I am wondering what would be a really red hot pc to build just for photography. I have put in ram and a hardrive plus a graphics card once but wouldn't know where to start on a new build, but I'm not too scared to have a go. What would be a good spec for a really hot, spoil yourself, no one else can touch, photography only pc. I do have a couple of machines that are about four years old that I could ransack for bits if necessary.
Photo only PC spec
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i7-2600k overclocked (very easy to do - I got an extra 15% out of mine and now have a 4.3GHz processor), 8G RAM, 64G+ Vertex SSD system drive (mine is 90G - 84G formatted - with 27G used), 64G SSD scratch drive, 1Tb user drive, any 1G graphics card with a couple of 24" IPS monitors.
Would be worth waiting for the problems with the chipset for this to be sorted though (there is a bug on the SATA interface that is being worked on by Intel expected to be finally through the retail chains sometime next month). Only slightly less powerful would be an overclocked i5-2500k.
You could salvage some disks from old PCs, but it probably isn't worth it (the later drives are faster and a new DVD is only £10). Junk everything else - things move on too quick in the PC world.
i7-2600k overclocked (very easy to do - I got an extra 15% out of mine and now have a 4.3GHz processor), 8G RAM, 64G+ Vertex SSD system drive (mine is 90G - 84G formatted - with 27G used), 64G SSD scratch drive, 1Tb user drive, any 1G graphics card with a couple of 24" IPS monitors.
Would be worth waiting for the problems with the chipset for this to be sorted though (there is a bug on the SATA interface that is being worked on by Intel expected to be finally through the retail chains sometime next month). Only slightly less powerful would be an overclocked i5-2500k.
You could salvage some disks from old PCs, but it probably isn't worth it (the later drives are faster and a new DVD is only £10). Junk everything else - things move on too quick in the PC world.
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Umm... if you're dealing with large amounts of data, a fast processor certainly does help - what do you think does all the processing? I kept the same HDD when I upgraded my machine and it is a LOT faster doing anything now (and I had 8G memory in my last machine so wasn't short there either)...
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+ monitors... If you want to cut down, the i5-2400 (no k at the end meaning you can't overclock it) is the best bang for buck...
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Looking for the same kind of thing, with enough grunt to do the odd bit of video processing and a few reasonably recent games (not obsessed with frame rates though, just want the games to play well and look nice).
Any good branded stuff that fits the bill? (I know I could self build, but I've done all that and fed up with the hassles. Just want something off the shelf really). £1k-ish budget without monitor, though with would be good (24" IPS).
Still keep thinking of a top spec laptop instead though, but the poor displays and serious heat/noise issues when under load on them put me off.
Any good branded stuff that fits the bill? (I know I could self build, but I've done all that and fed up with the hassles. Just want something off the shelf really). £1k-ish budget without monitor, though with would be good (24" IPS).
Still keep thinking of a top spec laptop instead though, but the poor displays and serious heat/noise issues when under load on them put me off.
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i7-2600k overclocked (very easy to do - I got an extra 15% out of mine and now have a 4.3GHz processor), 8G RAM, 64G+ Vertex SSD system drive (mine is 90G - 84G formatted - with 27G used), 64G SSD scratch drive, 1Tb user drive, any 1G graphics card with a couple of 24" IPS monitors.
I'm in a similar boat as the original poster (although with a slight eye on video work also), so thanks.
As to the "any 1G graphics card" - do you or anyone else know if nvidia cards are the best way to go because they're CUDA-enabled? Or does it make no real difference?
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For Photoshop, the acceleration is only 2D image manipulation at the moment. They haven't enabled CUDA for the filters.
If you use Premiere Pro and you want acceleration, it's Nvidia only. It's only supported (i.e. tested) on the top end cards, although you can hack it to use any Nvidia card, but the performance will be less (needs to have a certain level of capability of course, 1G memory minimum).
I downloaded the trial of Premiere Pro and the graphics card (passive GTS450) is definitely faster for complex renderings. The card can handle real time rendering of multiple layered 1080p video clips at the same time - the i7 can't. This gives you an idea what you can do (on a top end graphics card) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xso6CGdsl2c