Building a PC for Adobe Photoshop

aaf

I’m going to be putting a system together which will be mainly used for Adobe Photoshop. I’ve built about 6 pc’s since Jan, all have used AMD cpu’s. Not 100% sure if I should go with AMD on this one as I know Intel is better for encoding and that but which is better for Photoshoppage? I think I read somewhere that AMD is better but just need confirmation on this. If I do go AMD, I was probably gonna go Socket 754 as there’s no real need for expensive 939 boards etc unless I need to get a graphics card to better run Photoshop. Never thought of that, would it be advisable to get a graphics card for running Photoshop? If so, what card. I have a Leadtek 6600GT in my own system and I do a bit of Photoshopping myself with no complaints. I’d probably be looking at getting an AMD A64 3400+ or my customer might be willing to stretch to the 3700+ clawhammer. Storage wise, I was thinking of Seagate SATA 300-400GB NCQ drives? Any advice?

pickarooney

I didn't know you'd need any particular hardware for running photoshop. Will you be doing massive batch processing?

I am MAN

Just make sure you put alot of RAM into it

aaf

pickarooney wrote:

I didn't know you'd need any particular hardware for running photoshop. Will you be doing massive batch processing?

Wouldn't imagine so. I'm building the pc for her and tutoring her in Photoshop basics. She will be mainly using it for Photoshop, email and interweb.

aaf

I am MAN wrote:

Just make sure you put alot of RAM into it

Well, I was gonna put 1 gb min in it. I saw 1gb kit of Mushkin for sale on boards I may go for.

Mutant_Fruit

aaf wrote:

Wouldn't imagine so. I'm building the pc for her and tutoring her in Photoshop basics. She will be mainly using it for Photoshop, email and interweb.

Then that system is WAY to fast. An AMD64 3000+ (or 3200+) with a 100eur graphics card would be more than sufficient, when combined with 1 - 1.5gb of ram.

Wertz

I'd advise 2 smaller HDDs instaed of one big one. Both as back up and for the scratch file.

As for the rest of the systewm I run PS 7.0 on a 2.4 pentium and 768 RAM. Gfx card is a worn out fx5200.
Even several filters on large, high res photos only takes a second.

IMO the rig you've mentioned is sledgehammer to crack a walnut

sceptre

Ideally something reasonably fast with two hard drives and lots of RAM. Pretty much any video card that will display 16-bit colour (that's "pretty much any video card") will be fine.

As the lads say, what you've mentioned is overkill for what it'll probably be used for.

Photoshop 8 runs perfectly well on my aging P3, though I don't hand it anything overly complicated.

aaf

Cheers lads. Will take all into consideration. So, should I just get a skt 754 motherboard (MSI), stick a 3000+ or 3200+ in and maybe a Radeon 9600XT with either 2 x 160gb SATA Samsungs or 1 x 400gb Seagate Barracuda? I'll look into get 1.5 - 2gb's of ram. Thanks.

Khannie

Sounds good to me aaf. I'd go with the 2 drives too. If someone's going to be doing work for business on it, you might want to setup raid so that the drives are redundant. A few years down the line when one drive goes belly up, that could get you a lot of love.

edit: Think there's a cheap 9600 on komplett with 256 megs in it. For image editing, the more ram in the gfx card the better.

aaf

Khannie wrote:

Sounds good to me aaf. I'd go with the 2 drives too. If someone's going to be doing work for business on it, you might want to setup raid so that the drives are redundant. A few years down the line when one drive goes belly up, that could get you a lot of love.

edit: Think there's a cheap 9600 on komplett with 256 megs in it. For image editing, the more ram in the gfx card the better.

I'm actually selling a Radeon 9600XT for a mate so I might just stick that in. It will mean I'll have to go skt 754 though but I reckon I don't need to go skt 939 as the only benefit down the road with a skt 939 would be if she wanted to upgrade graphics card but I really can't see that happening. Will probably go for 2 >= 200GB Seagate hard drives so and put them into RAID 1