Office PC as base on which to upgrade

chuckstarza

chuckstarza

chuckstarza

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Joined
23 Sep 2015
Posts
4
Hi.

I've recently taken on a temp assistant in my studio and I'm looking to put together a PC which she can use for general office admin - basically running Lightblue and Office.

However, over time I'd like to have her start doing some processing of shoots.

Ideally I'd just build a nice PC that could comfortably handle the imaging side of things (Lightroom, CS and that's about it). We're a MOR studio, so no major high end retouching or massively large stacked images.

I wanted to see if it's economically feasible to build a PC that will do the basics and then upgrade components as and when required.

Is it just a bit of a false economy to build a lesser powered system which would need upgrading later on?

If so, can someone suggest a system that would run Lightroom and Photoshop at a fair clip (exporting on LR for example takes an age on my current processing PC due to it's naff processor)?

I'd probably be looking at a budget of around £450/500 ex OS and monitor.

  • Aerocool DS200 Black/White Edition
  • Asus B85-PLUS Intel B85 (Socket 1150) DDR3 ATX Motherboard
  • Intel Pentium K Anniversary G3258 Socket LGA1150 Processor -
  • Seagate 2TB 7200RPM SATA 6Gb/s 64MB Cache HDD - OEM
  • Kingston 120GB SSDNow V300 Drive SATA 6Gb/s 3 2.5"
  • Aerocool Strike-X Army Edition 500W '80 Plus Bronze' Power Supply
  • Kingston HyperX Fury Black 4GB (1x4GB) DDR3 PC3-12800C10 1600MHz Single Channel Kit (HX316C10FB/4)

This is what I put together as a start, OS/software on SSD, images stored on Seagate.

The SSD will have very little on it, just OS, LR, CS, Lightblue and Office.

Suggestions?
 
8GB of ram would be a well worth upgrade, and surely it's only worth getting the Anniversary edition CPU if you intend to overclock, therefore need a better motherboard?

I'd look at a bigger SSD, 128GB will vanish very fast even with that little amount of programs on it.
 
Thanks for the input

Actually that 4GB was supposed to be two of - so yeah, 8GB.

The processor was suggested as an alternative to an i5, but no, I don't intend to OC.
Agreed on the SSD, my own 250GB SSD fills up amazingly quickly.

Suggestions on processor/mobo combos? Is it worth looking at an i7, or would a current gen i5 (or even i3) do the job? Again, it'll only ever do work on still images, but do want to build in a bit of future proofing.
 
If you want to save a fiver, the G3220 would be ample for officer work. Slower for Adobe CS but fine for everything else.

As for motherboards, no idea outside of the Z97 range I'm afraid. Perhaps try getting a mod to move this thread to general rather than projects you'll have far better brains than mine to solve this.
 
 
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