Custom Build PC - Advice

Photoshop will happily use as much RAM as it can lay its hands on, if you have 8GB spare, it will take it if it needs it.

Under a 64 bit Windows OS, it can use as much as it needs. Under MacOS it can strictly only use a certain amount (i'm not sure what this is off hand) but the OS can work in such a way as to indirectly allocate more if it is available rather than force paging.
 
Thanks for all your replies - I have really enjoyed reading through them and have spent a bit of time over the weekend tweaking the spec of the machine and think I have concluded on this.

Yes some people may think it over the top, but I would like the machine to last me a good few years, and you never know I may use the machine for other things in the future - such as gaming etc. If anyone sees any problems with the spec, I would be most greatful for any comments.


Coolmaster Stacker 831 case
Coolmaster Silent Pro 500W Modular PSU
Asus P6T SE iX58 Socket 1366 8 Channel Audio Motherboard
Intel i7 920 2.66GHz Socket 1366 Processor
Artic Silver Thermal Paste
Noctua NH-U12P Special Ed Socket 1366 Dual Fan Heat Pipe CPU Cooler
Corsair 12Gb (6x2Gb) DDR3 1600 MHz RAM
Asus HD 4650 1Gb DDR2 VGA DVI HDMI Out PCI-E Graphics Card
Sony 24x DVD +-RW Internal SATA Drive
Internal Card Reader
Dell 24" 1920x1200 Ultrasharp Monitor
3x Hitachi Deskstar 1Tb SATAII 7200rpm 16Mb Cache drives in RAID 5 configuration
Windows Vista x64 bit with Windows 7 upgrade

For those interested this machine comes out at £1350.00 + VAT and I made about £200 - £250.00 worth of savings from the original spec.

The memory seems a big debate on here, but having looked 6GB of Corsair 1600MHz DDR3 and 12GB of Corsair 1600MHz DDR3 the difference in price is £65, which is not a huge amount of money over the whole machine.

Any comments again would be most welcome
 
hi!! not trawling through all this, but the gist of advice seems sound

personally a nice chip, stable and quiet is the way forward
don't skimp on the monitor, so that's good, if you're into photographs heavily, why not have a monitor that rotates for portrait edits??

well done for downgrading the gfx, you don't need the 48xx series
I would have a 500gb hdd for your system and then a 2nd 1tb drive for the photos.
RAID is fine but do you need it?
12Gb memory?? are you rendering architecture? 4GB will do a decent job to be honest with windows 64bit. have more? but do you really want it?
DVD rom...think about getting one with lightscribe on it. same price but you can mark disks out if you want to. handy when giving copies of photos away.

with that spec gaming should be generally fine I think
if you are looking at 12gb memory too, look at setting up a ramdrive for windows ready boost. otherwise get a nice fast USB pendrive to do this for you.
 
Get a better PSU, Coolermaster don't have a brilliant rep with PSUs.

Corsair make bomb proof power supplies for an acceptable price. A 650W model will do you well, especially should you choose to slap in a big power hungry graphics somewhen down the line, having a 650W PSU will allow you to stay in the peak area of efficiency and also keep the PSU temperatures lower and thus fan noise down.

P6T is a solid board, will do the i7 justice, as will that Noctua.

4650 is a perfectly decent mid range card, though with card prices as they are, look at the 4770 and 4850/4870 cards. Lot more performance if you do like the odd game for not much more money. nVidia wise something like a GTX260 is very good value at the moment too.

You've obviously picked your side of the RAID debate so I won't bother trying to convince you otherwise again but personally i'd not touch Hitachi stuff any more. Western Digital would be my first choice, Samsung second and then Seagate at a push. WD Caviar Black or Samsung F1 are quick drives without getting VelociRaptors or SSD.

Will be a very fast machine though.

I'd be interested to see just how much faster it is than the Q9550 I just dropped £650 on though. I contemplated i7 briefly and decided against it. Custom PC do a good benchmark with an image editing test in it using GIMP, would be good to see how that machine would do at it in comparison, if you'd be willing to give it a go :)
 
DizMatt said:
hi!! not trawling through all this, but the gist of advice seems sound

personally a nice chip, stable and quiet is the way forward
don't skimp on the monitor, so that's good, if you're into photographs heavily, why not have a monitor that rotates for portrait edits??

well done for downgrading the gfx, you don't need the 48xx series
I would have a 500gb hdd for your system and then a 2nd 1tb drive for the photos.
RAID is fine but do you need it?
12Gb memory?? are you rendering architecture? 4GB will do a decent job to be honest with windows 64bit. have more? but do you really want it?
DVD rom...think about getting one with lightscribe on it. same price but you can mark disks out if you want to. handy when giving copies of photos away.

with that spec gaming should be generally fine I think
if you are looking at 12gb memory too, look at setting up a ramdrive for windows ready boost. otherwise get a nice fast USB pendrive to do this for you.
Click to expand...

