High End Photoshop Machine suggestions?

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Cwiddy

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Oct 6, 2004
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Designing a machine for my father for mainly photoshop use, price isnt really an issue, but i dont want to go top of the line.

Is it worth going dual core? 2 gigs of ram enough? video card (dont ahve a clue here, i think like a gamer so i have trouble looking at crappy ones), hard drive suggestions (i dont knwo how it woud access other then teh initial load, so is it worth faster drives?)

Also I am an AMD fan, but the intel dual cores are much cheaper, so it is hard to decide there
 
Things to keep in mind for graphic design:
- monitor, color is important so think big and sharp.
- video, ram isn't important really just get a cheap Radeon or something with good IQ. If you want to splurge get a Matrox Parhelia.
- media, the guy will need space but not too much. Hard drive doesn't have to be huge if you have a burner or backup device. Which every graphic designer should have, just in case. You can get two and move the pagefile to the secondary one, photoshop tends to like lots of scratch space. Use RAID 0 for the extra boost.
- input devices. A good mouse or trackball, maybe even a nice graphical tablet if your father likes using a pen type device more.
- memory, 1GB is fine for casual graphic design use. You can go over board and get 2GB+ if your father likes to use large files, but usually it's not really needed but ram is cheap and photoshop likes it.
- save some money and get a motherboard with integrated sound, or a used sound card.
- backup power supplies are good to have, nothing worse than working on some art and having a brown out kill your hard work.
 
Get 2gb of ram and skip raid 0. It's a gimmick, and unless he's working with REALLY big images or something, the extra ram will improve the performance much more than the extra disk speed. And for that matter, an extra gig of ram is probably cheaper than another disk.

I'd get a large CRT, they're more accurate on colors. A 22" crt will run about $600 online.

Get a decent Enermax or Fortron PSU, and a UPS. Check the stickies in the PSU forum for other suggestions.

 
sergey85z said:
AMD x2 with 4gigs would net the best performence if you have the money.
Click to expand...

And if you dont have 4k$ to spend, a Pentium 4 will beat out any A64 in photoshop performance, equally matched of course. 2GB of DDR2 to match and a Quadro or Matrox card and your good to go.
 
I do a lot of work with PS and Bryce 5. My images typically top about 600MB when I'm working with them at full resolution. I've worked on a Pentium 3 700 coppermine, P4 2.53, P4 3.0E and now I'm using a Pentium M 1.7. This is absolutely the fastest computer I've ever owned.

I'd recommed that you get a Pentium M 2.13Ghz(beats A64 FX's and P4EE's in benchmarks while using 1/5 the power), 2x1GB of whatever good quality value RAM you can find, use a PM barebones(the one I have is AOpen with built in EVERYTHING, and its the size of a Shuttle) because its got everything and will be better than a mish mash of different stuff in this case. Newegg sells those and the Pentium M CPU's. The weakest link in my whole setup is my slow IDE HDD and now they've got a new barebones out with SATA so thats become a moot point. You can use a really fast 10,000rpm SATA and have all the power you'll need for PS or just about any other application.

I'd say that a Mitsubishi Diamondtron monitor will be your best bet for image quality and still a good value, but it's a CRT and its big.

IF cost is not an issue in the true sense, get an LCD designed for medical imaging(i.e. reading MRI's and other critical visualization needs). If you go LCD you'll need to get a graphics card with DVI. For 2D image quality just about any good Matrox or Nvidia will work. You don't need anything that can do a lot of floating point calculations because all of the work you're doing is CPU intensive. The graphics card will only do 2D things most of the time in your case so you're looking for good quality, not good performance. Both companies make workstation 2D cards and they'll run you a couple hundred dollars. You can easily spend between 600 and 10,000 dollars on a good monitor. If he does a lot of high resolution work you'll want something that's at least 2megapixels.

http://www.eizo.com/
http://www.totoku.com/dp/product/index.html

P.S. My SmartUPS 750 doesn't even register a load when the PC is on with the monitor in power save mode, only 22% load when the computer is working hard or playing games... You'll love how silent and low-heat it is too.
 
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