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multimedia design and programming machine

K

kidicarus74

Limp Gawd
Joined
Feb 23, 2004
Messages
397
i'm looking to get a new computer for work. I'm a graphic designer / web developer / software engineer for a small business (7 employees). Currently, I'm using a 1.7 ghz Pentium M IBM T42 (w/ 512 mb of ram) as my primary machine and a 2.8 ghz Celeron that the company provided (also with 512 mb of ram). I've been given a budget of around $750 to purchase a new computer since the celeron will be passed down to the new intern.

My question is, how much faster for content creation would a p4 3.2E (socket 775) with a gig of ram be than the two machines already described? I figured i can salvage a cd burner and an 80 gig hard drive from an unused p2 400 at home and be set...

essentially most of my day involves having photoshop cs2, dreamweaver mx 2004, flash mx 2004, outlook 2003, AIM and a couple browsers open. There are days where i design and build software in VB or .NET (using visual studio) and days where i do access database programming

edit: i'd really rather not use the laptop much longer and have a desktop instead. reason being is that the laptop is essentially my wardriving / sitting on the couch personal rig and i LOATHE carrying it to and from work everyday and having to set it up every morning when i get there
 
For Photoshop, it should make quite a difference. Although it depends on what you do exactly with PS ofcourse. For large images and heavy filters, the P4 is still the best CPU I believe.
The other stuff isn't really CPU-intensive at all, so I doubt you'd notice much, apart from HT making them run a tad smoother alongside eachother.
For Visual Studio, only the compile-stage will be affected, but not too much, I suppose. Also depends on how large your projects are. I believe the Athlon64 is the best choice when you have to build large projects.
 
Also since you're on a budget, if Im not mistaken you will have to buy slightly more expensive DDR2 for the 775 platform
 
nope... the intel 915 chipset is LGA 775, and uses pci express graphics and DDR ram, not DDR 2
 
For 750$? Hm go with something like this:


dual core 820D or Pentium 4 640
i915P Mobo with DDR1 , pci-e, and lga support
Get a nice 2GB of valueram
And a video card that fits your needs (no more than 200$)

and youll be set..
 
pretty sure that only the 945 and 955 chipsets support dual core, but i'll give it a look
 
The harddrive may also have a significant influence on performance, especially with large image in Photoshop or building large projects in Visual Studio.
So you may want to invest in a good, fast harddrive instead of salvaging an old one.
 
by "old" i meant a 7200 rpm 80 gig harddrive w/ 8mb of cache... pretty much the best you can get without going SATA (which won't be much faster anyway). The local disk is essentially a scratch drive, as all project files are stored remotely on a central server
 
so i went ahead and got this system:

Pentium D 820 (dual core 2.8 which i plan to overclock to 3.0 or 3.2)
1 gig OCZ DDR2 667 ram (2 x 512)
Abit AL8 945p Mobo (love abit, always have, always will)
Sapphire X300 128mb graphics card (my geforce mx 400 on the celeron works just fine, figured an x300 would get the job done just as well)
Antec Sonata 2 case w/ 450 watt psu

we'll see how it turns out tomorrow
 
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