building a pc for photoshop

morgan

morgan

morgan

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right after my dabble with thinking of switching to an imac I have realised that i just cant get away from a pc.

I'm looking to spend no more than £900 inc vat/delivery. I am using the unit for photoshop and internet, and maybe the odd game, but thats pretty rare.

I've got a dell at work which has been great/rock solid and they seem good value, but I'm open to suggestions - even spec'ing and building my own...

I've been out of the pc scene for far too long so its all foreign to me now (cpu standards/vid cards etc). All I want is something thats gret with photoshop, nice display and is quiet and reliable.

I am looking at the new dell range:

There are three systems which appeal to me:

Dimension c521:
AMD® Athlon™ 64 X2 Dual Core processor 5000+
2048MB Dual Channel DDR2 533MHz [4x512] Memory
Dell™ 20" UltraSharp™ Wide Aspect Digital/Analogue Flat Panel (2007FPW) - 128MB ATI® Radeon® X1300 PCI Express graphics card
160GB (7200rpm) Serial ATA Hard Drive with 8MB DataBurst™ cache

which works out as £771 inc VAT delivered

or:

Dimension E520:
Intel® Viiv™ Core™ 2 Duo E6300 Processor (1.86GHz, 1066MHz, 2MB)
2048MB Dual Channel DDR2 533MHz [4x512] Memory
Dell™ 20" UltraSharp™ Wide Aspect Digital/Analogue Flat Panel (2007FPW) - Integrated Intel® Graphics Media Accelerator 3000
160GB (7200rpm) Serial ATA Hard Drive with 8MB DataBurst™ cache

which works out as £751 inc VAT delivered or you can have a E6400, 320GB HD for £838

the other is a dimension 9200:

Intel® Viiv™ Core™ 2 Duo E6400 Processor (2.13GHz, 1066MHz, 2MB)
2048MB Dual Channel DDR2 533MHz [2x1024] Memory
Dell™ 19" UltraSharp™ Digital/Analogue Flat Panel (1907FP) - UK/Irish
256MB nVidia® GeForce® 7900GS graphics card
320GB Serial ATA RAID 0 Stripe [2x160GB 7200rpm drives with DataBurst™ cache]

This works out as £870. Its a better unit, but to fit the budget I've had to drop the 20" widescreen to a 19" ultrasharp


Any advice would be great. I know this isnt strictly a photography post but I'm only using this for photo processing really so I really need the help of you guys who are up with the latest gear.

thanks again!
 
For Photoshop you will want a lot of memory, more than 2GB! It's the most important thing followed by a good CPU. The video card and disks performance won't make as much of impact as you would expect but would be useful for using the machine for other stuff.
 
Blimey i dont find there to be to much a problem with CS2 with only 512mb, admittently, it does sometimes take a while, but 2gb would be plenty.
 
ChroniC said:
Blimey i dont find there to be to much a problem with CS2 with only 512mb, admittently, it does sometimes take a while, but 2gb would be plenty.
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Sure, it will work with 512MB but if you want to open a lot of photos especially in RAW format it will have to page the information to the disk.

Morgan is (from memory) a wedding photographer and I expect he will want to open a lot of photos at once to process them.
 
^^Gord^^ said:
Sure, it will work with 512MB but if you want to open a lot of photos especially in RAW format it will have to page the information to the disk.

Morgan is (from memory) a wedding photographer and I expect he will want to open a lot of photos at once to process them.
Click to expand...


ahh fair play. The more the merrier, if that be the case. I work on 2 or 3 at a time, so i dont think it would be a problem still however.
 
Suffice to say, DO NOT USE DELL.

Big CPU and 4gb of ram should do you nicely. Graphics cards are a whole different ball game. You can get some that are specifically for graphic work, but they'll be pap for gaming. If it's solely for video editing/photoshop you might want to look up some reviews on dedicated cards.
 
There's no way on earth I'd trust my photos to a RAID0 array - one drive fails and you've lost the lot. Specify larger drives in a RAID1.

Make sure that whatever RAM you buy is only in two DIMMs so you have room for expansion later.

You should build your own. It will be slightly more expensive than your Dell systems but you will have exactly the components you want, not what Dell can get cheapest.

Jonathan
 
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Snapshot said:
There's no way on earth I'd trust my photos to a RAID0 array - one drive fails and you've lost the lot. Specify larger drives in a RAID1.
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I don't think you should rely on your hard drives at all. All my photos are backed up on a USB hard drive and also burnt to DVD. What happens if someone steals your PC? RAID isn't going to protect you there. Whilst RAID does give you an extra level of protection in case you haven't backed up the OP has set a limit of £900 so spending the money on an extra HD will eat into that.
 
I agree, if your data isn't backed up it can't be of any value but that's a separate issue. The extra cost of two 320GB HDDs over two 160GB on a BYO is under £50 - well worth it for a certain amount of peace of mind IMO.
 
