Help me spec a system for photo editing.

[famas]

Hello all

A good few years ago i built my first pc, mainly for gaming. its an Athlon 64 cpu on socket 754, 2gb ram, 6800gt. shows it age.
Since buliding the pc i have been out of the pc loop. i dont know whats what any more.

my pc is still running well, and altough i dont play games much any more my intrests have turned to photography. I use photoshop CS3 a lot and this is were my system starts to struggle. its extreamly slow when applying filters and when multiple images are open.

im after a new system with best proformance in CS3 as possible, I would still like to play my games tho a high spec graphics card is not necessary, something with equal proformance to my current 6800gt will be fine.

im after at least 4gb of ram, with the option of ugrading to 8gb in the future.
will have to go for vista 64, im not sure if basic will do for me, or weather home premium is better value? this needs to be included in the spec.

I've always been an AMD man, but if i can get a better system with intel for my money i can move to the dark side.
I've been looking around at the new phemon quad cores. something like the 9550.
at this price would i be better off going for say a Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 6400+ 3.20GHz
or would the Phenom X4 Quad Core 9550 2.20GHz out perform this and be a better option???

i have no idea about a mother boards. only thing is its must have 4 dimm slots for the 8gb of ram.

again i dont know what memory is compatible with cpu/motherboard? tho i assume a pair of matched 2gb sticks will be best?

a massive hard drive is not needed as i use externals, 160gb will be more than enough.

only need one dvd drive as well, no peripherals needed.

i think thats every thing, one thing to note is im currently using a 32" lcd as my monitor, running at 1280x768 at 60htz, dont know if this info is needed but i thought i add it just incase.
EDIT.. must include a case and psu. im not after a fancy case, something plain like the Coolermaster Elite 335 Case is nice.

Now comes for the real stone in the works, i have a max budget of £400.

hope i have provided enough info for you and all help is very much appreciated

 

[Ace Modder]

With that motherboard you can keep your AGP card, if you are really happy with the performance. With your free shipping it comes in at less than £409.

That will be a great upgrade, Quad core, with 4GB RAM and the option to go to 8GB veyr cheaply.

Doubt you will get much better for the price.

This is assuming you dont't need a new HDD or Optical drive.

 

[famas]

Thank you for the spec ACE.
would you say that intel cpu's are better bang for buck over AMD? Or is it swings are roundabouts like always?

also im wanting to keep my current pc as a back up till the new system is up and running fully, And probably after. so swapping over parts isn't really an option.
i also have a few reserves about that mobo. i take it you can use both AGP and PCI express graphics cards, but reports say that the PCI-E is limited to x4, which at current wont affect me, however if i get back into gaming i would like the option to upgrde to a high end graphics card.
also reading a lot of stuff about memory compatibility. with the board only acepting upto 2gb unless you flash the BIOS? Also 2 dimm slots support ddr2 and the other two support ddr?

i dont mind saving on a low end graphics card in the new rig, as i can play games on my current pc. would something like the OcUK GeForce 8400 GS 256MB DDR2 do for the new build? then if/when i want a more powerfull graphics card to play new games i can upgraded as and when.

i can steal a re-writer drive from my current pc, tho i still need a HDD.


cheers

 

[BarKeep]

If you are doing any kind of serious work with PhotoShop you should have a 2 hard disk system so that the scratch pad is on the second hard disk.

Snip from an Adobe TechNote:

When insufficient RAM is available for bitmap image editing, Photoshop uses a scratch disk file--temporary disk space for storing data and performing computations. Photoshop can create 200 GB of scratch disk files on as many as four hard disk partitions. If Photoshop's primary scratch disk is set to the same hard disk or partition as the Windows virtual memory paging file,Photoshop alerts you at startup because the scratch disk and the paging file compete for disk space, and Photoshop's efficiency in writing and reading its scratch disks is reduced.