Dell outlet possible purchase

Looking to upgrade my wife's computer to be a bit beefier for photo and video editing.

This is the specs I'm seeing. I built a few computers several years ago, but have completely lost interest in the hardware side of things. This is one of the computers i was looking at. Should I grab it at that price or should I expect to find one cheaper? Mostly I'm scratching my head at the processor and graphics card. I have a quad core in mine, but now they have the i5 and i7 out...

Base
Studio XPS 8100 Desktop

Media Bay
16X DVD +/- RW w/dbl layer write capability

Processor
Processor: Intel Core i7-860 Processor (8MB Cache, 2.80GHz)

Operating System
Genuine Windows 7 Home Premium

Memory
8 GB DDR3 SDRAM 1066MHz (4 DIMMs)

Hard Disk Drive
1 TB SATA II Hard Drive (7200RPM)

Video
1024MB ATI Radeon HD 5770 GDDR5

Edit: Whoops! forgot to put the price. its $879.

Looking at the regular dell site, configuring this same machine brings the total up to $1398.

I'd say that's a pretty good system for the price....IF you wanted something to play games with! The 5770 video card is just overkill for a photo editing machine [and even for video editing (IMHO)].

A better deal would be to wait for when their cheaper $800-900 XPS 8100's systems dip down to $500-600 for refurbished....since those are usually plenty for photo editing. They pop up every now and then, but they usually sell out super fast (i.e. sometimes within minutes!).

Basically for $850, it would cost you about the same price to get a brand new XPS system with i7 upgrade, 4gb RAM and a lower-end video card.

BeritOlam wrote in post #9933617
I'd say that's a pretty good system for the price....IF you wanted something to play games with! The 5770 video card is just overkill for a photo editing machine [and even for video editing (IMHO)].

Yeah, that's where my computer building always went towards. I forget that you can get much cheaper if you aren't wanting to play the latest games. Thank you for the help. I really didn't want to spend that much anyway. I'll probably look more towards the $500-600 range. Maybe a nice Inspiron.

dsd17 wrote in post #9935476
I'll probably look more towards the $500-600 range. Maybe a nice Inspiron.

From all the reviews I've seen, the XPS is definitely a cut above the Inspiron line (in terms of hardware quality). So I'd seriously try to get an XPS if at all possible.

Dell has pretty good deals pop up almost weekly on XPS i5/7 systems. If you don't need the brute strength of the i7, there have been some nice i5 deals around $600. Plus, I'm not sure Dell even makes an Inspiron with an i7 yet.

BeritOlam wrote in post #9943639
From all the reviews I've seen, the XPS is definitely a cut above the Inspiron line (in terms of hardware quality). So I'd seriously try to get an XPS if at all possible.

Dell has pretty good deals pop up almost weekly on XPS i5/7 systems. If you don't need the brute strength of the i7, there have been some nice i5 deals around $600. Plus, I'm not sure Dell even makes an Inspiron with an i7 yet.

I went ahead with the Inspiron. Found one for $599 with

i5-650 3.2GHz processor
8 GB RAM
1 TB HD

no graphics card, but I had purchased one for her old machine a couple months ago that I'm gonna put in it.

BeritOlam wrote in post #9933617
I'd say that's a pretty good system for the price....IF you wanted something to play games with! The 5770 video card is just overkill for a photo editing machine [and even for video editing (IMHO)].

Actually, CS4 (not sure what other adobe products do) supports offloading/sharing load with the GPU, yielding faster processing results. Thus, having a powerful GPU is a desirable attribute, even if one isn't playing CoD/etc.