Thanks - can you explain these two bits in a bit more detail please?

divine` said:
Get a better PSU, Coolermaster don't have a brilliant rep with PSUs.

Thanks - I will look at these - Will any PSU fit in any PC Case? I was just playing it safe having the same make of case and PSU because I wasn't sure!

Corsair make bomb proof power supplies for an acceptable price. A 650W model will do you well, especially should you choose to slap in a big power hungry graphics somewhen down the line, having a 650W PSU will allow you to stay in the peak area of efficiency and also keep the PSU temperatures lower and thus fan noise down.

P6T is a solid board, will do the i7 justice, as will that Noctua.

4650 is a perfectly decent mid range card, though with card prices as they are, look at the 4770 and 4850/4870 cards. Lot more performance if you do like the odd game for not much more money. nVidia wise something like a GTX260 is very good value at the moment too.

Thanks I will look at these

You've obviously picked your side of the RAID debate so I won't bother trying to convince you otherwise again but personally i'd not touch Hitachi stuff any more. Western Digital would be my first choice, Samsung second and then Seagate at a push. WD Caviar Black or Samsung F1 are quick drives without getting VelociRaptors or SSD.

Will be a very fast machine though.

I'd be interested to see just how much faster it is than the Q9550 I just dropped £650 on though. I contemplated i7 briefly and decided against it. Custom PC do a good benchmark with an image editing test in it using GIMP, would be good to see how that machine would do at it in comparison, if you'd be willing to give it a go :)
Click to expand...

What is GIMP and I would be more than willing to give it a go - Definately Thanks
 
I'll try and answer all those queries.

Lightscribe is a type of disc writer that can take special lightscribe discs and use a laser to physically write words on the front side of the disc. Personally i'm happy with a marker pen but it's not much more expensive so worth a look if the idea interests you.

Readyboost is something that enables Windows Vista / 7 to perform certain things quicker. You can use all sorts of things for this, a 4GB USB drive is probably most cost effective considering they can be had for around £15 and under.

Any ATX PSU will fit in any ATX case. Bar a couple of exceptional combinations, you will be fine. The Corsair TX650 will fit in the Stacker just fine. I'm using one in a CoolerMaster CM690 (smaller than the Stacker) at the moment and it fitted nicely. There is also the Corsair VX550 if you think 650W is a bit overkill. I only bought the 650W because the 550W was out of stock when I bought my PC.

GIMP is basically a free open source version of Photoshop. The Benchmark I mentioned however has everything it needs packaged up already, you wouldn't need to install anything bar the benchmark program itself. The image editing test basically runs an automated series of opening images and performing processing on them and timing how quickly the PC can manage it all. The Benchmark can do other tests too such as video encoding and multitasking but these aren't as relevant to a PC aimed at image processing.
 
divine` said:
I'll try and answer all those queries.

Lightscribe is a type of disc writer that can take special lightscribe discs and use a laser to physically write words on the front side of the disc. Personally i'm happy with a marker pen but it's not much more expensive so worth a look if the idea interests you.

Readyboost is something that enables Windows Vista / 7 to perform certain things quicker. You can use all sorts of things for this, a 4GB USB drive is probably most cost effective considering they can be had for around £15 and under.

Any ATX PSU will fit in any ATX case. Bar a couple of exceptional combinations, you will be fine. The Corsair TX650 will fit in the Stacker just fine. I'm using one in a CoolerMaster CM690 (smaller than the Stacker) at the moment and it fitted nicely. There is also the Corsair VX550 if you think 650W is a bit overkill. I only bought the 650W because the 550W was out of stock when I bought my PC.

GIMP is basically a free open source version of Photoshop. The Benchmark I mentioned however has everything it needs packaged up already, you wouldn't need to install anything bar the benchmark program itself. The image editing test basically runs an automated series of opening images and performing processing on them and timing how quickly the PC can manage it all. The Benchmark can do other tests too such as video encoding and multitasking but these aren't as relevant to a PC aimed at image processing.
Click to expand...

Thanks - I'll drop you a PM when I am up and running to get some more info and we can do the test!
 
as divine said.

for lightscribe the results look like
lightscribe.jpg
verbatim-color-lightscribe.jpg
70819_lightscribe_liteon_rotated.jpg

you print in monochrome although someone mentioned colour lightscribe to me once.. I've never seen it tbh

the disks are more expensive but you don't need to use them all the time. it'll write to any normal disk too. also if you are presenting your work it looks better than a marker pen :) I print my disks using my canon printer (or sharpie :p) but I like the lightscribe results and the drive costs barely a pound more last time I looked.

can you use a ramdrive for readyboost? this is when you tell the PC to use the memory that's spare as a harddrive. the easiest way is to use a USB device. some are marked as readyboost "ready" etc for speed purposes.
 
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