Alastair Robertson wrote:
Thanks again - more good into but I am starting to get a bit lost when it comes to RAIDs stripes and mirrors - wikipedia helped me out a little but as you can tell I am pretty dense on this stuff.
RAID is getting esoteric. The payoff can be good, but selecting the right modes for your usage can be a little tricky and you have to buy more drives. So you best probably avoid it for now.
So CPU's options start with Pentium Dual 2.6 GHz 2MB cache, then Core 2 Duo processor 2.8 with 3MB cache, then move into the Quad systems. I take it then that a Duo would be ok
That Core 2 Duo sounds like maybe an E8400 or so, which is at a pretty good price point. If what I've been reading about the photo tools using the video card's processing, then giving up two or three hundred MHz on the CPU won't make much difference there, and it's virtually undetectable in most other circumstances. As long as the Quads are at similar "nearly 3 GHz" clock rates, any of them should be fine. More cache is better, especially as clock speed increases.
4GB RAM is allowed
Get 4GB of RAM, but do it so that you have free memory sockets for future expansion. For example, if your motherboard has four memory sockets, get two 2GB sticks of memory now ... then if you go full 64-bit later, you've got room to expand the memory. Most motherboards these days will work best if memory is added in pairs or triplets of sticks, depending on the motherboard.
Hard drives specified are Seagate SATA 3G units of varying sizes with varying sized caches.
SATA 3 is pretty much /de rigeur/ on the consumer front, and the best price per GB of storage. Faster RPMs and bigger caches are better, within the limits of economy. 7200 RPM drives with 8-32MB of cache are common. Anything faster or with much more cache is going to get expensive quickly. The 15000 RPM drives, though, are real speed demons in the right configuration, though expensive.
There are a variety of graphics cards offered from the base Intel Dual DVI controller to ASUS and PNY Quadro cards with a whole lot of acronyms I don't understand. If I get two of the Dell 22" Monitors I found yesterday - what do I need to look for in the card?>
You want a regular nVidia chipset rather than the Quadro, to get the benefit of the 3D stuff, I think, but I'm not well versed on the Quadros, either. I'm not sure which ATI chipsets have and don't have the appropriate 3D accelerators.
Make sure that the card has two display outputs, and both DVI if possible, rather than VGA. That'll let you hook both monitors to the one card with digital communication between them.
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