Whats the right balance for a photoshop machine?

Oldylocks · 8 Oct 2009 at 12:22

Hi, I'm trying to spec my first complete build which is primarily for photoshop and illustrator work. I've got a budget of about £700 for the case and everything in it but I'm not sure where to spend the money, CPU, RAM or hard disks - or GPU.

Will I notice much difference between i7 and Phenom? Should I put money saved with AMD into more RAM?

I had considered a SSD but Adobe has told me Photoshop won't run on one, but could I use one for the OS and page file?

This noob would really appreciate any advice.

(Loads more questions to come, I'm sure!)

Cheers

Oldylocks · 8 Oct 2009 at 12:33

Thanks, I'll shelve the SSD idea then, (which solves a lot of my other queries!)

Oldylocks · 8 Oct 2009 at 12:37

Thanks reflux,
I did wonder, when I got a reply from Adobe in broken English, as to whether my question had been understood. Do you have your page file on the SSD, I've read that if its on the same disk as the OS and programs it will slow things down...or does that only apply to 'ordinary' drives?

Oldylocks · 8 Oct 2009 at 12:47

Thanks for the advice, that's the sort of setup I was thinking about and an SSD is sounding interesting again! Maybe with my budget, though, I would be better off spending on chip and RAM and add an SSD later.
The bottom line is anything is going to be faster that my 5 year old Dell!

Oldylocks · 8 Oct 2009 at 13:09

Biggest files I'm working with atm are about 100MB so would I really see the difference betweeen, say Intel i7 920 and Phenom II x4 Quad Core 955?

Oldylocks · 8 Oct 2009 at 13:17

Brilliant, thanks.
Is 420W enough? I would probably have 2 hard drives and later I might add a blu-ray but not a lot else. Also, would it all fit in a Lian-Li A05NB, which looks so neat?