PC Upgrade question

[strikerstu]

Well the time has come to upgrade from my existing pc which died at the weekend.

I have been searching several forums for the last 2 days but cannot find the specific answers to my questions

I will be upgrading to LR 2 etc so it needs to run that at a decent speed.

Keeping to a budget of £750-800 (monitor not included) what chipset, processor, graphics card and motherboard would you recommend. I will be sticking to Win XP Pro so don't suggest Vista as I hate it. I will be putting the max amount of Ram for XP in the m/c.

Many thanks for your help

Stu

[OdiN1701]

Are you looking for an entire system, or just those components? For just that, here's what I'd go with. But I realize pricing is different over there across the pond.

Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 (2.83GHz) $320
Asus P5QC Motherboard $140
Corsair 4GB (2 x 2GB) TWIN2X4096-8500C5 $113
eVGA (512-P3-N975-AR) 512MB 9800GT $125

That's basically $700US. Your budget is about $1300US, so if you can get similar pricing, you can add some more stuff - hard drive, DVD burner, case, power supply, etc. But for the base system I'd look at that.

Also there is a $40 Mail-in-Rebate on the Corsair RAM, but again that may be for US customers only - don't know what promotions they do over there.

4GB is going to max out XP unless you have XP 64-bit. I run Vista Ultimate 64-bit and I run with 8GB of RAM. It runs LR2 great. It's a bit older quad-core 2.4GHz running at 3.0GHz.

The motherboard supports DDR2 and DDR3 so you could get some DDR3 if you wanted - it's more pricey.

[strikerstu]

Thanks Andrew, burners etc will be stripped out of the old m/c and h/d's will be at least 2 Samsung Spinpoint drives.Stu

[OdiN1701]

If you don't have SATA hard drives now, you will probably need to upgrade them, as I think there is just a single IDE channel which your burners will probably take up.

I would recommend Western Digital HD's - been excellent for me and good support too.

Perhaps a Raptor drive for your OS drive, and then a pair of larger drives (500GB or so) with a RAID-1 mirroring setup for your data. If your OS drive goes nuts, you can reload and still have all your data on the others, and if one of the data drives goes out, you've got the RAID to cover you.

Still recommend another backup method though.

[carronade]

I have just built a new computer using old bits case,drives etc
I used a dual 2 duo e8400 £112, asus p5q £80 motherboard, gigabyte radeon hd3560 graphics £40 all at DABs.
Ebuyer supply sata to ide converters at £4.99 each if you wish to use your ide devices on a SATA controller.
LR2 works alot quicker than on my XP computer (although I have not yet clogged up the hard drives with rubbish ).

[AdamJL]

Knowing what you currently have (in terms of camera equipment) will definitely help

Are you afraid of overclocking? If not, consider the Q6600 G0 Stepping.
A relatively older CPU (about 12 months now?), but overclocks like a monster.

so,from OcUK:
Q6600 - 128
Gigabyte GA-EP43-DS3 - 76.36
8GB DDR2 RAM (2 x Corsair 4GB DDR2 XMS2 Dominator PC2-8500C5 TwinX) - (77.54 x 2 = 155.08 for a 64bit OS).. a 32bit OS won't see all of this RAM by the way.

NB, I've yet to see comprehensive real-world benefits of DDR3 over DDR2 that justify moving on from DDR2.

Also, I've yet to read up on CS4's GPU acceleration feature, so I won't recommend any graphics card as yet. It could be that the amount of stream processors/cores etc makes no difference, only memory bandwidth and clock speed, so it'd be pointless going for a top end card if there's no benefit.
So factor in anything from £50-£250 for a GPU on top of this.
And remember, Scan readily best OcUK in terms of pricing (normally by a few pounds), so you could save money going there.

Total: 331.90 (or 609.44 for a high end Graphics Card and 8GB RAM).
And remember, you'll want to investigate a new Power Supply as well if you want a powerful GPU and loads of disks.

[Sp00ks]

And remember, you'll want to investigate a new Power Supply as well if you want a powerful GPU and loads of disks.

You will have to upgrade power supplies. The connectors will be different on the new board.

[strikerstu]

Thanks for the replies folks, I should be placing an order this weekend.

Current cameras are 1DMKIIN and 40D and wont be upgraded till the 1DMKIII replacement comes out.

Stu