Best sub £500 rig for my workplace?

[Chopski]

Hi,

I have been given the task of building a sub £500 rig for work and wanted to know if I have gone down the right route. Its main objective is to run photoshop at a decent pace along with the standard array of apps you would have running in an office place and a dual monitor setup...

This is what I have;

Silverstone PS02B Precision ATX Case - £41.09
400W Corsair CX400W Power Supply - £43.03
MSI 770-C45A AM3 Motherboard - £50.68
AMD Athlon II X2 240 CPU - £44.52
Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro v2 CPU Cooler - £18.67
4GB Corsair TwinX XMS3 DDR3 PC3-10666 (1333) Memory - £95.29
896MB Gainward GTX260 Graphics Card - £148.36
320 GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 HDD - £34.51

Grand total: £492.88 inc. VAT & Delivery

What you think? Have I missed a trick here? It has been a while since I did this sort of thing to be honest. I usually upgrade old setups as much as possible rather than forking out on a new setup.

Thanks in advance CAT-THE-FIFTH

Chopski

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Hi,

I have been given the task of building a sub £500 rig for work and wanted to know if I have gone down the right route. Its main objective is to run photoshop at a decent pace along with the standard array of apps you would have running in an office place and a dual monitor setup...

This is what I have;

Silverstone PS02B Precision ATX Case - £41.09
400W Corsair CX400W Power Supply - £43.03
MSI 770-C45A AM3 Motherboard - £50.68
AMD Athlon II X2 240 CPU - £44.52
Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro v2 CPU Cooler - £18.67
4GB Corsair TwinX XMS3 DDR3 PC3-10666 (1333) Memory - £95.29
896MB Gainward GTX260 Graphics Card - £148.36
320 GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 HDD - £34.51

Grand total: £492.88 inc. VAT & Delivery

What you think? Have I missed a trick here? It has been a while since I did this sort of thing to be honest. I usually upgrade old setups as much as possible rather than forking out on a new setup.

Thanks in advance CAT-THE-FIFTH

Chopski

Out of interest is there,ahem, a reason you are going for a GTX260 - there must be some serious CUDA acceleration in the applications you are running?!

[Chopski]

Are you accusing me of playing games at work?!

In all honesty (I have no idea) I thought photoshop would require a half decent card?

Or does it not use the graphics card at all? Not sure where I have got it from, but its in my head...

[Chopski]

Not too sure abhout the PSU too tbh. Is 400w enough to power this beast?!

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Are you accusing me of playing games at work?!

In all honesty (I have no idea) I thought photoshop would require a half decent card?

Or does it not use the graphics card at all? Not sure where I have got it from, but its in my head...

Photoshop does benefit from graphics card acceleration and even CUDA can be used to accelerate some plug-ins and filters.

I would probably get a faster processors and a slower graphics card.

[arthurleung]

I would say drop the graphics card, drop the heatsink and get a X4 630 or Phenom II, and certainly a bigger HDD, may be another of them. How about 2x 500GB Samsung F3?

Although I have to say your maths doesn't seems to add up? Try getting it from the same company, like SCAN or Ebuyer. Both offer free delivery (need more posts here first, for SCAN)

[floppybootstomp]

That's the first thing that struck me - for a work machine the graphics card is way over-specced.

With that budget I'd go for an Intel machine, Asus or Gigabyte board with onboard graphics and a nice high end CPU.

[scaryjim]

400W is more than ample for anything but the most extreme enthusiast setup really - it's the PSU manufacturers who try to persuade you otherwise Well, that and the fact the the cheaper PSU manufacturers rate their PSUs to peak, and they can only provide 400W for more than about 5 seconds That Corsair should be fine though - if you look back through CPU & GPU reviews Hexus's test systems rarely draw more than 200W - 300W

The GTX260 does look rather out of place - I know *some* Adobe apps can use GPU acceleration for *some* functions, but unless you're sure that you will be using those functions sufficiently to warrant having a GPU just for accelerating them, I'd go for a lower cost GPU (a HD4650 / GT220 for ~ £40 - £50 at most) and put some of the change into an Athlon II X4 or Phenom II X3, which will improve the overall performance and responsiveness of the system.

If you're buying a retail CPU and you're not planning to overclock (which I assume you're not, given that this is a work machine) then don't bother with an after-market CPU cooler either - the stock one will do a perfectly good job keeping the CPU at a safe temperature.

There, you've just saved your boss £70

[Chopski]

Photoshop does benefit from graphics card acceleration and even CUDA can be used to accelerate some plug-ins and filters.

I would probably get a faster processors and a slower graphics card.

OK, back to the drawing board.

I would say drop the graphics card, drop the heatsink and get a X4 630 or Phenom II, and certainly a bigger HDD, may be another of them. How about 2x 500GB Samsung F3?

