Cheap Photoshop PC

[madman045]

Right, my other halfs dad does a fair bit in photoshop as he love's taking pics with his 350d

He currently has an athlon 3000, cheap all in one gigabyte mobo with onboard video and 512mb pc2700 and a slow maxtor 80gb ide

Would this lot work together?

AMD Athlon 64 3700+ Socket939, San DiegoCore, 2.2GHz, 1MB Cache, Retail
ASUS A8N-SLI SE, NF4 SLI, S939
2Gb (2X1Gb) Corsair TwinX XMS DDR PC3200
250 Gb Seagate ST3250620AS Barracuda 7200.10
256MB Sapphire RX1300XT PCI-Ex16
Plextor PX-755A/T3UK Black
Asus TA-5A Black/Silver Midi Tower Case with 350W aPFC PSU
1.44Mb Sony Black Floppy Disk Drive OEM
50cm Coolermaster Round Floppy Drive Cable Certified
50cm 3XS Round ATA133 Certified IDE Cable
NORTHQ Silent Tornado ALU Casefan 92mm, 15db, Blue LED,16.5CFM,3pinn Molex
80mm Sharkoon LED 2000 "Golf Ball" Quiet 17.8 dB(A) Case Fan - 22.7 CFM

That lot comes in at £497 delivered.

Can it be done any better for the same performance with Intel?

Thanks

[Dorza]

Intel are regarded to be better with multimedia work (image/video editing, encoding and 3d work - modeling, rendering). I if were building a system specifically aimed at that sort of work it would be an intel system. It really depends how serious the work is though.

[teachmech]

What about a dual core X2 3800+ as I believe photoshop will make use of both cores.

[dave87]

An e6300 with an ASRock board would be my bet, they don't overclock as well as some of the top end boards, but I don't think thats applicable in your case. Apart from needing to change to DDR2, the rest is fine

Dave

Edit - something like this http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=443857
and
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...ductID=430631?

[keef247]

how serious is he with photoshop then?seems like he really wants the speed?is it high res uncompressed image edits and rendoring then?

[madman045]

Well £500 is the budget, if I can get all the above within the that, then thats ok.
He takes pics in the highest quality setting on his 350D and his current pc crashes when you get to about the third layer when editing a picture.

Also the motherboard seems to be on its way out as windows takes about 2-3 minutes to boot...

[madman045]

An e6300 with an ASRock board would be my bet, they don't overclock as well as some of the top end boards, but I don't think thats applicable in your case. Apart from needing to change to DDR2, the rest is fine

Dave

Edit - something like this http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=443857
and
http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...ductID=430631?

According to the question on the scan site with regards to the motherboard, it doesnt support the E6xxx range...

Ok would the following be better and work ok and whats the onboard VGA like?

£124.19 Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 775, 1.86 GHz Retail
£140.45 2Gb (2X1Gb) Corsair Value Select, DDR2 PC5300 (667), 240 Pin, Non-ECC Unbuffered, CAS 5-5-5-15
£48.40 Asrock CONROE945G-DVI

Windows XP Home SP2

also would the PSU in the case be ok?

[dave87]

Ah, didn't see that bit

The ones you suggested should be fine, and I haven't had any problems with the PSUs in the Asus cases I've used (at work we ordered 300+ of their barebone PCs - only ones to get damaged were by flooding )

Dave