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[Parl]

I'm going to be building a PC for a friend intended for Photoshop CS3/CS4 with a low budget. That budget is £155 (with some leyway), but the HDD, DVD writer, graphics card, monitor, mouse & keyboard are sorted.

The components that need to be purchased are CPU, RAM, mobo, case, PSU.

In the last year or so, I've fallen behind in knowledge of what components are the best for particular tasks are different price ranges, so I'd like some help as to what to use for this system.

A case has already been selected, which costs £20, which leaves £135 for the rest. And because of that, there isn't much room for a PSU costing £30+ or anything like that. It's not particularly feasible. I was contemplating overclocking to achieve a better value for money, but it doesn't seem like there's much room for a good mobo and heatsink for it.

Using eBuyer, looking through, I'm tentatively working with...

- Intel Pentium Dual Core E2220 2.4GHz (800MHz) Socket 775 1MB L2 Cache (£52.03)
- 2GB Kingston DDR2 800MHz/PC2-6400 Memory Non-ecc CL5 Unbuffered 1.8V (£20.50)
- Asus P5KPL-AM (£33.95)
- Casecom 500W 12cm Fan - 20+4pin, ATX12v, 4x Molex, 1x SATA (£16.99)

With the case, that comes to £143.50, and as delivery will be free, there's a small amount of room for more expensive parts. Also, when selecting these parts, I was effectively pissing in the wind and I'm don't know what I should be going with. I don't know what that processor is like compared to others in the price range, same with the motherboard, and I don't know if I'm spending too little on any of the components. And how useful would it be to delay the purchase by a couple of weeks in order for an extra £50-£60 to be available?

So what parts shall I go with?

 

[Liu Kang Baking A Pie]

Look at the minimum requirements for Photoshop and get something better that fits your budget. That's all.

 

[Divvy]

What version of Photoshop will he be using?

 

[Parl]

Look at the minimum requirements for Photoshop and get something better that fits your budget. That's all.

I want to build the best for the budget. That's my point, and I'm sure most who build systems want to achieve the same too.

What version of Photoshop will he be using?

She currently uses CS3, but I imagine CS4 will be making an appearance before long.

 

[Chris R]

Just buy a prebuilt system with decent CPU power, a shitload of memory, and lots of HDD space?

 

[Liu Kang Baking A Pie]

I want to build the best for the budget. That's my point, and I'm sure most who build systems want to achieve the same too.

It really isn't that complicated. Find the fastest Intel processor that fits in your budget. It's not like they have a lot of options to choose from. The higher the numbers, the better.

 

[Parl]

It really isn't that complicated. Find the fastest Intel processor that fits in your budget. It's not like they have a lot of options to choose from. The higher the numbers, the better.

I know it's not complicated. But I want advice on whether to get something like an AMD Phenom X3 Triple Core 8650 2.3GHz, or an AMD Athlon II X2 250 3.0GHz, or just go with an Intel Pentium Dual Core E6300 2.8GHz.

Also, I don't know what my best choice of RAM would be either.

 

[Rentahamster]

Get at least 4GB RAM (8 if you can, RAM is cheap nowadays, and Windows 7 RC 64-bit is gonna be free for a while longer). You want to keep Photoshop from paging to the scratch disk as much as possible. In fact, try and secure a second hard drive to use as a scratch disk. For increased performance, you do not want the scratch disk to be on the same physical drive as the OS.

Then buy the fastest CPU you can get. Photoshop isn't the best at utilizing multiple cores for a lot of the older functions, so in general, a faster CPU is better than one with more cores.

http://macperformanceguide.com/index.html

This site has a lot of really good info on optimizing photoshop performance. It's geared towards Macs, but nearly all the info is relevant for PC users too.

 

[gblues]

Something a lot of people miss is that you should have 2 physical hard drives, both high-performance. Use one to install Windows on and your applications; the other will stay empty and you'll configure Photoshop to use it as a scratch disk. Don't use a 2nd partition because you won't get a performance boost. The point of the scratch disk is to avoid contention with Windows on the main HD. If both Windows and Photoshop are accessing the same physical drive (i.e. 2 partitions) the contention still exists and you don't get a performance boost.

 

[Divvy]

I want to build the best for the budget. That's my point, and I'm sure most who build systems want to achieve the same too.


She currently uses CS3, but I imagine CS4 will be making an appearance before long.

CS4 is a huge resource hog so the more ram the better. If you have an Nvidia card, the gpu accleration helps too.

Also: Make sure you get Windows 7. CS4 chugged like hell on my Vista PC until I upgraded to 7, then it was smooth as butter.

 

[Meus Renaissance]

I know it's not complicated. But I want advice on whether to get something like an AMD Phenom X3 Triple Core 8650 2.3GHz, or an AMD Athlon II X2 250 3.0GHz, or just go with an Intel Pentium Dual Core E6300 2.8GHz.

