Clearly two schools of thought on custom built vs off the shelf - I
don't really have allegiance to either. I lean towards custom built
because PC's for photo work are kind of a unique breed.
Off the shelf gaming PC's generally would be fine, but sometimes are
skimpy on memory and often have stuff that I don't need - like super
high end video cards, cooling systems for overclocking, tricked out
cases, etc. But general business class PC's are usually a little
underpowered and weak on video, memory and expandability. I've been
getting custom built machines form the same shop locally since the mid
1990's. I know I can get what I want tailed to my specs. I pay more for
what I get, but can leave out the stuff I don't want or need so it
balances out. But over the years they have evolved from being a consumer
retail store to doing more small business IT support / networking, so
I'm not sure what to expect at this time.
On 3/15/2016 7:52 PM, John Francis wrote:
On Tue, Mar 15, 2016 at 06:55:09PM -0400, Mark C wrote:
Yep - I'm looking at a new machine. Stopped by Best Buy but was unimpressed
so I asked a local computer shop for a quote barebones new machine. I can
pull my data drive and relatively new video card out of this box and use
them in the new one. I could use the system drive form this one but would
like to upgrade to a SSD. I'll see what they come up with.
I'd suggest taking a look at what <your manufacturer of choice> offers on
their website. I gave up going full custom getting on for two decades ago;
I found that after investing multiple hours of my time I was saving at best
a small amount of money (and, generally, getting a worse warranty). The worst
thing about the systems is getting rid of the extra crap that gets installed
on the system (HP PC dock, I'm looking at you ...), and nowadays you can get
rid of most of that if you are careful (and there are various products that
can get rid of it for you if something escapes your notice).
Go for a system with an SSD and only the on-board graphics, and you won't be
paying extra for things you don't want. Adding an additional data drive and
a graphics card is about as easy as hardware upgrades can be.
Admittedly I haven't bought a desktop/deskside system for quite some time;
I've been using notebook computers for work, and we're just about to replace
the long-in-the-tooth notebook computer my wife uses for various purposes,
the most important of which is to run all the household accounting software.
Her old system is a 4GB HP-dv7t (bought mainly because it could be configured
with two hard drives, so she could snapshot all the financial data onto the
other hard drive every time she exited from the program). Nowadays 4GB isn't
really enough to run Windows 7 Pro, and when I looked at adding more memory
I got a nasty shock - DDR2 memory sticks are expensive! I could get over 16GB
of DDR3 RAM for what it would cost me to buy an additional 4GB of DDR2 RAM,
and I might have to buy all-new RAM to be able to upgrade that system to 8GB.
While I couldn't find a reasonably-priced system with two hard drives, I did
find one with a 1TB hard drive plus a 256GB SSD. With a dual-core i7 processor
(quite a bit faster than a 2.5G Core 2 Duo ... :-), 16GB of RAM, Windows 10,
and an SSD boot drive, I expect she'll find it significantly faster.
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