£500 Spec for PS Machine

Starky · 19 Feb 2012 at 23:25

My father is a photographer and wants to spend around £500 on a new system. I'm going to put it together for him but I'm not entirely sure about what the bottlenecks are for doing a lot of photo editing.

He doesn't work with videos or 3D or anything too graphically intensive so I've put most of the money towards a nice processor and a fast hard drive for installing programs on (he has tonnes of large capacity drives for storing images on).

Here is what I have so far, a little over £500 but it should be OK. I don't need a disc drive as I have one spare that I'll use. Also don't need a new copy of Windows. Let me know your thoughts.

nolimit · 19 Feb 2012 at 23:33

Looks fine to me, I think the graphics card is bit of overkill for photography purposes. I'm sure something like the ATI HD 5450 will do the job.

ChroniC · 19 Feb 2012 at 23:40

For 500quid it's ok. If it already has storage capacity, maybe think about downgrading an item and going for a SSD, and more RAM. It would make a huge difference.
I work on a i7 with 12gig, but I am opening a few raw files and about 150 Jpegs, sometimes, a few other programs and Capture 1, and it doesn't struggle at all.

Bottleneck for Photoshop is most definitely the HDD and RAM, an i5 will do fine, but it's the history states and cache that will be effecting the scratch disks and RAM. You need to have about 4-6 gig RAM for Photoshop usage, 2gig for System, and the fastest HDD you can get, the processor isn't doing much until you run filters etc. That said, that's what I'd suggest for a GFX designer or Retoucher, your father would do well with what you have specc'd up.

SMed · 19 Feb 2012 at 23:42

If you already have tonnes of spare drives, skip the HDD and get a small capacity Solid State Drive. You probably won't even need a GPU unless you want to have dual monitors.

sehcure · 19 Feb 2012 at 23:53

YOUR BASKET
1 x Intel Core i5-2500K 3.30GHz (Sandybridge) Socket LGA1155 Processor - Retail £179.99
1 x Gigabyte Z68AP-D3 Intel Z68 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Motherboard REV 1 £84.98
1 x Crucial RealSSD M4 64GB 2.5" SATA 6Gb/s Solid State Hard Drive (CT064M4SSD2) £77.99
1 x Antec VP450P 450W '80 Plus' Continuous Power Supply £39.98
1 x Kingston HyperX Genesis Grey 8GB (2x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C9 1600MHz Dual Channel Kit (KHX1600C9D3X2K2/8GX) £38.39
1 x Sapphire ATI Radeon HD 6450 1024MB GDDR3 PCI-Express Graphics Card (11190-02-20G) £33.59
1 x OcUK Tsunami Gaming Case - Black £22.99
Total : £490.51 (includes shipping : £10.50).

2500k over the 2550k as the built in GPU is useful if the graphics card dies or something.
Overclock that straight to a nice 4.3-4.4Ghz with little to no voltage changes, and you'll have a great little PS rig for your dad.
1GB vram 6450 just because..well the budget allowed for it..

Starky · 19 Feb 2012 at 23:57

Thanks for the advice, good to know about the graphics - could maybe even just use the graphics card that he currently has, I don't think it's too bad... I've included one anyway for now though.

So here's another spec with the SSD put in. I didn't want to go for less than 120GB because 60GB can disappear very fast due to lots of programs being installed and system files building up.

Is 8GB enough memory and would there be any benefit to using faster memory? There are sill 2 slots free on the MB for the future

EDIT: Sorry sehcure I didn't see your post. Think we are along the same lines though! Will consider squeezing the case for the better graphics card.

sehcure · 20 Feb 2012 at 00:00

Go for a Crucial M4, as they're more reliable and on offer this week.
Unsure as to why you're sticking with the corsair vengeance RAM; you could even go crucial ballistix sport and save £8 or so, keeping it much closer to £500 overall and you'd see no difference at all in performance.

mcc49 · 20 Feb 2012 at 14:50

My advice is to get as much ram as you can afford. I have 2 workstation, 1 is an i7 with 6gb RAM and the other is i5 with 16gb RAM and the latter is so much more responsive.