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Blow my money!! New rig for Photographer

T

thatsright

Diamond Member
I came back to where it all started for me, ATF. The last rig I build was exactly 5 YEARS ago when I was on the tail end of my PC Gaming love. Now I am huge into digital photography and don't game at all. The 'blazin' rig I had 5 years ago, is now total pure crap for what I need to do. I have a P4 rig with a Radeon 9700Pro, 19" CRT, etc. Nice then but ehh....

I DO NOT NEED anything to do with overclocking, tricked out cases/lighting, etc. The monitor might be the most important part of this. Color accuracy is the most important, not necessarily fast MS numbers gamers crave. Can I use my old ATX case I have now? If so, assuming I will have to buy a new PC for the new case and mobo? Prob going to use XP Pro initialy. So here is what I need:

-Assuming I will get a Core2 Quad core with stock cooling.
-A good MOBO. w/ IDE Channel. With hardware RAID. (Can I get one that will do RAID+1 with a internal HD and one external HD in a enclosure on my desk. eSATA??)
-256 MB Video card. No gaming=low price right?
-Two SATA HD's. MUST have 5 year warranty's. 16mb cache 500GB-1TB each
-3-4GB of ram. No overclocking.

What I have and will try to keep:
-DVD-ROM and DVD-RW drive
-Klipsch ProMedia 2.1 speakers
-Mouse/Keyboard
-Audigy 2 ZS (old school PCI) sound card

Can someone here suggest something given the above? My budget is around $1,600 or so. And about $300-400 of that is for the monitor probably. So after that piece, were talking $1,200 left for the actual pc.

Whatever you guys can think of I'd greatly appreciate. Its been a while since I've dropped a grand at NewEgg ;-)
 
Thatsright first right out of the gate, 1600 is quite a good sum of money not to really "overclock at all" you can get 20% of your quad speed increase with a small fsb bump, but anyways let me take a crack at your needs. (also a little bit of gaming potential as well, *cough* spore)

Case-Antec P182
This is a dream case, quiet, sleek and plenty of room for HD's among other things 150$
PSU-Corsair 620HX
Modular, Clean case, plenty of power, and a little more. Very top notch as far as quality goes 110$
Graphics-HD4850
Right now doing very well against any newer card. Last awhile 170$
CPU- Q9450
Fastest Quad on the market, plenty of power for video coding 330$
RAM- 8gb of G.skill
You can afford 8gb right now because its very cheap and it doing video/photo work it will probably be more useful than you might imagine 2x 85$= 170$
Hard drive- 2x 750gb Seagates
5 year warranty, 2x750gb =1.5tb for photos 120x2=240$

I'm up to 1170 right now, and I don't pretend to be a monitor expert. I suggest looking in the video cards and graphics question for that SPECIFIC advice. Also as far as the motherboard is concerned, I think just about any p35 and above would work.
 
I'm not going to have much to add but just off Powernick50's list, I like the Case, PSU, and CPU.

For the RAM, RAM is RAM so what he suggested is fine, just get 4 gigs. AFAIK, XP Pro can recognize up to 3.25GB of ram (I may recall reading somewhere there's a fix for this) but even if it could recognize 8GB of RAM, I really doubt you'll be needing more than 4GB's.

For the HDD, his choice is good, but I think you're really only limited to Seagate drives if you want the 5 year warranty. Is it really that important? Suppose the drive dies...you won't be getting your data back.

For the GPU, I would get one myself but if you were to consider a cheaper one (ATI's 2400/2600 and nVIDIA's 8400/8600 cards have 256MB dedicated memory and can be had for $60 or less), make sure it has all the connections, etc. you'll need.

To cut costs, you could consider the Antel Sonata III Case with 500W EarthWatts PSU for $125. You are going to need cut back on something (definitely save $85 by dropping to 4GB's of ram) if you want to get a motherboard. Either way though, Powernick50's recommendation is a really good place to start from.
 
