[expatCanuck]

Greetings -
I'm upgrading/building a PC for editing using Lightroom or something similar.
Capable enough to handle those big Pentax raw images quickly.
I'm not a gamer.
I'll also likely have to edit the .avi files that my boy shoots on his Canon SD790IS.

Suggestions welcome, as would be answers to the following questions:

1. 2GB RAM enough, or should I go to 4GB?
2. Will 2 separate hard drives (one for the OS, one for photos) make a noticeable difference?
3. Is the AMD Athlon 64 X2 5050e Brisbane 2.6GHz a fast enough CPU?
   (I rather like the idea of only drawing 45w)
4. Do I need a separate video card and, if so, how much RAM should it have?

The goal is to spend, intelligently, just enough -- but not overspend.

Thanks much.

- Richard

[Bubbabob]

Go with 4gb - No question.


The hard drive is a tricky question. No, you will not see a speed difference. However! The larger the hard drive, the more prone to failure it is. For example, If you have a lot of photos to store you may look at getting two 400/500GB drives instead of a single TB hard drive.

As for three and four, I haven't kept up with the new CPUs/video cards enough to help you out. I will say, however, that the amount of RAM a video card has is a very poor indicator of it's performance.

[debbie]

memory and hard drives will not cost you anything, so I would say spend your money on the CPU and save it on the video card. A separate video card is not a must.

[Lainey]

4gb definitely. I have 2gb and while its ok it could definitely be improved. I'd go for separate drives, too, and then some more externals to back them both up... I would say that CPU would be fast enough if you have 4gb ram. If you're not a gamer... don't go for a special card, you'd be wasting your money.

[Buddha Jones]

Go to Sharky Extreme and look at the specs of their high-end systems that they build and follow suit, that is what I usually do when I go to build a new system. I usually build one every 2-3 years.

[chiem]

1. 2GB RAM enough, or should I go to 4GB?
2. Will 2 separate hard drives (one for the OS, one for photos) make a noticeable difference?
3. Is the AMD Athlon 64 X2 5050e Brisbane 2.6GHz a fast enough CPU?
   (I rather like the idea of only drawing 45w)
4. Do I need a separate video card and, if so, how much RAM should it have?

1. I doubt there's any photo that requires 2+ gb of memory to process in memory, but with memory prices as cheap as they are, go with 4 gb.

2. 2 separate hard drives striped will make a difference when dealing with video, as they'll tend to be several gb in size and the extra throughput will make moving them around faster.

3. I'd recommend quad core and as fast as you're willing to pay for when dealing with video. Video encoding alone takes a heavy toll.

4. A separate video card won't make a difference unless the application(s) you plan on using have specific support for the GPU. And even so, the amount of ram on it isn't usually an issue, but the number of cores/processing units on it and their speeds will affect performance.

Dual monitors, RAID, or 2 HD with 1 for the OS 1 for the files. All the ram you can. Once you start adding layers with Photoshop you'll be glad you did. You don't want PS to use swap files.

[Venturi]

I finally got sick and tired of my aging dual-core AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800 and problematic ASUS A8N-E mobo.

Picked up an Intel Core2 Quad Q9400 2.66GHz + EVGA NVIDIA nForce 790i Ultra SLI mobo for $420 (free shipping) from Newegg. It'll be here tomorrow and I'll be happy to let you know how they perform once I've got it up and running.

For now, I'm keeping the existing 4GB of DDR2 PC3200, 512MB ASUS NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GPU and trio of Seagate SATA 320GB drives. (I'll upgrade the memory to DDR3 and GPU to dual cards, 1 for each monitor, this summer)

[Wheatfield]

At least two hard drives, preferably more. You want Windows swap on on HD, Photoshop swap on the other.
You can never go wrong with maxing out ram. Put the most on that will be supported. If you are running WinXP, don't put more than 4gb on, but look into the /3gb switch for the start.ini file. This allows Windows to allocate more memory to programs.
I run a seperate video card myself. If your MB has good graphics onboard, then go with it.
A friend is running Vista with 8gb of ram and a quad on a decent board. He says it's plenty fast enough with his K20D files.
I don't think he really pushes things a lot, but he does like doing panoramics, which can be pretty big.
I'm running a somewhat faster processor than what you are planning, and honestly, I wouldn't mind going faster still. If a quad will give you better performance, and you can do it, then go for it, but honestly, it would be down my list from other things.

What I'd want:
On board dual RAID, with support for at least 4 SATA drives onboard.

If I can't have that, then I want a fast RAID card plugged into a PCIx16 slot, and four drives plugged into it.

Onboard graphics will do, but I really think a seperate card will do better. If you are going for a seperate card, make sure you de-activate any onboard graphics control that you have.
Personally, I'd go for a graphics free MB and a good graphics card.

If you have 4 drives onboard, then configure 2 striped drives, and go to external drives for back-up.
You want at least two drives for back-up, more won't hurt.
Your safest storage is two or more seperate drives in seperate boxes on their own power supplies.
Your least safe storage is the striped drive in your computer.

You can get a freebie called sync tool off of Microsoft's website.
It's a little big button, but it does drive back up and synchronization quite well.
Don't overlook the value of a good case. They are not all created equal. A good case will run quieter, and will keep the internals cooler.
And don't buy too small of a power supply. A good strong power supply and case will survive many, many upgrades of internal components.
There is a little calculator on the Asus website that will tell you how much power you need for your planned system. Don't believe it, go 50% more watts.
Don't overlook a nice monitor. They are a little expensive, but are worth taking a performance hit on a box for. If you have to cut back on your box to get a better monitor, consider doing it.
That's what comes to mind right now, anyway.

[WerTicus]

cs3 comes in 64 bit flavour and I've used more than 4gb of ram stiching together massive panoramic images (70mega pixel +), if that is something your interested in doing you might like more ram

Also get three hard drives, one for windows, one for photoshop and one for photoshops scratch file.

cs3 also supports video card acceleration but only with certain high end cards. The real issue will be support for high resolution monitors with no video card.

[David Glazebrook]

1. I doubt there's any photo that requires 2+ gb of memory to process in memory, but with memory prices as cheap as they are, go with 4 gb.

Go with atleast 4gb.

I have a machine with 4gb. Recently I was going a HDR panorama in RAW. You guessed it machine popped up with an error message about being out of RAM.

I only last week went to my local computer supplier and started making enquiries about building a faster system with either 8 or 16gb of RAM.

Since I like to make very large prints using RAW files and am now introducing HDR its the only way for me.

[patrickt]

The key is your video. What you normally do isn't the issue. It's any critical task that stresses your resources and that would be your video editing. I know bupkus about video editing and would consider visiting a video site for input. For example, the graphics card might not be critical for photos but might be for video. I don't know.

[WerTicus]

drive speed is critical for video... you'd want raid arrays maybe SSD based.

[Quension]

Note that the video the OP is talking about is coming from a Canon SD790 IS, which shoots 640x480 at 30fps in MJPEG and WAVE. It's not very CPU intensive, let alone something that even a slow laptop hard drive is going to choke on.

If you expect to deal with HD video at any point, definitely beef up for it, but the AVIs from that point & shoot aren't going to stress any of the suggestions so far.

[jbinpg]

The more processor cores you have, the better. Most higher end graphics apps these days will take advantage of the cores available which can cut down your thumb-twisting time remarkably. And using a 64bit address range can really help dealing with those 80 meg 16-bit TIFFs. The days of rotating drives are at their end, thank god. We will all be better off with SSDs.

Jack