To go dual processor or not??

wijcc · 27 Jun 2011 at 10:38

Would going with a dual processor give any performance boost for a desktop which is used for Photoediting (photoshop) and maybe a bit of video editing?
Look for get desktop for a friend who is a professional photographer, with a budget of £1000 max. Want kind of setup would you recommend? Just need the complete desktop plus OS (no need for mouse, keyboard or VDU)
Thanks in advance guys

getcarter · 27 Jun 2011 at 10:43

Go for an intel i5 2500k quad core setup. Perfect for what you want it for.
But do you want to build it yourselves or would you rather a pre-built system?

cmndr_andi · 27 Jun 2011 at 10:43

With that budget I wouldn't suggest going dual processor as it is really very expensive to buy the board and compatible CPUs.

Instead I would go for a single very quick CPU like the Intel Sandy Bridge i7 2600K (quad core, eight threads due to hyperthreading), a nice P67/Z68 board, a decent overclock, plenty of RAM, a graphics card and an SSD.

If you don't want to overclock the CPU yourself then you could go for a pre-overclocked bundle like this which looks like a good match for the stated uses (and comes with plenty of RAM).

This review shows how the stock i7 2600K does in photoshop.

wijcc · 27 Jun 2011 at 10:52

Thanks, the i5 2500k seems like quite a nice cpu, is the i7 2600K worth the extra £££s..
What other parts would you recommend to go with the i5 2500K/i7 2600K?

cmndr_andi · 27 Jun 2011 at 11:06

In heavily threaded stuff (like photoshop and video encoding) the i7 2600K is ~10-20% overall compared to the 2500K, so for your uses I would pay the extra for it. Here is a direct comparison in a range of applications.

For a work system with these uses I would suggest these parts:

There is a bit of room in £1000 budget there to either go for a discrete graphics card (instead of using the onboard intel HD 3000) or increase the SSD capacity to a ~120GB.

francky · 27 Jun 2011 at 11:25

Indeed...the i7 2600k will be perfect for you with HT giving you 8 cores (4 Physical and 4 Virtual)......2 Physical CPUs would be massive overkill as that aimed at the high end server market that use Virtulisation enviroments and you would probably only use about 10% of your CPU power. ( I build virtual enviroments for my clients that can run almost 8 server enviroments with 2 physical CPU's)