Build Advice Advice needed to speed my pc up for Photoshop use

My bad, I haven't been following it properly. I just know the 4850 was supported and bought it for cheap

 

Best one is a MAC Pro for editing in Adobe. All Pro in photography work on MAC computer.

 

his budget is £300-£700, not £1300-£1700.

 

Yep is true, sorry I did not pay attention to his budget.

 

Stuff like this makes me laugh. With a decent processor (see Q9550) and amount of RAM it's no different to(and probably faster than) using a Mac, apart from not having to hit ctrl every time you want to right click.

 

Yeah my budget for an upgrade would of been max £700 but if I do go for the new machine it would be more like £1400- £1700 I guess I'd spend on it to make it full proof for a good 4-5 years.

Have considered Macs and they do look good I must admit, but the price put me off and all my Adobe software is for the PC so I'd need all the software buying again so it would be rather expensive. Still be interested to see what the put in the new Mac Pro when it comes out. The cost of memory on those Macs though is a little over the top though wohh. Why so expensive I wonder.

 

because it just works. apparently.

 

"Macs don't have viruses"
"Macs don't crash"

Both marketing pieces by Apple, both complete ********

Also, has anyone notice that Macs spelt backwards is Scam?... just a thought

 

In the end I opted for buying a Intel X25-M 80GB drive and windows 7. With me having a VelociRaptor 300 GB which would be best for my OS on and make the other the dedicated scratch drive for Photoshop CS4.

The way the current prices are for PC components I'm just gonna hold off on buying a new PC till next year or the year after depending on if it speeds up much with doing away with partitions and having a dedicated Scratch drive.

Another question is if I bought the AMD Radeon HD 5850 and a couple of todays current games would that work on my spec machine as it is or would I need a better setup altogether.

Cheers

 

Gawd, people perscribe a totally new rig for everything these days, 8GB of Ram, a GTX 295 and a better CPU cooler for overclocking is all you need, why would you need a new case too an SSD would help too and I dont trust your PSU, I'd recommend changing it ASAP

 

I only mentioned a case cause I didn't think my case would be big enough for one of these Asus P6T motherboards, its already tight in there as it is.

the GTX 295 is too expensive for me as I'm only a casual gamer.

Whats wrong with the Atrix 720Watt Silent Dual Fan I have, I was recommended it at the time I bought my machine.

 

Well, look at it this way:

The OP has obviously invested a great deal of time and money in to Photoshop.
Now that his rig has issues with performance, he's wondering what the best upgrade path is.
Since Socket 775 is all but dead, it makes little long-term sense to plough several hundred quid into a Q9650, 8GB of super-fast DDR2, etc.
Oh, and the OP said he's looking at getting a new rig.

While there is the option of the OpenGL route available, I'd not want to be spending £350 on graphics right now.

So, that pretty much wraps up the reason behind the overhaul suggestions. As for Macs, yes, they're shiny, but they're essentially laptops bolted on to screens and then covered up. And then you have Mac towers, which are just like regular PC towers, with a doubled price tag - they START from £1899, for a Xeon 920, 3GB of RAM, a 640GB hard drive, and a Geforce GT 120 (aka the 9500GT). Upgrading to 6GB of RAM, a 1TB hard drive, a Radeon HD4870 adds an extra £360 (which, through extrapolated figures, means they value the 4870 at £280, a 1TB hard drive at £240, and 3GB of DDR3 at £120).

You could upgrade your rig to an i7 for the cost of an HD4870 and a Samsung Spinpoint...

 

Which is the best setup for my OS and a dedicated photoshop scratch drive. when I've got a Intel X25-M 80GB drive and a VelociRaptor 300 GB which would be best.

Another question is if I bought the AMD Radeon HD 5850 and a couple of todays current games would that work on my spec machine as it is or would I need a better setup altogether.

