For an extra £30 you can get a Crucial M500 240GB http://www.ebuyer.com/497430-crucial-240gb-m500-ssd-ct240m500ssd1 amazon have also price matched if you prefer to buy there.
Did anyone look at the specs required for CS4? It's pretty old software now. http://helpx.adobe.com/creative-suite/kb/system-requirements-cs4-point-products.html It doesn't need 8 cores and it cannot use 8 cores. A higher clocked quad core CPU would be a better option. Save the cash on the CPU and put in an extra 64GB SSD for a scratch disk. It will make more difference than extra cores ever would. Having a better CPU in Premier CS4 is more important than the GPU, the integrated Intel HD4000 would be fine. For CS4 Suite I'd go for: i5 (with integrated graphics) 16GB RAM 120GB SSD for OS + Apps 64GB SSD for Scratch Disk 1TB or 2TB HDD for storage. Buy budget parts for the rest. Unless your parents are ninja video editors it will be a great setup for them
What about backing up? Do they have a backup drive / solution? If not, and they value their media sort something out. Either an online cloud backup, or local drives... or both! (For the data I care about I use four different real time cloud providers in addition to two local drives)
I assume it was our own ignorance to ingore /look up cs4 info vs. cs6. After all the reading, I'd also agree with the intel side of things. Regardless, if the OP doesn't get the info in time, the AMD setup that was originally listed will still be good, though I realize the intel side would be more beneficial.
Thanks all for the input. I was waiting a while to see where the discussion arrived at. It seems like the consensus is that the higher clocked Intel will do a better job at running CS4 because that software simply won't utilise 8 cores. I very much doubt that my parents will upgrade to CS6; they aren't professional photographers. As for the SSD - is Crucial a reputable manufacturer for SSDs? I know they do good RAM but that won't necessarily mean they make good SSDs. If they are decent then the price for the 240GB one looks good. Is a scratch disk really necessary? Isn't that mainly for professionals who edit a huge amount of stuff at one time? Surely 16GB or even 8GB would be sufficient for most purposes? I think their main use is photo editing with a very small amount of light video editing. Thanks once again, wilko
I like the samsung ones, but I've got a crucial m4 that I've had for 1.5-2 years that hasn't missed a beat. Crucial ones are reliable, and bit-tech just did a review of one of the newer ones and if I recall correctly, it had a good review. Scratch disks can be really convenient to have for video editing, not sure how useful they are in photoshop, especially if they're doing smaller scale things.
Scratch in PS4 isn't really that necessary, especially with SSDs as main drives. Crucial make good SSDs. See Bit-Tech's latest review of the M550 as an example, and their M500 drives are really cheap right now. 8GB is fine for CS4. Seriously, it struggles to use anything more.
Not so much for PS4 but the OP mentions video editing, so I assumed Premiere CS4, which does like scratch. Putting it on a separate cheap smaller SSD saves excessive wear to the OS drive. I agree that 8GB would be fine, and would bring the setup I spec'd to under £500
