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Howdy everyone,
I'm speccing a high end rig for a friend who's particularly heavily into photography (Photoshop CS2 and probably later CS3.) Can you please cast your eyes over the below spec firstly checking the compatibility (particularly between RAM and Mobo and PSU and mobo) and secondly comment on anything appropriate/make suggestions for improvements I've given explanations/comments/motivations for particular parts where appropriate below:
Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 "LGA775 Conroe" 2.40GHz (1066FSB) - Retail £125.99
- He wants a *fast* system now without paying ridiculous prices for the CPU, so the strategy was to spec well but not overspec. He's prepared to do a bit of overclocking providing we can get the overclock undisputably stable. From my knowledge this chip with good cooling and a good motherboard should yield at least a 3Ghz stable overclock which would make for a plenty quick photo and video editing rig. We considered one of the Quad Xeon's 3200's but this seemed overkill for now (he said he can always sell on the C2D if needed to get a quad.)
Akasa Mirage 62 Aluminium Case - No PSU £83.99
Requirments which this case seems to fulfill rather well:
- Air filters if possible
- Reasonably quiet
- Lots of space
- Very good cooling properties for hard drives
- Easy to access
- Front PCI Bracket support (nice feature, this)
Other cases considered: Akasa Eclipse 62; Antec P180, P182, P190, NineHundred; Lian-Li PC V1000 PLUS.
Corsair 4GB DDR2 XMS2 Dominator DHX PC2-6400C5 TwinX (2x2GB) £159.99
- Not much to say really, 4GB in 2 sticks allows for later upgrade to 8GB.
- Hopefully this RAM will allow for flexibility in finding the best tweaked settings.
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 500GB ST3500630AS SATA-II 16MB Cache - OEM £151.98
- The intention is for these to be main data storage drives.
Reasons these were picked:
- 5 Year warranty
- Seagate currently has a reputation for being reliable
- Very quick
- Reasonably quiet
Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Compound (3.5g) £5.99
- For fitting after market cooler
Corsair HX 620W ATX2.2 Modular SLI Compliant PSU (CMPSU-620HXUK) £87.99
- The rig will possibly later support many hard drives, and this RIG has 8 SATA power connectors (the smaller 520/550Watt [I forget its rating] has only 4.)
- It is reputedly a quality PSU that should last a long time.
Western Digital Raptor 36GB WD360ADFD 10,000RPM SATA 16MB Cache - OEM £123.98
- The intention is to buy 2 of these as independent scratch disks for Photoshop. Might be overkill I suspect but he's the photo buff and apparently other photoshop experts say having fast disks dedicated to Photoshop scratch duties can speed it up dramatically. Gives you the option of RAID'ing them if you want as well etc.
Akasa AK-174BKT-B 120mm Auto Thermal Sensor Black Case Fan - 3 Pin £19.98
- 2 of these since the case does not have fans included. Are there any better ones that might actually connect to the Mobo to allow RPM control from the motherboard??
Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro CPU Cooler (Socket 775) £16.99
- Apparently the stock HSF of the Core2 is noisy. This seems generally very good and improves the cpu temperatures. I considered the Noctua is well, but it seems expensive. Is the Noctua substantially better than this/worth getting?
OcUK GeForce 7300 GT SILENT 256MB DDR2 HDTV/DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail £22.99
- He does *not* game, so this seemed an ideal relatively cheap card that will nevertheless be more than he'll need for now (and no great loss if it is upgraded later with something more beefy.)
Samsung SH-183LBEBN 18x18 DVD±RW Dual Layer Serial ATA Lightscribe ReWriter (Black) - OEM £16.99
- Wanted a quiet DVD rewrited with Lightscribe ability. This seems to fit the bill.
Gigabyte GA_P35_DS3P (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard £87.99
- This board was chosen due to very good overclocking abilities (from reviews around 575Mhz is not uncommon) and a wealth of peripherals for a very reasonable price (lots of USB ports, 8 Sata ports etc etc.) Also it uses the new P35 chipset so supports 1333FSB and therefore leaves a bit of room for a future CPU upgrade if desired.
