Need help with a Photoshop-specific computer

[terry107]

My girlfriend is starting a career in photography and needs a new computer. She has been working on a 5 year old Emachine that just isn't cutting it anymore. All it's going to be used for is Photoshop and the internet. Here's generally what I have in mind:

Processor: AMD X2 3800 - I was thinking this should be more than sufficient.

RAM - Min. 2 gigs - I've read that Photoshop only supports 3GB of ram. Would it be wise to go ahead and get 4GB?

Hard Drive - At least 2. I've read that RAID 5 uses one of the drives as a backup in case of failure; however, I've never done a raid setup before. Is there any other piece of hardware that's required?

Video Card - Here's where I'm stumped. All I know for sure is that it needs a DVI out, which doesn't really narrow it down too much. I've read that Photoshop only really needs a basic card, but I don't know for sure.

Monitor - I've read the amazing guide on here so I have an idea of what to look for.

The rest (MBoard, PSU, Case, etc.) I should be able to handle on my own. Thanks in advance.

 

[Matthias99]

Originally posted by: terry107
My girlfriend is starting a career in photography and needs a new computer. She has been working on a 5 year old Emachine that just isn't cutting it anymore. All it's going to be used for is Photoshop and the internet. Here's generally what I have in mind:

Processor: AMD X2 3800 - I was thinking this should be more than sufficient.

Probably plenty of CPU power for photoshop. If you expect to be doing tons of CPU-intensive things (resizing huge images, computationally-intense filters, etc.), you may want to look at some benchmarks and see how the latest Intel CPUs compare.

RAM - Min. 2 gigs - I've read that Photoshop only supports 3GB of ram. Would it be wise to go ahead and get 4GB?

Single applications in 32-bit WinXP/2K can only access 2GB of memory (3GB if you do some tweaking to the OS, though some older apps don't like this.) Installing more than that may help if you multitask, since then you'll be able to dedicate a full 2GB to Photoshop while still having other programs open. However, you may not need that much memory -- it depends on how large the images you work with are, and how many files you have open at once.

Hard Drive - At least 2. I've read that RAID 5 uses one of the drives as a backup in case of failure; however, I've never done a raid setup before. Is there any other piece of hardware that's required?

You're thinking of RAID1... RAID5 requires at least three drives, and usually a separate controller card. I would recommend staying away from RAID and just focusing on a good backup strategy (which you should have even if you use RAID). Drive speed is usually not that big a factor for Photoshop if you have enough RAM -- unless you work on really, really, really big images where saving/loading the files can take a long time.

Video Card - Here's where I'm stumped. All I know for sure is that it needs a DVI out, which doesn't really narrow it down too much. I've read that Photoshop only really needs a basic card, but I don't know for sure.

You read right. You need essentially no video card horsepower for Photoshop. DVI output is good if you'll be using an LCD -- it's all digital, so there are fewer issues with using cheap cards. If your gf wants to get a high-end CRT (for better color rendering), you'll want a card with good-quality VGA output. Matrox cards tend to be popular for this.