Best PC on the market?

TravelJunkie

Hi,

Looking for specifications for a PC to be used in a work environment.

Must be really fast, to take lots of applications.

quatro processor - is that the best?
What's the best memory you can get?
Other things?

Will also be using Adobe software plus full Office suite.

The PC has to be top notch because it might be another 8 years till the next one!

:-)

Brian

I think a bottom of the range Dell would suffice.

5uspect

or a Mac. :pac:

How much are you willing to spend? Top of the range will cost several thousand and you'll have no need for that.
From your post you don't seem to know much about PCs so you'll be buying a Dell or a HP et al.
If you build it yourself you'll get a bit more bang for your buck.

As already said just get a cheap Dell workstation.
If you can hold out until october you can get Windows 7 which is quite nice.

forbairt

most processors will be able to handle things even the bottom of the range ones ...

Key elements you'll want will be Max the RAM on it ... 4gbs is probably more than enough for photoshop type work ..


If money was no object ... I'd probably get myself one of these

http://store.apple.com/us_smb_78313/browse/home/shop_mac/family/mac_pro

The main reason to get your maxed out PC ... normally seems to be games ... photoshop + office + webserver + flash + VM's ... work fine on my low ish end Mac Book Pro ... 4gbs ram helps out lots as it stops having to swap memory to disk that often

drunkmonkey

imac 24' FTW!!!!

5uspect

Of course only get a Mac/PC if you already have the licence for your software on that particular platform.

forbairt

5uspect wrote: »

Of course only get a Mac/PC if you already have the licence for your software on that particular platform.

With Adobe if you contact them I believe that you can organise a switch of platform for your software. (they'll get new disks / downloads to you if you have proof / invoice / signed letters and so on)

5uspect

That's cool.

Voodu Child

You'd get a Dell Studio (Q8200) with 20" monitor for around €700 or a Studio XPS (Core i7) with the same monitor for around €950. That's alright prices for someone who doesnt know anything about computers and justs wants to get something simple from the likes of Dell. Look for some vouchers and you might bring those prices down.

Brian

An i7 for the tasks described is all kinds of overkill. My Eee runs Photoshop and Office just fine. It has a 1.6GHz processor and cost €350.

5uspect

That depends on what kind of photoshoppage you want to do.
Opening 200 RAW files for example, or layer intensive work.
Also if you want to use illustrator Premier Pro or after effects you'll need lots of RAM.

Office is pretty light tho. OP what do you mean by Adobe software?
If its just acrobat and doing up PDFs you don't need anything fancy.

Voodu Child

Baza210 wrote: »

An i7 for the tasks described is all kinds of overkill.

Hence the cheaper €700 suggestion also. Im assuming the budget is there or thereabouts, given the thread title.

Regardless of whether they are currently overkill or not, the OP specifies power as a preference, and also the need to stay relevant for a long period. That's understandable, a lot of smaller companies don't have the know-how or patience to do upgrade/replace their systems on a regular basis. I would prefer to be using a '09 Core i7 system in 8 years time rather than an underpowered budget system, but each to his own.

And I hope/presume the EeePC suggestion was a joke.

Brian

It wasn't a suggestion, it was a reference point.

melekalikimaka

Baza210 wrote: »

An i7 for the tasks described is all kinds of overkill. My Eee runs Photoshop and Office just fine. It has a 1.6GHz processor and cost €350.

theres no way that a eec pc can run photoshop 'fine' what do you load into it???

Brian

Of course, I'll believe your conjecture rather than my own experience. For editing photos, vectoring, creating signatures- it's well capable. I have 2GB of RAM in it after all. My iMac G4 at 700MHz and 768mb RAM has no problem running CS3.

Capt'n Midnight

TravelJunkie wrote: »

The PC has to be top notch because it might be another 8 years till the next one!

Hard drives have a design life of 5 years. 8 years is pushing it a bit.
Better factoring in a life of 3 years if you want reliability.

Top notch ?
Check out Moores law


cheap and chearful Dell/HP and buy a new one every 3 years

forbairt

melekalikimaka wrote: »

theres no way that a eec pc can run photoshop 'fine' what do you load into it???

Main issue with photoshop is usually ram and swap space. If you're not doing anything that intensive I'd assume it'd be fine. I'm looking into getting a NC10 for travel and was just thinking of maxing the RAM on it and it'd be fine. While probably not the fastest thing on the planet I'd assume it'd be grand once its loaded up. Of course if you're talking about opening up a 200MB file you'll probably notice delays but then I'd notice delays on my MBP oepning up large files as well. Unless you're making heavy use of filters as well which will be doing lots of maths calculations you should be fine.

miralize

I'm doing all of the things mentioned on my Macbook Pro. And with 7 hours of battery life, I get great portability

TravelJunkie

5uspect wrote: »

That depends on what kind of photoshoppage you want to do.
Opening 200 RAW files for example, or layer intensive work.
Also if you want to use illustrator Premier Pro or after effects you'll need lots of RAM.

