Spec me a budget photo editing rig

SwedishChef · 31 Mar 2009 at 12:26

My wifes PC is playing up - the display will fail to initialise 50% of the time (turning the PC off and on fixes it temporarily) so there is either a graphics card or motherboard fault, and last week it hung when detecting drives. Other than that it works fine but I suspect the motherboard is going bad, and possibly the gfx card too.

It's got:

AMD X2 4200+ CPU (socket 939)
Gigabyte K8N Pro SLi nForce4 m/b
2GB DDR RAM (PC3200)
BFG GeForce 7800 GT OC 256MB

I could try for a like for like motherboard replacement but I suspect they may be hard to get. In addition she's started to do a lot of stuff in Lightroom and Photoshop with large files and it was struggling a bit, so maybe it's time to upgrade to a decent solution with 3-4GB of RAM that will handle photo editing with a bit more ease. It doesn't need to handle gaming and I'd be installing 32bit XP on it. I'll be using existing drives, case, etc.

Can you suggest a decent, but keenly priced, mobo/cpu/gfx card/RAM combo?

Many thanks!

mp260767 · 31 Mar 2009 at 15:15

maybe start with the following, see how it performs and maybe upgrade to 4gb at a later date, will take your current memory and graphics card.

Intel Pentium Dual-Core E5200 "LGA775 Core 2" 2.50GHz (800FSB) - Retail £68.99 (£59.99)

Asrock 4CoreDual-SATA2 Rev2 (Socket 775) PCI-Express/AGP DDR2 Motherboard £57.49 (£49.99)

Sub Total : £109.98
Shipping : £8.25
VAT : £17.73
Total : £135.96

sketch145 · 31 Mar 2009 at 17:38

his current RAM is DDR and that mobo takes DDR2

mp260767 · 31 Mar 2009 at 19:03

sketch145 said:
his current RAM is DDR and that mobo takes DDR2

also takes DDR :

Supports Dual Channel DDRII667 (DDRII x 2 DIMM slots) and DDR400 (DDR x 2 DIMM slots)

SwedishChef · 1 Apr 2009 at 07:33

Ok, sounds good - prices too.

The E5200 CPU - how 'good' is that? Sorry, I'm a bit out of date on CPUs and the Tom's Hardware charts don't seem to include it. I've got an C2D E8400 in my PC so how might it compare to that?

I'm assuming with the socket 775 I've got some future upgrade options but if the benefit is there I could be tempted to spend a bit more upfront to get a decent performance boost. What would be the next step up?

Thanks for the help.

mp260767 · 1 Apr 2009 at 12:36

SwedishChef said:
Ok, sounds good - prices too.

The E5200 CPU - how 'good' is that? Sorry, I'm a bit out of date on CPUs and the Tom's Hardware charts don't seem to include it. I've got an C2D E8400 in my PC so how might it compare to that?

I'm assuming with the socket 775 I've got some future upgrade options but if the benefit is there I could be tempted to spend a bit more upfront to get a decent performance boost. What would be the next step up?

Thanks for the help.

should compare with your 8400 pretty well tbh, your 8400 has 3 times the l2 cache and 0.5ghz extra speed wise, but at stock i think the 5200 will do a decent job.

if its available in the budget may be worth looking at the 7400 (£113.84
(£98.99)) compared to the 5200 (£68.99 (£59.99)).