Basically, I'm into photography and im starting to learn Photoshop, but my laptop just isnt up to the whole playing with large image files. So im looking to buy a PC which will allow me to do tis with ease, without having to wait and wait and wait for processes to get done.

I've seen this on Overclockers and it sounds good to me, i was after some opinions on the spec, and if there are better deals elsewhere etc? I may not play games, but it would be nice if i had the option to play now and again, however if it was going to push the price up too much i would happily do without the option of gaming and just stick with my PS3 for that, lol.

http://www.overclockers.co.uk/showproduct.php?prodid=FS-114-OK&groupid=43&catid=963&subcat=&name="Primo%20Lite %20Complete%209500GT"%20AMD%20Athlon%2064%20X2%205 600+%202.80GHz%20Dual%20Core%20DDR2%20Complete%20S ystem

Any help greatly appreciated

 

To work with large graphics files you need LOTS of memory. Max it out. Photoshop has always been memory hungry.

Back in the day, people used to add accelerator boards to make it apply filters faster - all you need these days is a reasonably powerful processor and a decent graphics card to draw the rendered image quickly - the graphics card doesn't need huge amounts of memory to work in 2d, just enough to paint the screen - NVidia Quadros were good for that, don't know if they're still available. Not great for games though.

Bear in mind that some of that 4GB of memory in that machine won't be available for you to use for applications, due to a limitation in Windows.

 

it's not a bad machine for the price, but it definately needs more RAM, at least 2 gbs worth. If it were me, i'd buy everything separate and build it myself, but that obviously depends on whether you're comfortable with buiding a PC. If you did buy everything separately, you might save some money as well, but you would obviously have to buy all the periperals unless you had some lying about. you could just always buy that one and add a shitload more RAM, as long as it has available slots

 

Thanks for the help so far, are you saying its a definite that i need more than 4GB of RAM? Seems like a lot to me

Ive built a few pc's but not for years, so dont mind doing it that way, im just confused about the spec's as theyve moved on loads since i last built one.

A few blokes at work reckon that it's worth going for the Intel Quad Core over the AMD chip, any views on this?

 

I'd always go for an AMD one over the Intel ones as that's my preference.

4GB is a fair amount - my work machine has 4GB (but Windows only addresses 3.5GB!) which is handy in some situations, but as it runs Windows, spends half of its time swapping to disk regardless of the amount of memory its got!

I expect it should be more than adequate for what you sound like you're going to be doing, but if you feel the need to use more than 4GB of memory you'll need the 64bit edition of Windows, which has its own pitfalls. If you want to go 64 bit anyway for the additional processing power, there are further considerations to make.

Something else I'd suggest if you're going to be working with large graphics files: RAID. While 'proper' raid is expensive and requires a proper controller and proper hard disks, the SATA alternative should give you a slight edge, as well as a degree of protection from disk failure. RAID 1 (mirrored) would be what you'd need, so that you get maximum disk throughput, decreasing waiting time while reading or writing large sequential graphics files from disk.

 

Thinking about things i'll probably go with the 32 bit version of Windows

What you think of this spec? For Photoshop i could go without the flash graphics card, and add it later if/when gaming was required.

Samsung SM-2253BW £149.99
Antec Three Hundred Ultimate Gaming Case £46.99
Corsair TX 650W ATX2.2 PSU £64.91
Intel Core 2 Quad Pro 2.4 overclocked to 3Ghz £140.99
Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 £16.44
Abit Ip35 Pro XE £105.74
OCZ 4GB 1066Mhz RAM £64.99
Seagate Barracude 7200 500GB SATA2 32MB £43.46
Pioneer DVR-216 DBK £18.79

Total £652.30

 

I'd go for Vista 64-bit... Might as well get 8GB in there

Get the Q9300, or Q9450 if your budget allows.. the 45nm processors run cool and use less power than the slightly older 65nm ones.

If you're storing your files locally on the computer, might not be a bad idea to have to disks in RAID0 (striped) for the performance increase that gives you. (get like two 250's or whatever you want)..

 

RAID 1 for resilience against drive failure - hard drives aint what they used to be Lose a drive with RAID 0 and you're stuffed.

 

I have a MSI KT8 Master 2 far with dual AMD's (two processors, not dual core sharing the same memory bus) running 4gb of memory on the mobo, a gigabyte iram drive with 4gb on it with ubuntu Linux running crossover office and photoshop, and a gigabyte iram drive with 4gb on it for the swap file. Storage is raid 5 scsi raptors.

I have no problems with photoshop files and large raw images, simply not an issue

 

Gotta love SCSI Shame it's so damn expensive for the average user.

 

RAID is not a replacement for backup. RAID is a method of maintaining availability. If availability is not critical (eg, an evening restoring a system from a backup is acceptable), then the obvious choice if only two disks are available would be RAID 0 as for this particular application, disk I/O performance is key.

