Hi there, I have a strange feeling of Deja Vu when I make this thread, but I'll go ahead anyway. So the case is this; My father is a photographer who nowadays mainly scans the old films and edits the photos to be usable (removing dust etc.). The program he uses is obviously Photoshop CS3. Now the hardware-part of things is that currently he does that on Northwood 2,4 GHz, 1,5 GB rig that has very bizarre issues and XP installed in 2003. He needs a new computer. I'd also like to add here that the image sizes are hundreds of megabytes, so don't bother asking "since when has image editing required powerful rig". Also no Macs here. The goals here are: - Reliability (Maybe no RAID, he saves things to external drives and DVDs anyway, but quality motherboard, powersupply etc.) - Speed in Photoshop - Quiet operation (no need for virtual silence anyway) - He already has a TFT screen he's happy with - absolutely NO overclocking or gaming One possibility would be to make him buy a pre-built PC. Pros' would be easy guaranty, but cons would be rather numerous (not having the money put where it matters) Now that I've been browsing around the stores I've even wondered Phenoms eeek so I obviously need your guidance. The parts that I have in mind at the moment are Q9300 or Q6600 4 GB of DDR2 Motherboard (P35/P45, WHAT?) 640 GB WD -AAKS HDD an integrated graphic card OR a proper one if needed (working drivers and acceptable image quality, no gaming power needed) Right now I have four extra cases around so that's not an issue, but as for the PSU maybe Corsair VX450? Also he'll need a new OS. Vista 64 bit seems like a good choice, but which edition? Business? Home basic? I have no idea... Keeping in mind his current rig, I think this would give him enough speed for years to come, but I still need some help with the graphic card, motherboard and the CPU. One possibility would be to convert my 2nd. rig into more powerful one, but I'm a bit worried about how juice and for how long the motherboard can provide etc...
For the graphics card you may want to reconsider the power with CS4 supposedly making use of Nvidia's GPGPU function As to the rest, I'm looking for advice myself at the moment, so I'll leave that to folks more knowledgeable than myself
For graphic card you can get a Geforce 8600GT. As I read that the new version of Photoshop will use the GPU to render things, this should be good enough. I would say the 8800GT but you said it's budget. If quiet computing is what you also want, you can pay a bit more and get the 8600GT with a a passive cooling. It would be less worries for you as well, as those small fans tend to brake easily. PSU: Corsair VX series should be good.quiet, very stable, and very efficient. As for Vista edition. Well firstly 64-bit is a great choice. Especially that I expect Adobe to start releasing their new Photoshop with a 64-bit edition (else that would be disappointing, but then again its Adobe, they can't make their own PDF reader software properly.) And also you want 4GB of RAM, so you need an 64-bit OS.The Ease of use of Vista and the great help documentation will defiantly help your father in using OS. Right, so which edition... here is a post I did for someone as private message:
yeah nvidia's CUDA or something... wheres Langer when you need him, he dose alot of photoshop and illustrator i believe. the Q6600 i believe at the moment is the best 'bang for buck' chip out there, what with the release of intels P45 chipset means that the solid P35 chipset would have dropped in price meaning a solid performer can be had on the cheap like a Gigabyte P35-DS3R. i would get P35 right now if budget was a concern consider intel are moving to a new socket soon anyway so upgrade paths for 775 chips i bet are limited to the E8xxx and Q9xxx series. Where i would invest money is the OS and memory for PS, get him vista home prem 64-bit OEM and 8GB of ram, to help speed it up a little more i would RAID 0 a pair of Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 500GB SATA-II 32MB, as the extra cache helps plus pletty of space. so my pick of hardware in list form. Intel Q6600 ~£120 Gigabyte GA-EP35-DS3 ~£60 Corsair 4GB DDR2 XMS2 PC2-6400C5 TwinX (2x2GB) x2 ~£120 Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 500GB SATA-II 32MB Cache ~£100 Graphics can be anything cheap. so my pick would be around £400 before other bits like PSU and case, but his current case would be fine, and PSU can be a 400W unit, but solid!
The CUDA/GPGPU things are exactly why I'd right now want to go integrated.. For now you can't really tell which card offers the most bang for buck, so using the "free" integrated would make is easy to upgrade to one particular card in the future. Also 8 GB of memory straight away? Yeah well, it's cheap (around 65 € cheapest 4 GB kits), but it still sounds a hell of a lot to have.. So you reckon Q6600 is still the way to go? Q9xx0s don't offer enough to make up for the higher price? Upgrading won't most likely happen, atleast it didn't happen with the current rig. Only a couple of new HDDs have made their way to the case.
