Build a PC for photoshop

CTR_Chris

CTR_Chris

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Chris
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Its been a couple of years since i rebuilt my PC, and its painfully slow when using photoshop. So i think its about time i rebuilt it. I have a video card im happy with and very good LCD screen, can anyone recoment a motherboard, processer and RAM combo to run photoshop with?

Also where is best to buy CS3 from ?

many thanks
 
Budget for the hardware?
 
Lets work around the £350 mark
 
Something like these may suit

Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3, £64
2 GB Corsair TWIN2X 6400C4 DDR2 £79
Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 3.0GHz 1333Mhz Socket LGA775, 4MB, BOXED w/fan £182.50

That's from Komplett
 
Is your gfx card AGP or PCI-E, and what power supply do you have?

Will you be needing a new case?
 
I would normally say, at this point, consider going down the Apple route. But I won't :eek:

If I were still building PCs (something that stops as soon as you discover Macs :) ) I would be looking at going down the Core 2 Quad route.
 
The PSU is plenty man enough as this got upgraded along with the case recently

Im usin a AGp graphics card with DVI output to screen
 
CTR_Chris said:
Im usin a AGp graphics card with DVI output to screen
Click to expand...

As expected. If your upgrading the mobo, it would be silly not to upgrade to PCI-E as well. If you do no gaming, then you can pick up cheap PCI-E cards for second hand (£25-£30).

As regards to the other components, i would suggest of staying clear of C2Q at the moment, as prices are extremely high, and for the use it would get, it would be overkill. C2D offer the best bang for buck within the Intel range, and are far superior to AMD X2's.

I would suggest going for the C2D E6600, great clocking capabilities, and a nice 4mb L2 cache.

For the mobo, i recommend the Asus P5W DH deluxe.

Ram, well most of the time its down to personal preference, but if it was me i would go for 2GB of DDR2 OCZ PC2-6400C4 platinum revision 2. Amazing stuff for the price.

Your looking at about £340 + P&P for that lot. And a 2nd hand PCI-E gfx card is going to cost about a further £30
 
Quads aren't as daft as all that at the moment, the Q6600 is around £150+VAT so only about £25 more than the E6600. I'm not sure about Photoshop but Lightroom is properly multithreaded and will use all 4 cores during RAW processing - a conversion of an 8Mp CR2 file to an 8 bit uncompressed TIFF takes of the order of a couple of seconds. That's blooming impressive when you consider that it take my machine about 0.25-0.5s to write the TIFF to disk!
 
rpstewart said:
Quads aren't as daft as all that at the moment, the Q6600 is around £150+VAT so only about £25 more than the E6600. I'm not sure about Photoshop but Lightroom is properly multithreaded and will use all 4 cores during RAW processing - a conversion of an 8Mp CR2 file to an 8 bit uncompressed TIFF takes of the order of a couple of seconds. That's blooming impressive when you consider that it take my machine about 0.25-0.5s to write the TIFF to disk!
Click to expand...


After a quick look, i didn't realise Quads were that cheap at the moment, i could of sworn the Q6600 was around £250. Really its down to your budget, if you can afford to spend another £40-£50 on a quad, go for it. Either way, i think you would be very happy with the E6600 or Q6600.
 
They were that sort of price up to a fortnight ago. Intel slashed a load of prices when the 1333MHz FSB C2Ds were released.
 
dod said:
Something like these may suit

Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3, £64
2 GB Corsair TWIN2X 6400C4 DDR2 £79
Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 3.0GHz 1333Mhz Socket LGA775, 4MB, BOXED w/fan £182.50

That's from Komplett
Click to expand...

:agree: 100% that will be excellent spec
 
alexisonfire said:
After a quick look, i didn't realise Quads were that cheap at the moment, i could of sworn the Q6600 was around £250. Really its down to your budget, if you can afford to spend another £40-£50 on a quad, go for it. Either way, i think you would be very happy with the E6600 or Q6600.
Click to expand...

Buy a 6850 not a quad, nothing uses the quad so it will be no better than a 6600 the 6850 is only a little more money and is much faster. I know i have one!

ignore the quad , get one next time you change the cpu
 
ppp said:
Buy a 6850 not a quad, nothing uses the quad so it will be no better than a 6600 the 6850 is only a little more money and is much faster. I know i have one!

ignore the quad , get one next time you change the cpu
Click to expand...

Much faster is a huge exaguration, benchmarks of the 6850 have shown about a 2-4% increase in file compression, encryption and load times in applications over the 6600. The money difference is almost 25% more for the 6850 over the 6600.

Not exactly the best price/performance ratio.
 
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