Although I have to say your maths doesn't seems to add up? Try getting it from the same company, like SCAN or Ebuyer. Both offer free delivery (need more posts here first, for SCAN)

Yeah it was CCL and Scan inc. VAT & Delivery costs. I went with CCL as Scan didnt have the mb or spu I had in mind. Both have good reviews on bit-tech, which is where I got most of my inspiration for this spec tbh.

That's the first thing that struck me - for a work machine the graphics card is way over-specced.

With that budget I'd go for an Intel machine, Asus or Gigabyte board with onboard graphics and a nice high end CPU.

Would you say onboard graphics is enough for photoshop?

Thanks for all your points guys, well appreciated. I'll try for a better CPU and a lower specced GPU.

Chopski

[Chopski]

400W is more than ample for anything but the most extreme enthusiast setup really - it's the PSU manufacturers who try to persuade you otherwise Well, that and the fact the the cheaper PSU manufacturers rate their PSUs to peak, and they can only provide 400W for more than about 5 seconds That Corsair should be fine though - if you look back through CPU & GPU reviews Hexus's test systems rarely draw more than 200W - 300W

The GTX260 does look rather out of place - I know *some* Adobe apps can use GPU acceleration for *some* functions, but unless you're sure that you will be using those functions sufficiently to warrant having a GPU just for accelerating them, I'd go for a lower cost GPU (a HD4650 / GT220 for ~ £40 - £50 at most) and put some of the change into an Athlon II X4 or Phenom II X3, which will improve the overall performance and responsiveness of the system.

If you're buying a retail CPU and you're not planning to overclock (which I assume you're not, given that this is a work machine) then don't bother with an after-market CPU cooler either - the stock one will do a perfectly good job keeping the CPU at a safe temperature.

There, you've just saved your boss £70

Awesome thanks thats a great help, revised spec to follow. But I don't wanna save him anything I wanna get the best I can for £500 lol.

[Chopski]

OK revised spec;

Silverstone PS02B Precision ATX Case - £41.09
400W Corsair CX400W Power Supply - £43.03
MSI 770-C45A AM3 Motherboard - £50.68
4GB Corsair TwinX XMS3 DDR3 PC3-10666 (1333) Memory - £95.29
320 GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.11 HDD - £34.51 x 2

AMD Athlon II X4 630 Quad Core - £84.24
1GB Gainward GT 220 - £66.94

Total: £450.29 exc. Delivery

Have changed CPU and GPU, dropped cooler as you were right I won't be OC'ing and double up on the HDD. But I have £50 to spare!! lol

[arthurleung]

There is very little point in looking at reviews because for non-overclocking case (you certainly won't want your computer to blue-screen while you're working on an urgent photoshop work), all motherboards are pretty much the same apart from very small differences like slot layout, number of USB/SATA ports, and if it support very-high end (very high power consumption CPU).

Just get any motherboard will do, providing you get it from a company with good customer surface (e.g. Ebuyer)

[Chopski]

n00b question, but how do I thank you guys?

I'm thinking of just ramping up the GPU to make it closer to £500. Is the 512MB Asus GTS 250 any good?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I would probably look at something like this:

Athlon II X4 630 ~ £86

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/176579

ASUS M4A785TD-M EVO ~ £70

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/170277

Nvidia GT240 ~ £56

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/152505

96 stream processors and is bus powered

OCZ 400W PSU ~ £40

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/152505

Samsung F3 500GB ~ £37

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/146252

Antec mini-P180 case ~ £59 to £62

http://www.ebuyer.com/search?q=mini+p180&x=0&y=0

4GB DDR3~ £82

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/173105

SATA DVD rewriter ~ £15

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/170014

[scaryjim]

Awesome thanks thats a great help, revised spec to follow. But I don't wanna save him anything I wanna get the best I can for £500 lol.

Ah, but this way you get a great computer *and* you get bonus points with the boss for saving money - it's win win! New spec looks good, btw.

n00b question, but how do I thank you guys?

That's a post count reward, bizzarrely Once you've got enough posts (25, I think, but it might be a few more than that) a "thanks" button will appear at the bottom of each post.

A few users have links to the post count rewards in their sigs, or just search the forum for "post count rewards"

[Chopski]

I would probably look at something like this:

Athlon II X4 630 ~ £86

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/176579

ASUS M4A785TD-M EVO ~ £70

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/170277

Nvidia GT240 ~ £56

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/152505

OCZ 400W PSU ~ £40

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/152505

Samsung F3 500GB ~ £37

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/146252

Antec mini-P180 case ~ £59 to £62

http://www.ebuyer.com/search?q=mini+p180&x=0&y=0

4GB DDR3~ £82

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/173105

SATA DVD rewriter ~ £15

http://www.ebuyer.com/product/170014

I knew I should of just started this thread with "CAT-THE-FIFTH, whats the best setup I can get for work for less than £500?"

Amazing, thank you! Looking through them all now.