The 4850 is a waste for what you're doing. If you're not playing games and strictly doing 2D work, there's no reason to spend more than $50 on a video card. Since you can go with a low-power graphics card and you're not overclocking, the PSU is serious overkill as well. I'd look at something in the 450W or less range.
 
The other sections have roughly been covered. I don't think anyone's really covered the monitor aspect of this though. My friend is pretty seriously into photography and I can say that you should try to look into a good CRT if you're going to replace your current one. The only LCD he'd even think about getting is the NEC 2690WUXi and that thing is over a grand by itself. A good CRT still has better color accuracy if you can calibrate it properly, I believe. I also agree with DSF here, for non-gaming, get a lower end graphics card, and a 450W PSU - it will be far more than enough for your needs.
 
Been doing Photoshop since 5.0 and use CS3 now, shoot with a Nikon D200 and regularly touch up photos 150-200MB. Also do heavy work in Premiere CS3.

First list is good and I will tell you why I differ with the comments that follow. 8GB is too much right now but assuming you will use Photoshop or Premiere (if not disregard this) CS4 is due out this year and will support 64bit just in time for Vista 64bit to have a better mainstream following. I can tell you memory is the greatest barrier.

I also disagree with the no need for a high end graphics board. The first recommendation is a good one. Again, Photoshop will show a very noticable difference if you go low end. I got a Radeon 3850 1GB/256DDR3 and think it is a good buy.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16814102733

Lastly, CRT is dead wrong unless you will be producing commercial output to be compared to Pantone accuracy. LCDs are plentiful, cheap and you can get excellent color accuracy from Viewsonic, Samsung, even Dell (21" minimum or two 19" side by side).

No disrespect to others, but my 2 cents from working in this area.
 
Originally posted by: Randy1754
I also disagree with the no need for a high end graphics board. The first recommendation is a good one. Again, Photoshop will show a very noticable difference if you go low end. I got a Radeon 3850 1GB/256DDR3 and think it is a good buy.
Click to expand...
What difference do you notice? Color quality? Speed?

What low-end card(s) have you used that were insufficient?
 
Hey guys, thanks for the suggestions. And with that...

I will be using XP Pro, so anything over 4GB right now will be useless. Even if Adobe Photoshop CS4 is 64 Bit, I'm still not so sure this will compel me to move to Vista. Vista will still suck no matter what incentive there is. I know I will have to use it at some point, but until then... As for Video cards, I guess I should refine what I'm looking for. 256MB card with 256bit processing. I don't know of any Photoshop'er who has said 512MB card will display photos faster onscreen. Thats pretty much all the video card will be doing as 98% of performance depends on the CPU and RAM.

I'm intrigued by the CRT angle. But seriously, where can I buy a new pro grade 21"+ crt monitor? From the looks of it, I would need to spend around a grand (gulp!) for a LCD screen for what I need to do.

As for mobo, I'm sure all of the suggested are quality parts, but what about a (gasp) stock board with onboard raid? A tried and true and seemingly inexpensive Intel board?

Also can anyone verify the option of using RAID 1 for one internal drive, and a external drive? Possible?

Thanks again guys!
 
How serious are you with this photographing/editing stuff? If you really like, but still do it as a hobby, you really don't need a TOP of the line monitor. A good quality LCD 22" for 300-400$ should be sufficient. If you want to make money with it, then it could be wise to invest more money into a good CRT monitor.

Btw, why will Vista suck no matter what? I've moved to Vista and I'm loving it. In fact, in day to day use it's not much different from XP. It's more stable though. It can use more then 4gb of ram, and it has superfetch, speeding things up even more.

As for the videocard, I have seen people say that more vram helps, and there are plenty of gddr3 memory cards out there for under $75. You'd have to look it up yourself to be sure though.
 
