Afternoon, My uncles ageing PC wants replacing so I said I'd spec one up, just want to be sure I got the parts correct as its been a while since I built a PC from the ground up with new bits. As per the sticky here are the following points; Budget: About £500, shuttle box, bits inside, less would be better than on the button, my uncle is retired. Main uses of intended build: Email, internet and occasional photoshop. We're not talking all singing all dancing photo work, he does touch ups, a few jobs with layers. Nothing that I think will need more than 8gb of ram as I've shown his tricks on my pc which has 4gb and works all he wants pretty well. Parts required: Shuttle box (has to be a shuttle sized PC), CPU, RAM, Harddrive, CD/DVD Drive. Previous build information (list details of parts): AMD 64 3ghz (about all I can remember), 2gb of Ram, old spare graphics card, old shuttle box. Monitor resolution: 1920x1080 (new monitor as of last week) - Note, I plan to throw in a ATI 4350 I have spare. Storage requirements: 500 and up would be nice, 1tb would be good but prices. Will you be overclocking: yes/no (delete as required) Rather not for stability sake. He leave his PC on all day. I spec'ed this up, and it all seems good, but as I said its been a while. Ignore the highlighted, I suggested to him to re-use his old drive, but he wishes to keep the old PC whole for use as a second PC. That case is also out of stock, emailed scan asking when it's in stock, an alternative wouldn't be bad. Thanks for any pointers folks.
For the graphics card? From the look of it, they moved the PCI-E / Graphics slot in since any of the current shuttles I've touched, the graphics are is also passive (plan to fit a small fan) but, if it causes problems I'll just take it out. I've not mentioned the card to my uncle, its more just because I have it spare.
As long as the PSU doesn't get in the way of the card, it should fir, although you may want to find some measurements to see if they will fit
If its as old as the AMD 64 indicates, around 2004?, then I assume it will have an IDE hard drive. If you had used the old HDD, I would have advised to spring the extra for the Sata II 3gb/s hard drive, it will be so much better to work with and would be a shame to have such a slow relic in a modern system. T
He want to keep the old PC for printing, as he keeps all his photo stuff upstairs. So the old PC is staying whole.
Photoshop doesn't care much about fast ram, 1600MHz is plenty. What it likes is loads of ram and a fast multicore processor that also has good single thread performance.
Speaking from experience, he'll want more RAM. Gobs and gobs of it. Also, preferably more than one hard drive, so he can work from one and have a scratch disk on the other. That, alone, will speed up things considerably over what you've got specced out.
