A work colleague is getting ready to upgrade his ageing PC. He mainly uses it for photo editing (10MP RAW images off his dSLR) and so wants something that's speedy, quiet, and just performs effortlessly.
No need whatsoever for 3D performance for the latest games.
In many ways, similar to phurbs' AutoCAD thread. I would post there, but didn't want to gatecrash
He doesn't need any monitors, speakers, kb, mouse, so it's just the base unit involved. Initially playing around with a budget of around £600, but that's probably more than required. First, he was looking at a pre-built system, but I think you could do better building something yourself because the requirements are for more RAM and CPU, but not graphics.....
Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 2.4 Ghz 8Mb Cache
4Gb Corsair Memory DDR2 800 2 x 2gb single modules
80GB SATA Hard Drive
750GB Secondary SATA HDD
Corsair 450Watt PSU
512MB 9800GT PCI Express Nvidia DDR DVI
Gigabyte GA-G31M-S2L 1333FSB-DDR2 800x2 Intel G31 Integrated
2 x DVD+/- RW - 18X Samsung Lightscribe
No Floppy Disk Drive
Integrated Sound Card
3.5" Internal Card Reader
Wireless Network Card.
Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premiem (OEM)
13 Month Warranty, Free Carriage
So, if it were me, I'd change from 2 hard drives to just one, probably one of those nippy 640GB jobbies. Quadcore looks nice. I would probably invest in a good card reader. I know performance can vary from card reader to card reader, and when you're constantly importing 4GB at a time, a mediocre speed would really annoy me! Not sure if dual optical drives are necessary unless you start burning or duplicating a lot. Is that G31 Gigabyte board good or are there better alternatives given the usage?
I'd probably make sure to get Vista 64. I know the recent versions of lightroom benefit from a 64bit CPU and from what I've seen playing around with it, it eats up RAM at a rate of knots.
So what would you recommend?
As well as building, there's of course the option of finding something pre-built, but what is out there that would fit the bill and not cost a lot for the luxury?
Thanks