New desktop required

markyboy.1967

markyboy.1967

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Mark Molloy
Edit My Images
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Folks, i will be in the market for a new desktop in the next few weeks.Im looking at spending no more than around £850.I dont need a monitor but i do need it to edit pics on CS4 and lightroom.I need it to be quick at editing, reliable and possibly a min of 2 hard drives( would like one of those as an SSD as most say they are so much quicker for booting up).I dont think any of the bigger names with pre-built systems are what i need unless someone can tell me different and point out one at a good price vs spec.Could someone give me an idea of spec that i could get/want out of a system and where is the best and most reliable place to go for a system where they build to my spec.
 
markyboy.1967 said:
Folks, i will be in the market for a new desktop in the next few weeks.Im looking at spending no more than around £850.I dont need a monitor but i do need it to edit pics on CS4 and lightroom.I need it to be quick at editing, reliable and possibly a min of 2 hard drives( would like one of those as an SSD as most say they are so much quicker for booting up).I dont think any of the bigger names with pre-built systems are what i need unless someone can tell me different and point out one at a good price vs spec.Could someone give me an idea of spec that i could get/want out of a system and where is the best and most reliable place to go for a system where they build to my spec.
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Normal sort of spec applies.. i5 quad, at least 8gb ram, ssd. Try novatech if you want prebuilt.
 
i7 only really needed if youre into heavy video encoding. i think (based on andys research) even in that case you only gain 10% over an i5. so for photo editing the i5 should be more than capable.

CS will eat as much ram as you want to throw at it. if you can put enough ram in to stop it using the scratch disk then that would be ideal. what that level is depends on how complex your edits are.

pcspecialist/novatech etc. i cant say for pcspecialist but novatech builds are all quality branded parts rather than unbranded/generic stuff.
 
markyboy.1967 said:
Cheers Neil.:thumbs:..Im looking at an i5, 16-32gig Ram, 240 SSD and a 2TB as my must haves..I will have a look to see what i can get for my money.Cheers...
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That'll do nicely :D
 
I struggle getting PS CS to eat more than 8 GB of RAM on my 16 GB setup. I've read in other places that on 32 GB systems, the extra 16GB just gets wasted. This is despite tweaks to Photoshop's performance preferences.

Get a small fast SSD for scratch disk - I still find PS making frequent small HDD reads/writes even with >12GB of memory made available. Don't use it as your boot/system disk.

I found a colleague a Lenovo Ideacentre K430 - i7-3770, 16GB RAM, 4TB storage, 2GB Nvidia graphics for £600 - but it looks like ebuyer have sold off all their stock now.

I've got 90% usage on all four cores when upsampling 20 megapixel images with Perfect Photo Suite for poster prints. Most the time it's barely ticking over.
 
afasoas said:
I struggle getting PS CS to eat more than 8 GB of RAM on my 16 GB setup.
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Depends on image size, how many images you have open, and how many layers on each image.
 
Bought a Mac Mini i7 back in April and have just upped the memory to 16Gb. Great machine, fast as hell, tiny footprint and quiet. Worth having a look but don't buy from Apple with the upgraded memory, rather get the memory from Amazon at around £140 for 16Gb of good quality memory.
 
I would also go for something like a Noctua NH-D14 or Corsair H80i cooler instead of the stock intel setup. Much more efficient and quieter.
 
GeForce Junky said:
I would also go for something like a Noctua NH-D14 or Corsair H80i cooler instead of the stock intel setup. Much more efficient and quieter.
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You need a decent case to put it in though. This is a Noctua NH-D14 on an extended ATX board (so slightly larger than you'd normally have in a standard PC)!

P1010760-.jpg
 
Yeah you need to think about cases when considering your cooling setup. I built a gaming rig recently for about £1300, but that includes £450 of graphics cards, so near your price range. I went for a big case to fit my cooler and to allow max cooling with minimal fan noise. Self building is very simple these days. I might see what spec I could make up for £850 later if you want. If you do buy a pre-built, find one with the storage drive you want and add your own SSD and reinstall the operating system on that as soon as you get it. I use a Samsung 840 250GB as a system drive which is probably excessive for your needs if you just want operating system, photoshop and a bit of space for editing. On my laptop (128GB SSD + 1GB HDD) I batch edit photos on the SSD then transfer them to the HDD once I've finished editing.

pc1.jpg~original


pc2.jpg~original
 
Worth checking out www.scan.co.uk for components, especially their 'today only' section: http://www.scan.co.uk/todayonly/index.aspx

I've bought components to build my own PC from them before and been really happy with them. Their delivery times are super quick too if I remember right. :)
 
Photo editing and i5-3xxx/4xxx -> onboard (although I would definitely prefer 16G in that case).
 
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