Here's my current spec machine

Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 3.0 GHz 4Mb Cache
6Gb Corsair Memory DDR 800
500GB SATA Hard Drive partitioned 100GB as Photoshop Scratch disk
8025-C43 Midi
Atrix 720Watt Silent Dual Fan
768Mb Nvidia 8800GTX graphics card DX10
QC - Gigabyte N680iSLI-DQ6-1333fsb-DDR1066x4 SLI (Dual graphics)
DVD+/- RW - 18X Samsung Lightscribe
X-Discovery Case
windows 7 64bit

Cheers

 

Meh, fair enough then but a 4870 5870 isn't the way to go, NVIDIA tend to have better cards when it comes to rendering don't they, I'd say wait for Fermi, as for the rest of the rig - LGA775 isn't really dead, I mean seriously - look at Dell, HP and all the OEM manufacturers, are they selling more C2Ds or i5s? It's like the XP/Vista thing, as long as there is demand then there will be supply and people are still buying more 775 chips than anything else, I don't see it dieing off for 1-2 years yet... that said we are enthusiasts and if you wanna futureproof then maybe you should get a new rig, just understand it's not 100% necessary -

As for the case issue - I noticed the case looked like something you get at bargain basement or a computer fair but If it serves its purpose then it does its job and why should you replace it, I thought the whole point of cable management was to increase airflow/heat control and if heat isn't a problem why bother (unless you have a case window). The PSU sounds like its a bit old and your comment "recommended at the time" doesn't inspire confidence, switching to a new PSU would not only save you money but it's reliable - and Corsair make some cheap, solid modular PSUs...

My Opinion is that if you can spare the cash then a new rig could be the way to go but you don't NEED a new rig, some minor upgrades will have your rig ticking over slightly longer, if you want a new build outright then you can make a new topic, otherwise we're here to advice on how to keep this one alive

 

Cheers for the honesty Moyo

Case is rather crap you're right but serves its purpose for my setup now, but as I said if I choose to upgrade to I7 setup then it would house the bigger motherboard would it so would need a new one.

The psu issue, yeah its 2 years old but hopefully theres life in the old gal till I can afford my next rig. I've certainly had no problems with it.

Can you answer the above questions about which is the best way around for my OS and scratch drive and I know about Fermi, yeah will probs wait till they are out then with the graphics card. Would my PC work with a newly released game like Mafia 2 though as it is, I know it wouldn't be great but would it work.

cheers

 

the 8800GTX... released almost 4 generations ago and it's still powerful, my only advice when running new games would be not to try to run everything at max quality/resolution - be reasonable and the card will be able to handle it - the card packs a punch

 

cheers for that, I might get as couple of games then, love the look of Mafia 2 and GTA4. I'll take your advice though.

 

Nonsense.

I'm a professional photographer, and I've always used PCs. My OCed i7 is faster than the latest Mac Pros we use at the college I lecture at (tested by running the same actions on the same images so it's platform independent), and cheaper to buy. More upgradeable, and customisable. Once loaded PS looks and behaves the same in Mac OS-X as it does in Windows.

There is no justifiable reason to say " All Pro in photography work on MAC computer".... none whatsoever. Most do.. but it's not because the machines are more capable.. it's just almost a tradition based on people not knowing any better.

 

this ones a toughie, as it is all down to the drivers. nvidia have historically had the better drivers for OpenGL so have been the choice of the pros, but lately i have seen ATi really buckle down with their drivers (9.12 just came out with support for the latest OpenGL components), and also ATi tend to support open standards (OpenCL, also DirectCompute in a way) more than pushing their own proprietary ones (CUDA). Adobe seem to use the open standards more too, ie CS4 supports OpenGL, and it is conceivable that they will follow this with OpenCL too (as that is platform-agnostic unlike DirectCompute/CUDA).

So in this case its all up to Adobe - if they decide to use CUDA then by all means you did good going for nvidia, but if they end up using OpenCL then there wont be much to choose from by getting an ATi card now, except that the ATi card will have the more mature OpenCL drivers going forward due to the headstart it had.