Well I say spec but mostly just help with the mother board choice. Wanting a little ITX board with enough grunt to handle Photoshop files I deal with on a daily basis are 21mp so Mostly Ram will be needed. Would like it to have Raid 5 capabilities or atleast Raid 1 I've Designed the case and started building it already, plenty of room for an ITX + big ish heatsink for cooling & room for 5 Laptop drives. What i've looked at so far are http://linitx.com/product/13114 Has 5 Sata ports, proper Ram slots no SOdimms but the CPU looks a bit weak as does the GPU. http://linitx.com/product/12800 Can put a proper CPU in that one but again gfx look a bit weady. Any help would be appreciated then I can buy the board and start building . Morgan.
Need a budget. You don't start by looking at motherboard though. Generally you start by deciding which CPU and so which socket motherboard you need.
Depends could stretch too £250-300 for the Mobo & CPU if its a split combo, I don't Really have a budget as I'm building the comp over time rather then in 1 go.
Or wait until Zotacs Mini-iTX Z68 boards are available and get an i5 2500k for overclocking goodness.
you don't normally build a pc over time you realise your going to spend another £80 on a case + PSU and then £40 per 1TB hd
I'm running a MBP at the moment so this is a 2nd PC so nothing wrong with building it over time. Thats all fine the case is a scratch build im making at work so cost to me Zero, PSU will most likely be one of these http://linitx.com/product/12301 Need to tally up all the power requirements once i know what board and CPU etc.. it will have. Hard drive wise will be 5 of these http://www.ebuyer.com/product/192247 helps keep space down and power usage. GPU wise I was hopeing there would be a board with a decent onboard GPU, it wont be playing any games as mentioned above Most Photo Editing, will watch BDs on it thats about it. @Jaybles, Thank you will have a google around in regards to zotac .
Laptop drives tend not to perform as well as their desktop counterparts. You may want to consider an SSD for the boot drive and your photoshop stuff. The only remotely decent integrated GPUs are the newly released Llano ones, but even in the top of the range APU, the CPU part cant keep up with the i3 2100 let alone the i5. The integrated GPU in the i5 is enough to play 1080p video. Photoshop supports using a GPU to enhance performance in some tasks. See Here and Here. However, I am unsure of how greatly this affects performance.
Not sure I would want to run a 2500k on a 250W power supply though (did a quick tally and came to 287W recommended), you might want something a little lower power.
I'd say your best bet would be a i5-2500T/2400S or i3-2100 (depending how much you want to spend) coupled with an Asus P8H67-I, which comes out at £200-£250.
