PC spec recommendation for CS4 Design Package.

[bluphoto]

My old computer has packed up. I built it myself about five or six years ago out of some pretty decent parts, but it

was never particularly reliable.

 

So I find myself in the position of buying a new computer.

 

I was running on Photoshop7, so I guess its about time for an upgrade there too.

 

So I'm looing for an off-the-shelf computer which will be capable of using CS4 to its full potential. I hear that CS4

uses the graphics processor to do some of its calculations, which dramatically improves performance, and that

performance is also increased by going to 64-bit Vista. I was surprised to see the "system requirements" for CS4

were so low - (something like a 700Mhz P3 with 512k RAM) - so I want to be realistic.

 

I have another Dell machine which I'm happy enough with, so something along the same lines would be ideal.

 

I don't need a new monitor.

 

Now I don't have many peripherals, but do use a Wacom bamboo pad and Canon Pixma 4000r printer. (Although I'm

looking to upgrade to good A3 printer as well and will be posting for recommendation there in the next few weeks.

Apparently Vista64 has problems with some peripherals, although I'm not sure if mine are supported or not.

 

Will games etc run under Vista64, not that I have many...?

 

I'm looking to buy the CS4 bundle that includes things like Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, Dreamweaver etc.

 

I'd rather not spend more than GBP£1000 inc VAT and delivery on the PC (incl. Operating System) - preferrably less.

I also use Office 2003 pro and don't want to have to change that.

 

Any tips would be much appreciated.

 

thanks

Guy

[seland]

Any new PC would do, for £1000 you will have a very good machine. Dual CPU or more would be fine, and 4GB RAM for your Vista 64-bit. The system requirements (1.8GHz, 512MB RAM) are just minimum requirements for CS4 to run at all, but not smooth.

 

Check with Wacom and Canon support site if they have Vista 64 drivers.

[pierre_c1]

GBP£1000 is way too much ;)

It will cost you much less than 500.

 

First, forget about DELL, when you bought DELL it was great because of the warranty, this is no longer the case.

Since assembling a PC takes about 15 minutes I usually do it myself.

 

Anyway, I got a brand new PC last week, Core 2 Quad Q9300, 4GB, GeForce 9800, and a 500GB seagate HDD.

The case is an Antec Sonata 3 which is very nice, and the power supply is silent.

 

Of course I installed XP 32 bits since 64 bits is useless with only 4G. With 6-8GB, yeah 64 bits could be useful (if

you could get a 64 bit version of Photoshop).

 

But anyway if you're just editing photos you'll never need all that memory. PS will use about 1G, max. Of course,

Lightroom will be very happy to eat the rest...

 

Lightroom 2 is super fast on this PC btw. Exporting a big batch of RAWs does use the 4 cores... so it's about 2x

faster than on the dual core I had before. 12 megapixels RAW take about 2 seconds to process, lol. And the PC still

feels snappy.

[john_loso]

Yeah NVIDIA plan to release a photoshop version with CUDA 2.0 support , it use the power of video card to apply filter and some other photoshop function ...<br>

according to some estimation this new version (using the video card power) will be from 4x to 10x faster than Intel processor (in this case we deal with Quad core).<br>

For £1000 inc VAT here is what u suggest :<br>

1)CPu core 2 quad q9400 (2.66 Ghz x 4) (300$)<br>

2)Ram from 4 to 8 Gb (100$ for each 4 GB)<br>

3)A p45 motherboard (150$ , biostar P45 tpower)<br>

4)9800GT pretty enough for today gaming and support CUDA 2.0 (120$)<br>

5) A 650w psu (80$)<br>

6)2x750 hdd (seagate) raid 0 + 750 back up - u may go with raid 10 (0+1) (89$x4)<br>

7) A case for 100$<br>

this will be 1306$ and u may add the remaining funds for a good 24 inches monitors<br>

 

John

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[alexander-gardner.smugmug.]

Handy answers folks.

I'm much in the same boat and looking to build which is something I haven't tried in 10 years!

 

I'm a little daunted as to what is compatible and really don't want to mess it up but for $1000 I think I can build a decent system and upgrade the screen.