Possibly upgrading...

cats_five

cats_five

cats_five

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Joined
29 Dec 2004
Posts
420
Location
Fife, Scotland
My PC is fine for most of the things I do - surfing, work processing, low level stuff, but some more poke for Photoshop would be nice. This is CS4, not the latest one - at least not at present. It load programs fast enough for me so I'm not planning getting an SDD as part of the possible upgrade.

It's got a 4-core Phenom processor and 8GB of RAM and when it struggles is with blending several images into a panorama, which is something I'm quite keen on doing. I'm using the on-board graphics which seem fine.

I was thinking about an A8 trinity processor as an upgrade but have never been sure if that will give enough of a lift where it's needed - in CS4. It is however quite a bit cheaper than the i5 route.

If I go with the upgrade it will be with a Gigabyte mobo. The case is a Fractal Design, the power supply a good modular one and the disks all SATA so I only need mobo, cpu & RAM.
 
Hmmm... Found a site with CPU comparisongs using CS4, and there is very little difference btween the A8 & A10. There is a lot between those and the i5 so maybe that's what I should upgrade to...
 
Did some more thinking and Googling. Day-to-day performance is fine, and the few benchmarks I could find for CS4 suggest that the AMD Bulldozer are the rivals to the Intel processors. However they use a lot more power, so it's Intel.

I also found that CS4 can make use of the GPU power in the processors with HD4000 graphics, so have come around to thinking that a Core i3-3225 might be the best value processor for me.

I want to have a USB3 port available even though currently I don't have anything that would make use of it so as far as I know I need a Z77 mobo. Is there any reason to get anything much beyond the bottom end of the Gigabyte range of mobos? It has enough USB ports and so on, I want to get one with HDMI as well as DVI so I'm OK if I get another monitor.

Cooler - I believe the CPU comes with one, I'm happy to see how it is and if it's too noisy replace it. The current Phenom is running with a stock cooler quite happily. The Fractal Define case helps I guess. Or is the stock cooler SO bad I'll be driven to replace it PDQ?
 
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