Specific requirements:
- Highly flexibile/overclockable
- 8 sata ports (at least 1 e-Sata is required)
- At least 8 USB ports
- 1333FSB/45nm is nice to have
Other boards considered:
- Severeal 965 and 975 based boards (Asus/Gigabyte/Abit)
- close contenders where gigabyte P35_DS4, P35_DQ6 and Asus P5K. The DS3 seemed to be the sweet spot between features, overclockability and price currently.
Western Digital Raptor 74GB WD740ADFD 10,000RPM SATA 16MB Cache - OEM £86.99
- His idea was to use a single Raptor 74GB as System and Apps drive. Thus with having the scratch disks and the data disks gives plenty of scope for parallelism to be taken advantage of both in the OS and in photoshop to avoid bottlenecks and to ensure speed of performance. (As you can tell he's currently got a slow system thats making him tear his hair out.)
Other things to note:
- He has several good screens already so thats not required.
- He has lots of other hard drives already as well and will be setting up a backup solution from these, so don't worry about that.
- He's got a cheapy card reader (USB), but if anyone has a recommendation for a quality, very fast, card reader, he'd appreciate it. (Does anyone havea a card reader that attached directly to the PCI or PCI-E bus - should be a *lot* faster then?)
- I think the hard drives specced might be (apparently IMO) overkill (the raptors etc) but should make for an uber fast PC. Any experience from photographers with Photoshop and what HDD setups will be highly appreciated as I know virtually nothing of it and what works well for it, but would it be (for example) better to get 8GB or RAM rather than these extra disks? (avoiding the need for scratch disks then entirely perhaps?)
- He intends to run XP 64bit. Any comments about this (esp. re Photoshop) appreciated. Also I see overclockers don't list this, is that because the website is incomplete or because they don't have it?
Many thanks for any and all help/comments.
I'm speccing a high end rig for a friend who's particularly heavily into photography (Photoshop CS2 and probably later CS3.) Can you please cast your eyes over the below spec firstly checking the compatibility (particularly between RAM and Mobo and PSU and mobo) and secondly comment on anything appropriate/make suggestions for improvements I've given explanations/comments/motivations for particular parts where appropriate below:
Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 "LGA775 Conroe" 2.40GHz (1066FSB) - Retail £125.99
- He wants a *fast* system now without paying ridiculous prices for the CPU, so the strategy was to spec well but not overspec. He's prepared to do a bit of overclocking providing we can get the overclock undisputably stable. From my knowledge this chip with good cooling and a good motherboard should yield at least a 3Ghz stable overclock which would make for a plenty quick photo and video editing rig. We considered one of the Quad Xeon's 3200's but this seemed overkill for now (he said he can always sell on the C2D if needed to get a quad.)
Akasa Mirage 62 Aluminium Case - No PSU £83.99
Requirments which this case seems to fulfill rather well:
- Air filters if possible
- Reasonably quiet
- Lots of space
- Very good cooling properties for hard drives
- Easy to access
- Front PCI Bracket support (nice feature, this)
Other cases considered: Akasa Eclipse 62; Antec P180, P182, P190, NineHundred; Lian-Li PC V1000 PLUS.
Corsair 4GB DDR2 XMS2 Dominator DHX PC2-6400C5 TwinX (2x2GB) £159.99
- Not much to say really, 4GB in 2 sticks allows for later upgrade to 8GB.
- Hopefully this RAM will allow for flexibility in finding the best tweaked settings.
Seagate Barracuda 7200.10 500GB ST3500630AS SATA-II 16MB Cache - OEM £151.98
- The intention is for these to be main data storage drives.
