Spec me up!

cainey

cainey

cainey

Associate
Joined
31 Jan 2007
Posts
62
Hi all,

I think it's about time I upgraded my PC and would you like your opinions.
I'm looking for set up that will suit Photo and Video editing as I'm doing a lot of photography at the moment. I also need it to cope with gaming for Battlefield 2 and Starcraft 2.

I currently have this set up...

Asus P5B Deluxe (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard
Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 "LGA775 Allendale" 1.86GHz (1066FSB)
Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro CPU Cooler
OCZ ModXStream Pro 600w
BFG GeForce 8800 GTS OC 640MB GDDR3 HDTV/Dual DVI (PCI-Express)
OCZ Gold Edition 4GB (2x2GB) PC2-6400C5 Dual Channel
OCZ Platinum Revision 2 XTC 2GB (2x1GB) PC2-6400C4 Dual Channel
Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB SATA-II 16MB Cache
Samsung Spinpoint F3 1TB Hard Drive SATAII 7200rpm 32MB Cache
Creative X-Fi Xtreme Gamer Soundcard
Antec 900 Nine Hundred Case

Its struggles to cope with photoshop and lightroom to the point of it annoying me.

Budget-wise I'm going throw £600 - £700 at it.
I'm guessing all I need is a new motherboard, processor, cpu cooler, memory and graphics card. My preferance would be intel processor and nvidia gpu.

There are 2 bundles that look good...

Krypton Intel Core i7 930 2.80GHz @ 4.00GHz Overclocked Bundle £579.72 inc VAT

and

Radon Intel Core i5 760 2.80GHz @ 4.00GHz Overclocked Bundle £399.49 inc VAT

The Radon bundle gives me room for a couple of SLI'd graphics cards but would the Krypton handle the photo and video editing better?

Anyway what do you reckon?
 
You could do a cheap upgrade and chuck in a Quad core Q6600 OC it @3.6GHz+ with a nice new cooler and then purchase a Zotac GTX 470 and that should be able to play basically all of the modern games and will deal with photoshop fine.
 
If you do decide to pick one of those bundles and can afford to, take the i7 setup. It will last you longer than an i5 build in terms of greater performance.
 
I like the idea of using a Q6600 in, Quad core's fair better in video editing and it won't give you any draw backs running Starcraft 2.

The Radon bundles draw back is the lack of SLi. The Asus P7P55-M Mobo that comes bundled with it only have 1 x 2.0 PCI-E x16 Lane.

Either bundle adding a GFX card will probably bust open your £700 budget though.

If you have your heart set on it I'd recommend the i7 Krypton kit. it will last you longer and the Quad Core will speed up your editing. If you can get some more cash together try grabbing a GTX 460 1Gb model, It runs Starcraft 2 on ultra with out breaking a sweat
 
Thanks for the suggestions.
I think I'll go with the i7 Krypton kit and then add a couple of GTX460 1Gb's next pay day... screw the budget, I'll just eat pot noodles from netto for a few months.

Now with that in mind will my PSU cope? (OCZ ModXStream Pro 600w)
 
2x GTX 460 1Gb will use 320-350W so i would have thought it should cope just fine!
Make sure you pop some pics on here when the system turns up!
 
I'll post some pics but they won't be pretty. The antec 900 case I have seems to be the original 1st version as there are no holes for cable management.... hmm maybe a new case is needed too.
 
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