Is this a good spec for a PC

artona

artona

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stewart
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Hi

Calling those who know about PC specs......

Is this a reasonable spec for photo-editing?

AMD Phenom X4 9150e quad-core processor
(1.8GHz, 2MB Cache)
Genuine Windows Vista® Home Premium
2GB DDR2 800MHz memory

320GB SATA hard drive (7200rpm)
ATI Radeon HD3200 graphics
Dual Layer DVD Rewriter
6x USB, 1x IEEE 1394 FireWire® ports
Processor Type AMD Phenom X4 9150e quad-core
Processor speed 1800 The higher the number of Megahertz (MHZ) the faster the processor should be
RAM Memory 2048 MB
Hard Disk Capacity 320 GB
Drives Fitted Dual Layer DVD Rewriter
Graphics Description ATI Radeon HD 3200
Keyboard YES
Mouse YES
Onboard LAN YES

cheers


stew
 
Yes it's fine for photo editing (and most others things as well ;-)
 
HI

What about the graphics, do you think it needs a seperate card?

stew
 
artona said:
HI

What about the graphics, do you think it needs a seperate card?

stew
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If you have your eye on this machine I would say go for it. If you are gonna be gaming then definately a seperate graphics card but if only for photo editing, give it a try. You can always add a seperate graphics card later.
Also get the RAM pushed to 3Gb if you can.
 
VinnyB said:
If you have your eye on this machine I would say go for it. If you are gonna be gaming then definately a seperate graphics card but if only for photo editing, give it a try. You can always add a seperate graphics card later.
Also get the RAM pushed to 3Gb if you can.
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Yes - check what RAM is recommended for your photo editor.
PSE7 recommends 1Gb.
Don't know what Vista need, but I expect it could be quite hefty. Then add to that the other things you may want to run simultaneously (AV & Firewall).

That could well eat up the 2Gb of RAM that pc has. Use up all the RAM and the pc can become sluggish.
 
Yea, definitely go for 3gb with vista. Not quite to do with your question, but another thing to consider is you're not gonna get overcharged for the spec you've supplied. How much is this gonna cost you?
 
Unless you go for the 64bit version of vista then you won't benefit from any more ram and 2gb is plenty.

I assumed the graphics card was seperate sorry but even a cheap graphics card will be fine for photo editing and you could always buy an older high end model quite cheaply.
 
2GB is perfectly fine for Vista, I run x64 Ultimate on mine and Photoshop is fine. It's odd, when vista fist came out people were saying it files with 2GB of ram, now people are constantly stating it needs 3-4GB to fly, vista hasn't changes, so the amount of ram needed won't change either.

I assume it is a PC world type brand (by the fast processor but slow GFX and small amout of ram), if so I would be careful of being overcharged, and also chech whether it is x64 vista or x86 vista, there really is no excuse now to still be sticking x86 vista on new machines.
 
It's because Vista will use a percentage of your ram to store things you use a lot in, which it learns. the more ram you have the more it will use for this. Which is why if you have 2GB ram it will probably use around 700mb of your ram just on the desktop with nothing running, and if you have 4gb it use about 1200mb doing the same. Although all of that is irrelevent if you have 32-bit vista.
 
MarshallGoren said:
Yea, definitely go for 3gb with vista. Not quite to do with your question, but another thing to consider is you're not gonna get overcharged for the spec you've supplied. How much is this gonna cost you?
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Hi

£280, seems to be a good price, what do you think?

stew
 
I am sure you have realised, but you will need a monitor as well ;). Also, Vista isn't a great operating system, I would suggest windows xp professional or Windows 7 (though its not on "general" release yet).
 
aligibbs said:
I am sure you have realised, but you will need a monitor as well ;). Also, Vista isn't a great operating system, I would suggest windows xp professional or Windows 7 (though its not on "general" release yet).
Click to expand...

I don't mean to alter the topic of the thread, but I don't really see why people dislike Vista so much - I've had Business Edition since release and the only issue I ever have is network file transfers initiated via Windows Explorer! Stability wise, it's far above XP. I don't understand what makes people dislike it?!
 
Syx said:
I don't mean to alter the topic of the thread, but I don't really see why people dislike Vista so much - I've had Business Edition since release and the only issue I ever have is network file transfers initiated via Windows Explorer! Stability wise, it's far above XP. I don't understand what makes people dislike it?!
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Syx, it's been proved time and again its slower than XP, the bugs at the start have now been eradicated so its plenty stable. But it requires so much from a computer and people are reluctant to upgrade.

On the other hand, Windows 7 (currently in beta) and probably out next year has all the fancy pants bits of Vista but it runs like a dream, faster than both XP and Vista by a country mile.

OP, this PC looks great for photo editing, 3Gb of RAM would add something extra however, as above, if you plan on gaming you'll want to boost the graphics, but as it is, its all fine.
 
Yantorsen said:
It's because Vista will use a percentage of your ram to store things you use a lot in, which it learns. the more ram you have the more it will use for this. Which is why if you have 2GB ram it will probably use around 700mb of your ram just on the desktop with nothing running, and if you have 4gb it use about 1200mb doing the same. Although all of that is irrelevent if you have 32-bit vista.
Click to expand...

Yes I know that, but why has the amount of ram needed gone up since it was released (in fact only in the last few months have I seen people saying 2GB is not enough). I only assume as ram has got cheaper and more people have more ram as standard that they assume it can't run very well on anything else.

aligibbs said:
I am sure you have realised, but you will need a monitor as well ;). Also, Vista isn't a great operating system, I would suggest windows xp professional or Windows 7 (though its not on "general" release yet).
Click to expand...

