Photography PC, any Ideas?

[Rimfire]

I'm planning on getting myself a PC for work and a bit of play, It'll be mainly for editing pictures but I'm planning on playing a few games on it as well as it'll be my home pc. I shoot with an EOS 5D mkii at home which develops files to about 120mb, but I also shoot with a 40MP phase one back at work which develops out to about 250 meg at full res, easily making files of 500MB-1gig in photoshop!
I'm thinking of getting the Ultima Viper from OcUk with a 40gig SSD boot drive, win 7 pro 64bit and a Radeon 5850. I reckon it'll do anything I need doing for some time, and Im going to get a Benq 24" monitor and keybord/mouse as well. I budgeted £1600 give or take and i'm stretching it a bit but does anyone here have any better suggestions? Will the graphics card be a big factor, would a radeon 5870 be worth the extra 70 quid?
Atb, Rimfire

 

[YoungRogue]

I reckon the 5850 will be fine, lots of people on here have them and have them running as fast as the 5870

 

[mrteabag]

Welcome to the forums
Would you consider building a pc yourself?

 

[Rimfire]

Welcome to the forums
Would you consider building a pc yourself?

Hello! I have built a pc before a long time ago but from what i can tell its actually cheaper to get someone else to build it for you!

 

[smilertoo]

for photo work i'd worry more about the monitor than the gfx card.

 

[whitecrook]

GFX seems overkill, BUT CS5 is supposed to rock with a good 3d card not sure how powerful it needs to be but that is quite a decent card.

You want mem, fast disk and a fairly beefy cpu and a decent monitor, possibly a wacom tablet, and a monitor calibration tool.

I'd consider 2x SSD for scratch, and a RAID0 setup for good speed on working with files. Get a couple of FW / ESATA drives for backup / storage. at least 8GB of RAM. See where that takes you.

 

[Amp34]

Well lets put it this way, I have mine (CS5) set to "medium" and with a 6800GT (yeah...) it struggles a little every so often...

 

[deuse]

That setup would be ok as long as you have 8gig of ram for when you use liquify tool.
But you will need a Nvidia GTX285 and up to use all the features of CS5 premiere pro.

 

[Rimfire]

I have already got an NEC 2390 H-IPS monitor so the Benq will be a second monitor to replace my old one, Ive got a Wacom Intuos 4 and a spider for colour calibration so i'm pretty sure I will have a good setup, though the guys at ocuk said the megahalem cooler will cover up my extra RAM slots, You reckon 6 gig of tri channel 1600mhz would be fine? Id rather avoid liquid cooling as it sounds like a pain to maintain, id rather fire and forget! Whats the difference between the Nvidia GTX285 and Radeon 5850?