Upgrade office computer

[beatarmy]

Please help me upgrade my 3 year old computer in the US. I typically research and build my own, but look forward to some current expert advice.

I currently run win-xp, have a 3.x ghz pentium D, 2 gb ram, ATI FireGL V3100, ABIT AW-8 MAx, 2 pairs of SATA disks running RAID 1. I have a good 600W power ATX supply and like my case. The computer is unstable and bluescreens about every other day. Memtest shows errors in both memory sticks, life is too short to figure out if it is the motherboard or the memory and this is just as good an excuse to upgrade as any.

I want: dual 1600x1200 monitors, vista business, and will run dragon naturallyspeaking professional and image editing software, primarily photoshop, dxo and bibble. I don't play games on this machine and don't anticipate doing video editing.

This computer is attached to a gigabit network and assorted usb devices. I don't need wireless. I will not overclock, and my highest good is stability rather than speed. By rumor at least, naturallyspeaking runs best with the intel advanced instruction set so I would prefer to stay with intel.

I would like to stay under $1500 for the internals and save my money for high end monitors.

Ideally, I break the RAID and keep my current hard drives, power supply and case.

Any recommendations appreciated.

 

[Roguestar]

Intel E2180 $80
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16819116052
or E4500 for $120 (slightly faster, seeing as you're not going to overclock)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16819115031

Abit IP35-E $60 AR
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16813127031

4GB of DDR2-800 $80
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16820231122

ATI 2600Pro for dual-DVI $50
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16814161194

 

[beatarmy]

Wow, I had no idea the prices had come down so much.

Thanks for the advice. I will report back when built.:thumbsup:

 

[heyheybooboo]

Originally posted by: beatarmy
Wow, I had no idea the prices had come down so much.

Thanks for the advice. I will report back when built.:thumbsup:

How much do you use bibble ???


edit: FYI - NS promoted the extended SIMD instruction set that came out with the Pentium 3's 10 years ago. Those instructions are pretty much standard these days for Intel and AMD. Intel now uses SSE4 and the new AMDs SSE128.

 

[beatarmy]

I was a DXO fan until version 5 came out and broke my heart. Since then, more bibble, but I keep hoping dxo, with its lens/camera specific corrections, will be reissued faster and with fewer bugs

 

[heyheybooboo]

Bibble will take every cpu core you throw at it.

With a max budget of $1,500 an Intel q6600 quad core is due consdieration.

That budget would also be in the range of an AMD 2p workstation with 2 CPUs - or 8 cores.

Bibble performance would scale nearly 700% with 8 cores.

Photoshop is not "multithreaded" but some filters in Photoshop will run across 2 cpu cores. I'm not sure about dxo.

Photoshop needs ram, scratch disks and excellent I/O as opposed to multiple cpu cores.

Will you reuse your FireGL V3100 ???

edit: What about Firewire? Are you familiar with RAM Drive (using a 'bank' of memory as a hard drive to increase performance)