Also, I don't know what my best choice of RAM would be either.

There really isn't much difference between the 8650 and X2 250, nothing worth noting anyway however here is a comparison chart. The E6300, however, beats both on that. To be honest with you, considering your budget, any decent CPU will be fine. If this was for professional use and she was multi-tasking, she would provide a bigger budget for a really fast CPU.

Just get her something respectable for that task and she'll appreciate having a bit of cash left over.

 

[falastini]

check this thread out:

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=366177

It's for budget gaming rigs, but a lot of the same parts will apply.

 

[Parl]

Get at least 4GB RAM (8 if you can, RAM is cheap nowadays, and Windows 7 RC 64-bit is gonna be free for a while longer). You want to keep Photoshop from paging to the scratch disk as much as possible. In fact, try and secure a second hard drive to use as a scratch disk. For increased performance, you do not want the scratch disk to be on the same physical drive as the OS.

Then buy the fastest CPU you can get. Photoshop isn't the best at utilizing multiple cores for a lot of the older functions, so in general, a faster CPU is better than one with more cores.

http://macperformanceguide.com/index.html

This site has a lot of really good info on optimizing photoshop performance. It's geared towards Macs, but nearly all the info is relevant for PC users too.

Thanks. I was leaning heavily towards settling with the E6300 after some investigations. Also, there will be two hard drives in this new machine, and I'll certainly going to use the secondary one for scratch disc, thanks. (Thanks gblues for your input there too).

For a small increase in budget (£16), I can go to 4GB of RAM from 2GB, so I'm persuading her to go with that as it's a very good idea.

CS4 is a huge resource hog so the more ram the better. If you have an Nvidia card, the gpu accleration helps too.

Also: Make sure you get Windows 7. CS4 chugged like hell on my Vista PC until I upgraded to 7, then it was smooth as butter.

Is the GPU acceleration only for the NVidia graphics cards? Yeah, I'm certainly going to be installing Windows 7 on it, no doubt about it.

There really isn't much difference between the 8650 and X2 250, nothing worth noting anyway however here is a comparison chart. The E6300, however, beats both on that. To be honest with you, considering your budget, any decent CPU will be fine. If this was for professional use and she was multi-tasking, she would provide a bigger budget for a really fast CPU.

Just get her something respectable for that task and she'll appreciate having a bit of cash left over.

I'm going with the E6300, and 4GB of RAM, making use of the SATAII 500GB HDD I picked up for £15 second hand, and her secondary 250GB HDD in her current PC. It's going to be for use at university.

I'm not so sure about the motherboard entirely though. There's three between the £30-£33 price range - Asus, Gigabyte and ASRock. Wouldn't mind doing a bit of minor OCing on it too.

Thanks for all the help.

 

[DeadTrees]

And how useful would it be to delay the purchase by a couple of weeks in order for an extra £50-£60 to be available?

Very. The best that I could come up with:

Intel Pentium Dual Core E5200 £45.71
Intel DG41TY £52.74 *or* Gigabyte GA-EP41-UD3L £52.78
Crucial 4GB Kit (2x2GB) DDR2 (# CT2KIT25664AA800) £35.99
Corsair 400W CX PSU £37.72

Total: £173-ish

Fair warning if your spare parts use IDE ports--the Intel board doesn't have them. This also assumes that your video card isn't some 100+ watt porker.

 

[Zyzyxxz]

Is the GPU acceleration only for the NVidia graphics cards? Yeah, I'm certainly going to be installing Windows 7 on it, no doubt about it.
.

wait is this true?

If so shit I need to get rid of my 4870...

 

[fart]

you can't build your way to the best for a small budget. buy the uk equivalent of a low end dell.

Get at least 4GB RAM (8 if you can, RAM is cheap nowadays, and Windows 7 RC 64-bit is gonna be free for a while longer). You want to keep Photoshop from paging to the scratch disk as much as possible. In fact, try and secure a second hard drive to use as a scratch disk. For increased performance, you do not want the scratch disk to be on the same physical drive as the OS.

yes, as much ram as possible and clock speed over additional cores. i wouldn't bother with two disks. put more ram in instead. this is unless she works with very very large files, in which case go for a dedicated high speed secondary storage device instead (ie big slow system disk, small very fast scratch disk). note that you need a 64-bit os for 'as much ram as possible'. this may cause problems with other things she wants to do.

afaik the gpgpu code is still in the gimmick stages and isn't used to do fundamental computation, so i wouldn't pay for discrete video (rentahamster, do you know if there's a lot of offboarding other than silly filters?).

