Larry, For photo editing I bought a Mac Mini with 8GB RAM, a Dell 24 inch monitor, and a 1TB firewire 800 external hard drive for under $1K.
Rick http://photo.net/photos/RickW ----- Original Message ----- From: Larry Colen <[email protected]> To: Pentax-Discuss Mail List <[email protected]> Cc: Sent: Saturday, January 7, 2012 10:07 PM Subject: Re: Semi-OT: building a dedicated computer for photo editing Interesting post. I've been noticing lately that Lightroom doesn't run as quickly as I'd like on my three year old iMac, and that a friend's new $600 laptop specs out noticeably higher than the iMac (modulo display). I've also spent the past several years constantly running up against storage limitations on the iMac and having to shuffle almost all of my data off onto USB external drives. I'm curious how the cost of this new system breaks down. Despite my preference for MacOS, a desktop Mac starts out at $BIGNUM dollars and goes up from there, so I've considered a PC based box. One thing that causes me pause, though it would also apply to a desktop mac, is the displays. A while back, someone observed that up until HDTV the performance and resolution of displays were constantly improving. Since HDTV, it's been damn near impossible to find a display with more than 1920x1080 resolution, at least for an affordable price. On 1/7/2012 3:28 PM, John Sessoms wrote: > I'm planning a new computer to dedicate for photo & audio editing. I've > got the money saved and am just finalizing the necessary components > before I buy. I already have some of the components on hand; the case & > power supply (650W), and a couple of hard drives I can use at least > temporarily. > > My current (planned) configuration is a Gigabyte mainboard with Intel > i7-960 and 32GB ram (maxed out). I'll be using the on-board video to > begin with. I'll also need to get a new DVD burner - I'm looking for > something that will at least play Blue-ray & has Lightscribe. How does on-board compare with a moderate priced video card? Last time I checked you could get pretty good video cards for not a hell of a lot of money. > > I'm planning on running Windoze 7 64 bit and I intend to install > LightRoom, PhotoshopCS5 and Corel Painter 11 as my primary photo-editing > tools. > > I will also be using my Nikon CoolScan IV ED with it & eventually want > to get a flatbed scanner for larger formats. I'm saving for the Epson > V750 M-Pro. If it all works out, I should have the money by mid-year. > > I'm currently considering a configuration with 3 hard-drives. Primary > for the OS & software, secondary for Photoshop's scratch disk & > LightRoom's cache file and will use a 1.5TB SATA drive I already have > for data (I'll probably put Windoze's swap file here as well). > > Two things I haven't quite satisfied myself about: > > 1. Minimum size for the main drive? I'm considering something along the > lines of 250GB, because I have a spare 250GB SATA (2.5 inch) drive I > took out of my laptop when I upgraded it to a 500GB data drive. I > eventually want to change it out for a SSD. But that's down the road > quite a piece, because even small SSDs are still VERY expensive. > > 2. But I am considering a SSD for the scratch disk. Is 64GB large > enough? That seems to be the current price point I'm comfortable with. > Any brand recommendations? I have heard good things about computers that boot off of SSD. You lose a lot of the incentive to just leave the machine running all of the time. > -- Larry Colen [email protected] (from dos4est) -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions. -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