Build it yourself, you get what you need. If that isn't an option, you can probably find a prebuilt one that would do nicely. Take a look through the OcUK prebuilt ones.

Out of those processors, get the E6300. The 6400 has no extra cache, so the extra cost is a waste. Both will perform better than the AMD.

2 gig of RAM would be just fine, photoshop rarely uses more than about 600 Mb of my 2 Gb.

The HD speed won't make a massive difference, but obviously, the faster and the larger the cache you can get, the better. DO NOT STRIPE WITH RAID 0. Larger is better, but if you are indeed a wedding photographer, I would imagine that you back things up to DVD or something pretty regularly, so this may not be so important.

Monitor - bigger the better. Really fish for reviews on them though, to get one with great colour reproduction.

For the graphics, I doubt it really matters. You don't need to go overboard.
 
ElDude said:
Suffice to say, DO NOT USE DELL.

Big CPU and 4gb of ram should do you nicely. Graphics cards are a whole different ball game. You can get some that are specifically for graphic work, but they'll be pap for gaming. If it's solely for video editing/photoshop you might want to look up some reviews on dedicated cards.
Click to expand...

I'm pretty sure that the cards you mention such as the Nvidia Quadro and ATI Fire GL are designed for 3d rendering work to provide real time previews in programs such as 3DSMax.

Seeming as photo editing is 100% CPU you would be much better off spending the money on a better CPU.
 
Build your own I also say.

I was about to get an iMac also but decided on building a pc as its cheaper for more power. Including windows but excluding a monitor mine came to just shy of £800 and it FLIES with photoshop, which was the main reason I got it.

I went for an E6600 2.4 C2D & 2gig 667mhz RAM with a 7600 GS 512mb gfx card.

As you'll see from the 'how fast is your photoshop' thread I got a time of 22 seconds in CS3 which is not to shabby at all!

I only shoot RAW with my D200 (and soon D2X) and from a standing start with CS3 closed it takes about 3-4 seconds to open a file. When photoshop is already open its about 1 second, in fact not even that!

Its sped my work flow up by a huge amount and makes photo editing a pleasure again!
 
xolotl said:
I'm pretty sure that the cards you mention such as the Nvidia Quadro and ATI Fire GL are designed for 3d rendering work to provide real time previews in programs such as 3DSMax.

Seeming as photo editing is 100% CPU you would be much better off spending the money on a better CPU.
Click to expand...

Yeah, that's why I said look into the reviews side of it. If it was just for Photoshop you're right, all that's needed is CPU/ram/HDD space. I thought that if it was only going to be used for editing, the OP may be interested in that side of things.

No harm in covering all angles :)
 
SilverPenguin said:
I went for an E6600 2.4 C2D & 2gig 667mhz RAM with a 7600 GS 512mb gfx card.
Click to expand...

what hd do you have? does that make a big difference? Also have you got raid etc? What about how you have set up photoshop itself...ie page files etc?

Thanks for all of the replies guys...on the ocuk site and its all a bit foreign to me...hard to know what fits together so to speak. Ideally I want something thats discreet (not a massive case making loads of noise).

I do indeed do weddings mainly, I back up to USB external drives.

lots of reading up needed i feel!
 
morgan said:
also wondering why people are not keen on dell pcs...? dell laptops I'm not keen on but desktops they seem great.
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I think people just think they can get a better deal / fit with building their own. I'd expect if you had posted up HP machines you would have got the same response.

I would agree with the point that you can get exactly the PC you want building it yourself but that also means supporting it yourself. For a lot of people of here that isn't an issue (in fact judging by some of the 1st line support people I've "experienced" it can be an advantage!) but if you don't feel confident about supporting it yourself having someone like Dell to fall back on will be a plus.
 
morgan said:
I've priced up a system self built and its not cheaper, the killer is the psu and case it seems...
Click to expand...

If you want to build yourself a system take a look at the Shuttle barebones systems. You get the case, PSU and motherboard. They are imho very good but they are small so it can limit how many HDs etc you can fit in them.
 
morgan said:
I've priced up a system self built and its not cheaper, the killer is the psu and case it seems...
Click to expand...
I couldn't even get close to the spec of my own built pc for the same money when I looked?!

Back to the question about the hard drive, I have a 320gig Maxtor SATA2 drive (7,200rpm). Its partitioned in to a 70gb chunk for all my programmes and then the rest is for storage.

Photoshop I just installed and upped the memory allocation to %70 and this all I did. Havent done any other kind of setting up with it.

My pc is in a very basic black case and isn't overly loud, that was one of my criteria. There are no plastic windows or neon lights to be seen. I tried to stay away from all that on purpose. The case was only £30 but I've since seen you can get almost silent ones for about £80-£100 so I may upgrade to one of those in the future.
 
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