Office is pretty light tho. OP what do you mean by Adobe software?
If its just acrobat and doing up PDFs you don't need anything fancy.

Adobe wise, I'd be working with CS. Problem is I work with big files - ie. pics that are on average 33MB each. These are also downloaded from a remote server via internet, or, from CD Rom, which currently takes ages to upload.
Currently I have to wait about 10mins or more just to open 20 photos of 30MB each.

I like to switch tasks a lot, because my work is varied, so it would be great if I could just click on an application (in windows) and presto, there it is!
At present my windows is very slow.

TheCaveman

Well you asked for it.

Best consumer PC currently on the market.

NOTE: This is not a workstation.

Power Supply: 1200W Turbo-Cool T12W PC Power & Cooling
Graphics Accelerator: 2x Liquid Cooled NVIDIA GeForce GTX 295 3584MB GDDR3 in Quad SLI w/ PhysX
Motherboard: Asus Rampage II Extreme Intel X58 Chipset
Processor: Intel Core i7-975 Extreme Edition 3.33GHz
Processor Cooling: MAINGEAR X20 Elite Dual Radiator Intercooled Liquid Cooling System
Memory: 24GB Kingston HyperX Triple Channel 1600MHz
Hard Drive One: Intel X25-M 80GB Solid-State Drive
Hard Drive Two: Intel X25-M 80GB Solid-State Drive
RAID: RAID 0 - Increase and speed up your storage array (requires 2 or more HDDs)
Hard Drive Three: Intel X25-M 160GB Solid-State Drive
Optical Drive One: Pioneer Black Blu-Ray Reader and 12X DVD�R DVD Burner
Optical Drive Two: LG Super Multi Blue Blu-ray� Disc Burner & HD DVD-ROM� Drive
Sound: Sound Blaster X-Fi Titanium Fatal1ty Professional Series
Network Card: Onboard Dual Marvell 88E8056 Gigabit Controller
Wireless Network Adapter: D-Link Xtreme N� 802.11n DWA-552 PCI Adapter
Security Software: Free Antivirus Software
Operating System: Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium (64-Bit) SP2 with FREE Windows 7 Upgrade Coupon!

On sale at todays exchange rate for just under €7200

http://www.maingear.com/index.html

TravelJunkie

That's what I'm talking about! If I know what's the max, can downscale from there! At least I know.
This processor has a cooling system? do all processors have cooling systems or is it just this one?

leninbenjamin

TravelJunkie wrote: »

That's what I'm talking about! If I know what's the max, can downscale from there! At least I know.
This processor has a cooling system? do all processors have cooling systems or is it just this one?

all processors have a cooling system. If they didn't they'd generate so much heat they'd melt.

what this one has though is an after-market water cooling system. most of the time companies will simply use a generic fan on top of a heatsink (typically the bog standard one provided by Intel).

Mountjoy Mugger

TheCaveman wrote: »

Well you asked for it.

Best consumer PC currently on the market.

NOTE: This is not a workstation.

<snip>

On sale at todays exchange rate for just under €7200

http://www.maingear.com/index.html

Yeah. But will it still be working without a hitch in 8 years time, as the OP wants?

5uspect

All of them do.
That system is horrifically expensive. It won't significantly outperform a €1500 system.
(Perphaps 1.5 to 2 time the performance for 4 times the cost)
For your needs (fast application switching) you need lots of RAM. This means you probably need a 64 bit system if you want more than 4GB.
Now I'm not sure how well CS1 works with 64 bit Windows. CS4 has a 64 bit version of Photoshop.

Opening 20 30MB images in PS isn't really that difficult however. Also why would you need to open 20 images at the same time? Surely you can do what you need in an action or use bridge to open each file as you need it. A flashy PC won't make your network faster and CD drives aren't all that fast.

5uspect

Mountjoy Mugger wrote: »

Yeah. But will it still be working without a hitch in 8 years time, as the OP wants?

Water cooling, working without a hitch...

TravelJunkie

Yeah, 7k is a bit much. Don't think the boss will go for that Was thinking about 2,000 euro.

I've been doing some reading. Something about Vista vs XP and that I can bump up the Ram but XP won't be able to use it all?

I've been advised to stay away from Vista and install XP Professional.

TheCaveman

Get a decent system for around €1700

Install a SSD as you boot drive ( Solit State Drive)

All apps will open nearly instantly

5uspect

TravelJunkie wrote: »

Yeah, 7k is a bit much. Don't think the boss will go for that Was thinking about 2,000 euro.

I've been doing some reading. Something about Vista vs XP and that I can bump up the Ram but XP won't be able to use it all?

I've been advised to stay away from Vista and install XP Professional.

Get Window 7 x64. Its fecking great. Its out in October but you may get a cheap/free update from Vista x64 if you buy before that.