I had the opportunity to shoot my first wedding for my best friend’s youngest daughter in early October. It was a fun, but nerve-wracking, experience that I will never forget. When I came home and began to select photos for editing, I quickly realized that my laptop was no longer up to the task of handling photo editing. The Denoise function in Lightroom is fantastic, but my laptop just couldn’t handle its demands. It would simply crash mid-processing. The laptop in question was originally purchased when I started graduate school in 2020, and it was great for that purpose. I had been debating for a while whether I wanted to return to a tower as my primary computer.
After a ton of research and pricing comparisons, I decided to bite the bullet and return to a tower. I’m not interested in moving to a Mac for several reasons, so that was never a consideration for me. While I am comfortable replacing components in laptops, it is much easier to upgrade towers. I wanted something that would be good for several years but allow me to continue to upgrade components as needed.
The base tower that I chose was the Dell XPS 8960, but I upgraded every component over the base configuration. I chose the Intel i9-14900K processor with the NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 SUPER 12GB graphics card. I also decided to go with 64 GB RAM, two 1TB PCIe M.2 SSD drives and a beefier power supply to allow for future upgrades.
I have been using the new setup since Halloween, and I am in love. Tasks in Lightroom that were taking 15-20 minutes (if they finished) now take mere seconds. My photo editing workflow is so much more efficient, and I am less prone to wanting to chunk a keyboard across the room in frustration.
The return to a CPU tower has required reconfiguration of my desk setup, which I am still getting dialed in, to be honest. I work from home 3 days per week for the job that pays the bills, so the setup has to accommodate my work laptop. I wanted everything to run through one monitor, one keyboard and one mouse, so I found a KVM switch on Amazon that is doing a good job so far. I’m still not very satisfied with the cable management under my standing desk, so that is my next focus.
It is the Sunday before Christmas as I post this, so I want to wish everyone a safe and happy holiday.