 

[Rentahamster]

Is the GPU acceleration only for the NVidia graphics cards? Yeah, I'm certainly going to be installing Windows 7 on it, no doubt about it.

No, as long as the GPU supports OpenGL 2.0 and Shader Model 3.0, it's fine.

(rentahamster, do you know if there's a lot of offboarding other than silly filters?).

http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/405/kb405745.html
http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/404/kb404898.html

The benefits of GPU acceleration for CS4 are nice, but not mindblowing. I'd rather optimize for RAM, CPU, and disk speed first before spending more money on a GPU. The minimum requirements are fine.

 

[fart]

wow, it's even worse than i thought. it's all ui gizmos. that is not worth spending money on.

i can't emphasize enough how much photoshop hits working store and its secondary store. if you think about the kinds of operations it does, they're usually small op per pixel with a huge[/b[ number of pixels (include the actual image, all the cached/preview copies, layers, masks, etc. etc. etc). so the program is disk limited probably about 70-80% of the time.

 

[Hazaro]

Should dump more money in the CPU and RAM. Performance isn't there for the power. GPU hardly helps.

 

[Divvy]

No, as long as the GPU supports OpenGL 2.0 and Shader Model 3.0, it's fine.

Ah you're right, I misread my video card label on the preferences window as a requirement.

The benefits of GPU acceleration for CS4 are nice, but not mindblowing. I'd rather optimize for RAM, CPU, and disk speed first before spending more money on a GPU. The minimum requirements are fine.

True, though after having the rotate view tool, I never want to give it up.

 

[Meus Renaissance]

I was working with an Intel Dual Core E2200 2.13GHz for the past two years and for video editing and especially Photoshop, it was more than adequate. I really don't understand why you're all egging the guy on to dump more money on the CPU when it will be educational use?

 

[Parl]

Thanks for all of the input. Photoshop doesn't require a beast of a machine to operate, I just wanted to built the best PC for the budget.

I ended up saving going with a £46 CPU (E2200) over the one at £64 (the E6300) as there's not much in them and only about 12% better Photoshop performance difference between them (I'm also going to overclock it a bit). I also went for 2GB of RAM instead of 4GB as she preferred to save the money instead of spending £17 extra. If it seems like she'll benefit from an extra 2GB of RAM, then there's no issue with doing such an upgrade.

It's very possible to build a good PC on a budget, and buying a Dell or whatever isn't a good idea if you can build one.

There's already two hard drives on hand. I got a second hand SATAII 500GB for £15, so that part was fine. The graphics card is also sorted.

 

[zoku88]

I've run out of RAM using photoshop with 2GB :-/

Really, RAM is so cheap. I see little reason to not go with 4GB :-/ There's being budget mindful and then there is flat out being cheap

 

[Parl]

I've run out of RAM using photoshop with 2GB :-/

Really, RAM is so cheap. I see little reason to not go with 4GB :-/ There's being budget mindful and then there is flat out being cheap

I'm sure 1.7GB+ will be enough for Photoshop to do its business.

I get by running Windows 7 plus Photoshop CS3 on 512 MB (now that's cheap), admittedly optimised to fuck, but it runs fairly well, and I've seen it running on a 4GB system for comparison.

 

[Rentahamster]

I also went for 2GB of RAM instead of 4GB as she preferred to save the money instead of spending £17 extra. If it seems like she'll benefit from an extra 2GB of RAM, then there's no issue with doing such an upgrade.

Just install 4GB RAM and Win7 64-bit now. You're gonna do it eventually.

 

[evil solrac v3.0]

you're just gonna upgrade down the line anyway. time to start saving money so that in a couple of years you can use the i7 DDR3 platform. hopefully they'll also have better GPU in CS4 in the future.

 

[Meus Renaissance]

An i7 + DDR3? :lol Jeez guys, this isn't a gaming rig - its just a basic workstation for educational use.

 

[Firestorm]

Go with 4GB of RAM. I don't know many people who use Photoshop alone. There's a good chance she'll need to have Illustrator, inDesign, and/or Flash open at the same time and you want a good amount of RAM for that. Don't cheap out on RAM.

 

[clav]

I would vouch a E5200 chip over E2220. Its 45nm chip design makes it easy to overclock to 3 GHz.

I would agree the rest with GAF here to obtain 4GB of RAM since Photoshop programs tend to use a lot of memory. Also, you're using a Dual Core which is a Core 2 Duo with neutered cache, so you need to make up for it by having more RAM.

If you're going for 4 GB of RAM, I suggest you also use 64-bit Windows Vista/7.

One thing to expect about using that power supply. It might blow out within an year since it's one from the lower-end. Just know this is a risk you are taking.

wait is this true?

If so shit I need to get rid of my 4870...

Not true at all...

http://www.fudzilla.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=9809&Itemid=1