God, I never thought I would be saying this... In 2002 I bought a new Dual 867 PPC MMD Mac tower. The thing has been rock solid and my main production box since then. I have used Macs since the early 90s and never really had production experience on a PC. Being on a very limited budget, I have been trying to find ways to aquire a newer machine because my MAc is very slow with CS3. I was hoping Apple would release a new mac mini but that didnt happen. Not having much of a choice, I started looking at PC's.
Over the weekend, I put together a PC box with a friend of mine who is a networking engineer. Mostly older parts that he and I had laying around. I bought a case and a DVD drive for a total of $123 and change. He had an Intel boards with a 2.13 ghz intel processor. Not sure the exact model numbers. Graphics card Nvidia 7800 which has a bad port so needs to be replaced and a gig of ram. Windows XP (until 7 comes out) and Adobe CS3 suite, Office 07 and Lightroom 2.
Even with just a gig of ram (expandable to 8 gigs with Vista 64), this is light years faster than my mac with the Suite. I was actually pretty impressed. My goal was to make a production box for Photoshop designing albums and this is working pretty good so far. Being custom built, I didnt have to deal with all the program trials that usually ships with XP, so its a pretty bare system, which is the way I want it. All connected to my WHS for backups as well. I still cant stand XP, but for the price I will put up with it until something more modern comes around.
So for anyone out there that is just looking for a cheap PC to run the essentials on, look at building your own. I would figure all these parts would be accessible for about $400 if I had to buy the board/Processor and card. Not giving up on mac, just playing the waiting game....