I'll answer this in a different way. I read most trade magazines, subscribe to Lynda and NAPP training, and own many mainstream books pertaining to this topic. About 3-4 years ago the trade and pros reflected your viewpoint, I have not seen anyone advocate CRT for any use in a long time. So, my opinion aside, the industry seems to believe LCD is acceptable.

On the graphics board I concede you may be pressed to see the difference these days, but the geek in me still makes me want the better boards and the pros in the graphics world advocate much more expensive cards (1k-2k range). In any event I agree with you that depending on use, most users would not notice the difference. Best regards..
 
Originally posted by: thatsright
Hey guys, thanks for the suggestions. And with that...

I will be using XP Pro, so anything over 4GB right now will be useless. Even if Adobe Photoshop CS4 is 64 Bit, I'm still not so sure this will compel me to move to Vista. Vista will still suck no matter what incentive there is. I know I will have to use it at some point, but until then... As for Video cards, I guess I should refine what I'm looking for. 256MB card with 256bit processing. I don't know of any Photoshop'er who has said 512MB card will display photos faster onscreen. Thats pretty much all the video card will be doing as 98% of performance depends on the CPU and RAM.

I'm intrigued by the CRT angle. But seriously, where can I buy a new pro grade 21"+ crt monitor? From the looks of it, I would need to spend around a grand (gulp!) for a LCD screen for what I need to do.

As for mobo, I'm sure all of the suggested are quality parts, but what about a (gasp) stock board with onboard raid? A tried and true and seemingly inexpensive Intel board?

Also can anyone verify the option of using RAID 1 for one internal drive, and a external drive? Possible?

Thanks again guys!
Click to expand...

RAID 1 brings nothing to the table for you and will impede overall performance. To run mirrored RAID you need a minimum two hard drives.

Photoshop is RAM and disk I/O intensive. It works in a linear fashion on blocks of data. A faster dual core cpu like the e8400 will top a q6600 by a good 20% at stock clocks. An AMD X2 6000+ is roughly similar to a q6600 in performance at stock clocks. You generally will not see cpu utilization above 70% with Photoshop and will most likely average around 50% cpu utilization across 2 cores.

Photoshop the application is not multithreaded; there are, however, certain filters used in Photoshop which will run parallel threads across 2 cores. This is the exception rather than the rule.

(Premiere is a whole 'nother ballgame. Encoder selection in Premiere - such as MainConcept - will run parallel threads across those four cores.)

In order to speed processing in Photoshop (and get that microprocessor pumpin') you need to segregate your hard drives into specific functions and optimize your paging file. (1) Your OS needs to be on an independent drive. (2) You need a capture/scratch drive for your content. (3) You need a data drive for your finished product. (4) You need a backup drive.

For drives 1, 2 & 3: Western Digital Raptor 74GB 10000 RPM 16MB Cache SATA: $475

Drive 4: Seagate Barracuda 750GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache SATA : $120

That leaves you with $600 for your mobo/cpu/ram/psu.

The linear Photoshop cycle goes ""Read --> Process --> Write"" until completion. The read/write of the Raptors is roughly twice as fast as the larger drive with 25-30% lower latency.

Vista64 deserves more consideration on your road map. Even if your budget does not now provide for 6-8Gb of ram and Vista64 it should be on your short-term future plans. As noted, 64-bit Photoshop is on the horizon and the total system will suck up 6-8Gb of ram. You typically may allocate 50%+ of your system ram to Photoshop on Win-based systems. Excess RAM beyond what Photoshop can directly use (which in some cases is 3Gb+) will reduce system paging and boost running background applications/processes. Lotsa Fast RAM = Mucho Happy Processing.

Another + for Vista: Google 'SuperFetch & ReadyBoost'

 
get the 8GB of ram and Vista 64 bit. Editing a single, normal size photo with a memory undo of 15 will easily take 2GB.

XP doesn't take 4GB of ram, it only takes 3.25GB.

Vista is fine, just turn off UAC and it's just like XP.
 
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