At best that is a bit silly, at worst it is dangerous. XP just isn't as secure as Vista (and will run out of it update period sooner), nor does it run as well (unless you have a really low spec machine), and if he wants more than 3GB of RAM then he needs to get the x64 version of XP, and I would not want to put anyone through that (barely any drivers at all). Windows 7 on the other hand is very stable for a release candidate, but it is still a release candidate and not a good idea to have it alone, and anyway, unless you have a dog slow machine there won't be much (at all) performance difference between Vista and windows 7 anyway...
 
Tim Sainsbury said:
Syx, it's been proved time and again its slower than XP, the bugs at the start have now been eradicated so its plenty stable. But it requires so much from a computer and people are reluctant to upgrade.

On the other hand, Windows 7 (currently in beta) and probably out next year has all the fancy pants bits of Vista but it runs like a dream, faster than both XP and Vista by a country mile.

OP, this PC looks great for photo editing, 3Gb of RAM would add something extra however, as above, if you plan on gaming you'll want to boost the graphics, but as it is, its all fine.
Click to expand...

Yes it uses more resources, but then so did XP compared to 2000, and 2000 compared to 98 etc... It may not be a good idea to upgrade an existing machine if the machine is quite slow but there really is no point whatsoever choosing XP over vista for a new machine. Just like when XP replaced 2000 (well ME but I don't ever want to talk about that OS :lol:).

As for 3GB, machines generally run better in dual channel (or triple channel with i& machines) so actually he shoud either stick with 2GB or upgrade to 4GB (as you can't get 1.5GiB sticks...), in which case you need to make sure the machine has x64 vista on to utilise it completely.:)

But for less than £300 it doesn't seem too bad and you wouldn't need to upgrade it for the foreseeable future if just browsing/word/photo editing (other than maybe a bigger HDD).

EDIT: as for slowness, yes it was proved time and time again, for games... For practically everything else it was faster, and now that slowness has pretty much disappeared with the updates.
 
Amp34 said:
Yes I know that, but why has the amount of ram needed gone up since it was released (in fact only in the last few months have I seen people saying 2GB is not enough). I only assume as ram has got cheaper and more people have more ram as standard that they assume it can't run very well on anything else.
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Sorry, was explaining it more the people who didn't know, as from what I can tell you know a lot about PCs anyway. I think you're probably right though, if you're building a system yourself, unless your on a really tight budget, it seems silly not to go for 4GB since it is so cheap.
 
Amp34 said:
As for 3GB, machines generally run better in dual channel (or triple channel with i& machines) so actually he shoud either stick with 2GB or upgrade to 4GB (as you can't get 1.5GiB sticks...), in which case you need to make sure the machine has x64 vista on to utilise it completely.:)
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If you use 4GB on 32-bit, I know it won't use all of the memory, but if you have 2x2gb sticks, will it still use dual channel? and use ~1.5gb of each stick?
 
It also worth checking out what memory the ATI graphics card is going to use, a lot of cheap motherboards with onboard graphics are allocating a chunk of main memory to video memory so if the graphics card is set to use 256mb memory then you will only have 1.75gb of memory to be used by Vista. The amount of memory for the graphics card can be adjusted in the bios.

Tim
 
More drive space please! :) If you shoot RAW it'll fill up pretty quick!
 
Chaz Photos said:
I SAID I dont like AMD I do know my own mind
Click to expand...

With all due respect if you don't give a valid reason for that, it's fairly unhelpful. I don't particularly like HDR, but I don't go into every HDR thread and say that and not say why, because it isn't very helpful.
 
Yantorsen said:
If you use 4GB on 32-bit, I know it won't use all of the memory, but if you have 2x2gb sticks, will it still use dual channel? and use ~1.5gb of each stick?
Click to expand...

Yeah, something like 3.2GiB will be addressed used), but that also includes memory from a GFX and sound card too. The point is if you are or plan to use 4GB or more RAM you really should be going for Vista (or Wnidows 7) x64, rather than x86 (which is more of a legacy support for older machines IMO).
 
Yea agree anyway I was just wondering. There really is no reason not to go 64-bit unless you have some specialist soft/hardware which will only run in 32-bit, but even then you could run most things in a sandbox.
 
much more disk space needed. a 1TB drive will cost you about 20 quid more than a 300gb one....
 
nice rig, but I would put in 4GB ram for some future proofing.
windows 7 64 bit is running very nicely for me at the mo
additional graphics...apparently CS4 uses gfx acceleration???
 
Amp34 said:
At best that is a bit silly, at worst it is dangerous. XP just isn't as secure as Vista (and will run out of it update period sooner), nor does it run as well (unless you have a really low spec machine), and if he wants more than 3GB of RAM then he needs to get the x64 version of XP, and I would not want to put anyone through that (barely any drivers at all). Windows 7 on the other hand is very stable for a release candidate, but it is still a release candidate and not a good idea to have it alone, and anyway, unless you have a dog slow machine there won't be much (at all) performance difference between Vista and windows 7 anyway...
Click to expand...

I disagree- but everyone can have their own opinion. Why "waste" so much resource in running a operating system like Windows Vista? The difference between Vista & Windows 7 is massive, go and read all the information/blogs/reviews etc out there by people that have tried it. Sorry to the OP for bringing it off-topic slightly.
 
aligibbs said:
I disagree- but everyone can have their own opinion. Why "waste" so much resource in running a operating system like Windows Vista? The difference between Vista & Windows 7 is massive, go and read all the information/blogs/reviews etc out there by people that have tried it. Sorry to the OP for bringing it off-topic slightly.
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What makes you think I haven't? I got a beta key when they first came out.;)

The only computers that see a real difference in performance (as opposed to a couple of percent in benchmarking programs) are very low spec PC's such as netbooks.:)

The other question is, why "waste" money buying 4/8GB of RAM and never using it? However I guess people buy Aston martins and never go over much more than 70 so...
 
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