martin_howard1

<p>You could put a machine like that together for far less buying from Newegg, fair enough the guy is in business but $1276 is way too steep.<br>

You could buy an i7 box from Dell/HP etc for $1k...<br>

Alternatively get an i5 Quad core box from Dell/HP etc for around $800, and put the remaining budget towards a nice IPS monitor.</p>

 

<p>I went from Vista x64 to Win7x64, however at the same time I installed Win7 on a SSD - that gave me a huge performance increase. So if you did go down the Win7 route I would recommend getting an SSD at the same time. <br>

Actual Photoshop (CS4) performance that is not HD dependent seems about the same between Vista and Win7 however.</p>

<p>I agree with the sentiments about socket 1156 - I would definitely go with a 1336 board, the Gigabyte GA-X58-UD3R Rev 2 is one of the best for reasonable money, it has USB3 and also Sata 6Gb/s.<br>

There are some good deals on the i7 950 at the moment as it is going end of line. if you don't want to spend that much get the 920 over the 930 and save more money.<br>

Go for a SSD for a boot & apps drive, the latest Sandforce controller based drives are very quick, I recently put a OCZ Vertex 2E 120Gb in my laptop and it is quite a bit quicker than the Intel X25 G2 80Gb I have in my desktop. Both make using traditional HD's a painful experience.</p>

 

<p>You can always upgrade the Pro software to the Elite software if you find you need the Elite software features later on.</p>

<p>AFAIK you will need a minimum of Photoshop CS3 for your D700 & Photoshop CS4 for the 5DmkII. <br>

Adobe usually only includes Camera Raw support for new cameras in it last couple of PS releases.<br>

Other options exist of course - some paid, such as Lightroom, Aperture. Some free such as Canon DPP for the 5DMKII.</p>

<p> </p>

<p>Generally 180dpi is considered the acceptable minimum for a good quality print, this would mean that a 6"x4" print would need to be around 1080 x 720 pixels, this is obviously higher than the 720 x 480 I stated earlier, however it is not an exact science as different printers will impact the end result as well as people expectations of quality - (I would not be that satisfied with a 180 dpi print!)<br /> Personally I would be happy sending them at 600 x 400.</p>

<p>To avoid confusion you should think in terms of number of pixels when resizing images for the web. <br>

Facebook supports a maximum image size of 720 x 720 pixels, so assuming your shots are 3:2 aspect ratio then resizing them to 720 x 480 should do the trick. You could probably still get an OK 6"x4" print from this, but that's about all.<br>

Note facebook recently increased the upload size to 720 from 604 pixels, there is nothing to stop you using a smaller image size of course.</p>

<p>I have not used that particular card.<br>

I have owned a number of similar GeForce cards and calibrated two monitors successfully with a Spyder 3 Pro.<br>

Currently I use a GTX275 with 2 monitors, 1 wide gamut, 1 normal using Win 7 64bit. Everything works fine.<br>

Essentially as long as it is a PCI-E card with 2 DVI ports you will be fine.</p>

<p>Something like a nVidia Geforce 9500GT will do fine as it has 2 DVI ports, and can be used with two monitor profiles.</p>

<p>The limited 16 bit toolset and lack of proper colour management is a killer for me.</p>

 

<blockquote>

<p><em>Is this an accurate statement?</em></p>

</blockquote>

<p>~No.</p>

<p>When you convert to sRGB are you selecting convert to profile or assign profile?</p>

<blockquote>

<p>TOKYO, May 13, 2010—Canon Inc. announced today the achievement of a new camera-manufacturing milestone as combined production of the company's EOS-series film and digital single-lens reflex (SLR) cameras passed the 40-million mark.<br>

Production of the EOS SLR camera first began in 1987 at Canon Inc.'s Fukushima Plant (now Fukushima Canon Inc.), and then later moved to Canon Inc., Taiwan; Oita Canon Inc.; and most recently Nagasaki Canon Inc. from March of this year. In 1997, the 10th anniversary of the series, production reached 10 million units, and in 2003 passed the 20-million mark. After the rapid spread of digital SLR cameras, Canon went on to reach the 30-million mark during the series' 20-year anniversary in December 2007, followed by the current 40-million-unit production milestone, attained after a short two years and four months. Furthermore, the EOS Digital series also recorded a production milestone of 20 million units.</p>

</blockquote>

<p><a href="http://www.canon.com/news/2010/may13e.html">Link</a><br>

Interesting how quickly they went from 30 to 40 million units!</p>

<p>Must be ash in my monitor - I see no photo?</p>

<p>Click the show archive button - it will display a whole list of different subject areas for you to explore.</p>

 

<p>Yes the F3 would be more slightly more noisy than WD green drive, but the performance would be greater, there is always a trade off!<br /> I really would not worry about the difference in cache size - 32MB is plenty.</p>

<p>32MB vs 64MB cache is currently a marketing gimmick for the current gen of HD's.<br>

Installation is easy assuming you having a spare SATA 2 port on your motherboard.<br>

Once physically installed in will need enabling in Computer management >disk management.</p>

<p>Which WD drive are you looking at? I would take a look at the Samsung F3 drives as well, they are very strong performers.</p>

<p>The difference between 2.26GHz, 2.66 & 2.93 GHz is not night and day.<br>

If you are rendering in your 3D software often, I would definitely take the 8 core machine - it will nearly halve render times versus an equivalently clocked single 4 core processor.<br>

Photoshop etc will run fine on either setup.</p>

<p>A GTS 240 will be fine.</p>

<p>No afaik 1600% is the maximum, that applies to later versions as well.</p>

<p>I'm interested - why do you need such a high zoom level?</p>

<p>What operating systems are the machines running?<br>

How are the computers networked?</p>

<p>16 GB is plenty. <br>

I have yet to run out of RAM when manipulating large scans using 8GB.</p>

<p>I use a Wacom tablet & Logitech G500 mouse - the adjustable sensitivity is a god send for delicate work.<br>

Best thing to do is go into a shop where you can try them out - picking a mouse is very much dependent on the size of your hands and how you prefer to grasp the mouse, some people like to rest it in the palm of their hands whereas others use a claw grip using the ends of their fingers - manufacturers latched onto this and produce mice in differing sizes to suit.</p>

<p>If you want someting slightly bigger (24" 1920 x 1200) take a look at the Dell U2410 & the HP LP2475w. Combined with a Spyder 3 pro, should come in around your budget.</p>

 

<p>What processor model is in your current machine?<br>

What make/model is the PC? - options for tweaking some OEM PC's are limited by the motherboards these companies use.<br>

You should be good to go with your graphics card - if it is a least a GeForce 6 series it will be able to take advantage of the CS4 GPU accelerated features.<br>

Definitely go 64bit - the lack of drivers myth extends from XP x64 days when mainstream 64bit computing was in its infancy, unless you have some <em>really</em> old hardware then you will be fine. An interesting aside is that Microsoft do not approve drivers unless both 32bit & 64bit versions are available.</p>