Reasons these were picked:
- 5 Year warranty
- Seagate currently has a reputation for being reliable
- Very quick
- Reasonably quiet
Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Compound (3.5g) £5.99
- For fitting after market cooler
Corsair HX 620W ATX2.2 Modular SLI Compliant PSU (CMPSU-620HXUK) £87.99
- The rig will possibly later support many hard drives, and this RIG has 8 SATA power connectors (the smaller 520/550Watt [I forget its rating] has only 4.)
- It is reputedly a quality PSU that should last a long time.
Western Digital Raptor 36GB WD360ADFD 10,000RPM SATA 16MB Cache - OEM £123.98
- The intention is to buy 2 of these as independent scratch disks for Photoshop. Might be overkill I suspect but he's the photo buff and apparently other photoshop experts say having fast disks dedicated to Photoshop scratch duties can speed it up dramatically. Gives you the option of RAID'ing them if you want as well etc.
Akasa AK-174BKT-B 120mm Auto Thermal Sensor Black Case Fan - 3 Pin £19.98
- 2 of these since the case does not have fans included. Are there any better ones that might actually connect to the Mobo to allow RPM control from the motherboard??
Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro CPU Cooler (Socket 775) £16.99
- Apparently the stock HSF of the Core2 is noisy. This seems generally very good and improves the cpu temperatures. I considered the Noctua is well, but it seems expensive. Is the Noctua substantially better than this/worth getting?
OcUK GeForce 7300 GT SILENT 256MB DDR2 HDTV/DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail £22.99
- He does *not* game, so this seemed an ideal relatively cheap card that will nevertheless be more than he'll need for now (and no great loss if it is upgraded later with something more beefy.)
Samsung SH-183LBEBN 18x18 DVD±RW Dual Layer Serial ATA Lightscribe ReWriter (Black) - OEM £16.99
- Wanted a quiet DVD rewrited with Lightscribe ability. This seems to fit the bill.
Gigabyte GA_P35_DS3P (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard £87.99
- This board was chosen due to very good overclocking abilities (from reviews around 575Mhz is not uncommon) and a wealth of peripherals for a very reasonable price (lots of USB ports, 8 Sata ports etc etc.) Also it uses the new P35 chipset so supports 1333FSB and therefore leaves a bit of room for a future CPU upgrade if desired.
Specific requirements:
- Highly flexibile/overclockable
- 8 sata ports (at least 1 e-Sata is required)
- At least 8 USB ports
- 1333FSB/45nm is nice to have
Other boards considered:
- Severeal 965 and 975 based boards (Asus/Gigabyte/Abit)
- close contenders where gigabyte P35_DS4, P35_DQ6 and Asus P5K. The DS3 seemed to be the sweet spot between features, overclockability and price currently.
Western Digital Raptor 74GB WD740ADFD 10,000RPM SATA 16MB Cache - OEM £86.99
- His idea was to use a single Raptor 74GB as System and Apps drive. Thus with having the scratch disks and the data disks gives plenty of scope for parallelism to be taken advantage of both in the OS and in photoshop to avoid bottlenecks and to ensure speed of performance. (As you can tell he's currently got a slow system thats making him tear his hair out.)
Other things to note:
- He has several good screens already so thats not required.
- He has lots of other hard drives already as well and will be setting up a backup solution from these, so don't worry about that.
- He's got a cheapy card reader (USB), but if anyone has a recommendation for a quality, very fast, card reader, he'd appreciate it. (Does anyone havea a card reader that attached directly to the PCI or PCI-E bus - should be a *lot* faster then?)
- I think the hard drives specced might be (apparently IMO) overkill (the raptors etc) but should make for an uber fast PC. Any experience from photographers with Photoshop and what HDD setups will be highly appreciated as I know virtually nothing of it and what works well for it, but would it be (for example) better to get 8GB or RAM rather than these extra disks? (avoiding the need for scratch disks then entirely perhaps?)
- He intends to run XP 64bit. Any comments about this (esp. re Photoshop) appreciated. Also I see overclockers don't list this, is that because the website is incomplete or because they don't have it?
Many thanks for any and all help/comments.
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