Just make sure that the integrated graphic card can handle Aero perfectly smoothly even when a lot of windows open at high screen resolution.
I'll just turn all the candy off anyway so that's not an issue. It's the properly working 64-bit edition that I'm looking at when I'm getting Vista for the rig...
yeah the Q6600 is still a beast for the cost. plus with the stock intel cooler you could overclock it to 3GHz for him and it would be stable 24/7 and he wouldn't even know. if he is handling extremly big images like you say then 8GB is perfect for him!
Oh I also already have Xigmatek cooler so the CPU could be tray.. Do you reckon mATX boards generally are heavy duty enough to cope with years of quad-usage? I just remember the Blood-Irons where power components tended to blow up without good ventilation around the CPU-area... I have P180 Mini and Silverstone SG03 case around, both of which would make a good base for the new build.
mATX boards from good brands like gigabyte last just as long as there ATX brothers. the Intel G33 chipset is the best for Quad based mATX systems as some other chipsets cant handle a quad power wise. Hate to sound like a gigabyte fan boy, but thats the best mATX G33 board availble! i think its called the G33-DS3R
Ok I ended up with following Q6600 2*2 GB 800 MHz Asus P5E-VM HDMI (I don't know what's my problem, but I always find overkill motherboards. 6 S-ATAs and four memory slots are nice anyway.. and I'm expecting overall decency for the price. (didn't find the Gigabyte G33-DS3R from Finnish stores)) Corsair VX450W WD SE16 640 GB DVD-burner Vista Home Premium 64-bit OEM From the largest web-store this would set us back 610 € [£480, $900]. I just sent e-mail to the local dealer and am waiting for answer tomorrow morning...
Yeah I'll try to make him buy two kits straight away... If for nothing else then atleast he could give me the 4 GB kit and I could give him my 2 GB
My rig (if you can actually call it that) just about runs CS3, it's 1Gb RAM and a 3.06GHz Intel P4 processor GeForce 6200 graphics card, 80Gb 7200rpm HDD and XP Home double those specs and you should be fine, but I'd go with 4GB RAM just because it can't hurt
you can never have enough memory, because at some point you'll need it, as long as the processor can make use of the extra memory then i wouldn't lose sleep at all. mind you, im looking at a dual Xeon quad core system, with 8-16GB of ram... should be quick enough... If its not quick enough then il quit and live on a mountain!
The current one is 2,4 GHz P4 with 1,5 GB RAM and it's truely obsolete. The goal is not to "run" the CS3, but to actually work with it. Also add to the specs: PCI WLAN-card. This may also mean a motherboard with atleast two PCI-slots as he may need another card some time in the future... (For example old Flextight scanners still provide good quality, but use SCSI-connection...)
I just looked at your system spec, you should install CS3 on it and let him give it a go on there, if it works out fine then build him same spec'd machine. photoshop is a memory hog remember so 4GB mininum.
Yep, that's why I said double everything Mine runs CS3, and most pics I edit are 30MB+, which is why I said about quadrupling the RAM
I'd deffo go with Vista 64-bit edition - if he's joining a domain (which I doubt) or would like the previous version function then Business Edition, if not then just get Home Premium. Ps can take advantage of 4 core CPUs however as it is a 32-bit app I'd stick with 4Gb RAM for the time being. Reason I say get 64-bit OS is the fact that CS4 will be fully 64-bit and will take advantage of a RAM upgrade in the future. Sadly CS4 for Mac OS X will still be 32-bit tho. I do use Ps everyday at work and run a Dell XPS 630i, Q6600 2.4 (o/c'ed to 2.6GHz), 4Gb 800MHz DDR2, 500Gb SATA2 drive, nVidia 8800GT 512Mb running Win XP Pro SP3 and I can tell you that nothing can slow it down.
Yeah I've let him test it out and even w/o optimising any of the Ps's settings (max. memory use etc) the difference is like between day and night... And the fact that you can still DO something when the Ps is doing its stuff. Multiple cores Cheesecake, that's all I can say. I guess the Q6600, 4 GB will do for the time being. 8 GB comes with CS4