 

Thanks lads

Can you RAID any hard disks or do you have to buy special ones to allow you to go down this avenue?


What about the older software conflicting with Vista 64 bit , or the driver problems?

To be honest i dont really want to be spending over £700 so going for a step up in the processor department isnt really an option.

How much would this kind of setup cost with... a) a SATA hard disk? b) scsi hard disks?

 

An evening of restoring is a bit annoying but it wouldnt really cause me too much concern considering the rare occasions it would need to be done.

 

You won't get any driver issues if you're buying new stuff..

Very few pieces of software dont work and if theres something really old that wont, theres always the option of running a 32-bit xp or something inside a virtual machine on your vista 64 box

 

Its not cheap, but two processors are the way to go if you want big photoshop performance, people think dual core is as good but it is not as the cores share the same bus

but if your looking for big improvements which are cost effective simply run your OS in ram on a device like the iram drive.. have a look at the vids for how much quicker it is.

XP on iRam
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zShWv...eature=related

Vista on Iram
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kofpP...eature=related

 

Ah ok.

wow... how fast is that

 

I know that (umpteen years of IT Technical Support and system building taught me that), but it saves a whole lot of heartache, and saves restoring the last backup that you performed two years ago because you kept putting it off 'until next time'.

If you're gonna push the boat out , 0+1 is the next best thing.

Also, bear in mind that 64 bit OSs don't run 32 bit programs particularly well, if they run at all. Unless you can get a 64bit version of photoshop, and anything else that you'll run, leave 64bit alone until it's matured.

The best drives are SCSI drives for RAID, but then you'll need an expensive SCSI RAID adapter, and SCSI drives are expensive anyway - they always have been simply because they're superior to IDE (and more recently, SATA). You can use any SATA hard disk to create a RAID array if your SATA controller supports RAiD, but, try to get two identical drives, but try and ensure they're from a different batch. If one batch is defective, and you've got two from that batch together (for the sake of argument), there's a higher likelihood of them both failing together.

 

All I can say is my umpteen years of working in the sector, anything from helpdesk through to architecting thousand-disk storage arrays, have taught me not to rely on RAID for the above - it's a fools game. RAID doesn't stop someone accidentally deleting a file (well, unless they have a time-delayed shadow copy on another array/LUN). RAID doesn't stop a defrag going bad. RAID doesn't stop a virus wiping out the machine. It's a better approach to teach people the benefits of backups rather than storage availability methods, like RAID.

RAID should only be promoted for two things: 1) performance and 2) availability.

That's not entirely true. Yes, emulation will be occuring, but it's fine. Photoshop "32-bit" works just fine on a 64-bit o/s. 64-bit is perfectly mature, it's been around an awfully long time!

SCSI are the best drives for anything, but it's best not to mislead the thread originator into thinking he HAS to have SCSI. One of my home SATA arrays, which is even using RAID 5, still manages 500MB/sec burst and over 300MB/sec sustained read, which is more than enough performance (typically). It's quite respectable on IOPS too, but not as good as my 8TB SAN (Solaris+ZFS)

 

Agreed

Agreed, however, I don't believe I did nor did I intend to Any drive can of course be used in a RAID configuration, provided the controller supports it. I was just trying to point out that using SCSI drives is more expensive, as per the question:

 

Abiot ip35 nooooooooooooo!!!!! dont do it!!!! the board is terrible! well made yes but terrible! plus abit have stopped making boards now, pulling out of the market.

best off getting a gigabyte or asus board much more reliable.

and dont pay extra for a cliocked verson of the q6600, its piss easy to do urself!

 

Been doing a bit of reading and the Abit board i fancied didnt have wifi onboard, i've come across another board which has wifi onboard and is well acclaimed... the Asus P5K Premium WiFi... opinions on this one?

Is overclocking as simple as increasing the speed of the FSB and keeping the operating temp down to an acceptable level. What about the core voltage?

 

The machine you listed in your first post will be fine for what you want to do, I can easily navigate photoshop with 3 gig of ram on an Amd 64bit 3200 running at 2.2 gig.

I run a 250 gig sata drive for windows and instlled stuff, I run a 160 IDE drive for programs and documents.

This is easiest for when windows spits it's dummy out and needs to be reinstalled, however I have a 500 gig usb drive on top of the case for backup's.

Witha good cpu setup you shouldn't feel the need to overclock the cpu unless you really want to push the boundaries of what you can do with a cpu, not forgetting the cooling aspect of it of course.

 

i've built a system with the P5K series and its a good solid board and is highly rated, the one i used took some fiddling to set up as it came with alot of useless firmware, but the bios are quite good as it'll let you tweak everything.

yes its pretty easy, leave the voltages on auto (or set them to 1.3 or less) as you don't need to touch them, the q6600 will clock to 3ghz with no fuss at all, its when you start pushing further voltage tweaks are needed. that cpu runs really cool anyway and with the heatsink you listed it'll be fine.