k PCS have a mega deal on at the moment (https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/configure-review/348/) and for the slight Single core deficiency it would be a great build, no matter what your doing, as long as you don't mind the look/feel
 
R

Rogerius

Member
Charlas said:
To be honest, you could happily get away with an AMD Ryzen part as long as it's in the i7 kind of league, and for 1.5k PCS have a mega deal on at the moment (https://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/configure-review/348/) and for the slight Single core deficiency it would be a great build, no matter what your doing, as long as you don't mind the look/feel
Click to expand...
Thanks very much indeed, Charlas. So basically would you suggest me to go for this combination (the link you sent me) rather than the set of items I put down at the beginning (Asus Prime Z490-P motherboard, 32 RAM (Corsair Vengeance 2666 MHz), and a Nvidia Geforce GTX 1660 6 GB graphic card)? The cost is not too different, but I am a total beginner and have no idea myself!! Thanks a lot!
 
Charlas

Charlas

Enthusiast
Nursemorph said:
I'm the same. For the case, you should be looking at the Fractal Focus G (the one in the examples) as a minimum...lower budget cases aren't really good enough....the Focus G is an excellent budget case that deservce a price tag double what it is (I have the Focus G in my system and it is excellent)..however, it is not the quietest case around...it doesn't sound like a Boeing 747 taking off but neither does it sound like a Toyota Prius....if noise level is important, then I'd look for something with quiet in mind.
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You will get more for your money with that special (it's 1800 quids worth of hardware for 1500, or 1400 if you don't need the windows license) it really is a good deal!

It won't be as quick on paper as an i7, but that's on paper, we are talking ms of difference, or maybe a second or two during opening very large files. But for everything else it will be equal or better than the same priced Intel stuff.

My 'server' is a dual cpu Intel Xeon with 48 threads at the moment, and that would be beaten nowadays by a 3950x at less than a qtr of the cost of my setup.
 
R

Rogerius

Member
Nursemorph said:
I'm the same. For the case, you should be looking at the Fractal Focus G (the one in the examples) as a minimum...lower budget cases aren't really good enough....the Focus G is an excellent budget case that deservce a price tag double what it is (I have the Focus G in my system and it is excellent)..however, it is not the quietest case around...it doesn't sound like a Boeing 747 taking off but neither does it sound like a Toyota Prius....if noise level is important, then I'd look for something with quiet in mind.
Click to expand...
yes thanks, I'd rather go for a simple case, but a quieter one! I cannot work with noise around (though admittedly a noisy computer works as a background noise and so it might even help...)
 
Charlas

Charlas

Enthusiast
Like I say, if the case isn't your taste then that's fine, remember don't need all the lights on if you don't want to though, it can be stealth 😉

I'm the same, RGB is for kids, I'm too old for that stuff nowadays, plus blue Led's for some reason wind me up no end lmao, even so it's still a cracking deal.
 
Charlas

Charlas

Enthusiast
Oh and that one should be quiet, uses a noise dampened PSU and water cooling, so should be 40ish dB noise, and most rooms are 35-37 dB noise floor.
 
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