Best PC hardware spec for Photo edit?

My PC is long in the tooth. I use Adobe CS3 and a host of other downloadable utilities.

What is the Hot Video card for Photoediting? O/S? Stick with XP or move to vista? Any advantage to a 64 bit system? Memory sweet spot? AMD or Intel?

I can spend about 1500 for the PC. I have a Dell 20 in Monitor that will have to do for a while. Thoughts?

Head to Sam's Club, buy the current HP box with a QUAD CORE in it. Thats all you need and about $800. I put a Quad in my current desktop and it kicks butttt.....

The old Dual Core could run about 5 directories of RAW to JPEG conversions in Digital Photo Professional at once; then the computer was pretty much useless. The QUAD has run 14 directories and I was still able to go and play online games without any problems at ALL. Now that is impressive.

Mark H

I use a quad core (Q6600) and 4G of ram and 64bit debian (linux) OS. I can re-encode video while burning a DVD and re-touch photos all at the same time.. Love it

I'm sure a windows based similar platform would play the same

Gamb wrote in post #6264984
I use a quad core (Q6600) and 4G of ram and 64bit debian (linux) OS. I can re-encode video while burning a DVD and re-touch photos all at the same time.. Love it

I'm sure a windows based similar platform would play the same

Same as Gamb's spec but I run Vista-64 and it flies. LR slows down once in a while while backing up catalog but PSCS3 really flies.

Q6600+MB+4GB RAM for about $200 from Frys.

Photo editing is not very demanding on a computer. So any mid-grade or above computer will be fine. The only thing really to watch is ram. Make sure you max it out if you get 32bit. ( 4 gig) I would at least double that on a 64bit system as 64 can actually be slower than a 32bit system. The only real advantage to going 64bit is the added ram. But it can come at the cost of a slower system.

Onboard video is fine for photos as well. As nothing really moves, a fast frame rate is not needed, and there will be no polygons to shade. Again any mid-grade card will more than sufice. The monitor is by far more important than the video card. If I were to spend money it would be on the monitor.

I got the Gateway GT5658E. It was over kill. But I was thinking of doing some video with it as well.

I am a AMD fan, but they have not been able to keep up. So go Intel definatley.

I say move to Vista. I have experienced nothing bad about it. Its almost 2 years old not. 98% of the problems are worked out.

Adobe CS 4 suite is likely to be 64Bit so if you're looking long term then get Vista 64.

Photoshop recommendations is that you have lots of RAM from personal experience with working on high res images then 4Gb is the minimum with 8Gb recommended. Especially if you work on panoramas or 16 bit images.

Graphics again Adobe recommend a graphics card with 128Mb RAM minimum with 256MB being recommended. Most entry level to min range cards come with this. Bang for buck AMD/ATI 4850 is hard to beat just watch the cooling. Also it's rumoured that Photoshop CS 4 may have OpenGL acceleration for images if it does then you will want a decent card.

The next thing to consider is storage. 750Gb drives are still the sweet spot at present. Get two and mirror the data. Don't use RAID on your Mobo it can make it hard to recover data if the board fails. Also get a primary drive which is what your OS is going to be on, Size doesn't really matter but if you want speed consider the Velociraptor series but any 7,200 drive will do. The data drives will also perform as your scratch disks.

Get a high quality PSU. This is the heart of the system and will be supporting a lot of hardware. You're looking at around 500w minimum.

Processor. AMD for budget and Intel for speed. AMD Quad core offerings are a compelling option compared to Intel. Intel rule the roost for speed, but remember you do have a slight premium for both mobo and RAM (Intel use DDR 3) and Intel charge what their processors worth. To be honest unless you really going to be heavily into multi-tasking then a dual core processor is sufficient. I'm still using a Athlon X2 which performs everything I expect of it.

The main advantage for moving to 64Bit is the amount of RAM you can address. Depending on the applications and usage patterns it's difficult to say if there will be a decrease in performance. There is a slight increase in file sizes and memory footprints but again this is usually fairly neglible. Overall the speed increase can be something like 2-15% I have seen quoted. Of course it will be interesting to see how Photoshop CS 4 handles 64Bit. Remember even under a 64Bit OS a 32 Bit can only address 2Gb so this is something to be factored in and not all apps will work the 32 Bit emulation in Vista 64.