Desktop PC

submityournentries

hey hey hey.
as this is the place for new and most serious matters, this topic should fit in well

basically, im looking for a new computer, not a laptop (already gone a goodish laptop) and i want something powerful. im open to building it myself, or buying a fully complete unit.

the only requirement i need is that it is fast/powerful enough to run photoshop cs5 and indesign cs5 at the same time and quickly, cause my laptop takes best part of a minuite to open either. id like a big harddrive (500gb+) but thats not crucial.

budget, including screen,keyboard and mouse is about £500/£600.




or option 2, i can get a new iMac for £870 but im less inclined to do that cause windows seems to be pretty good, and i cba with learning how to do all the carazy mac shortcuts and having to convert files between the 2 formats.

anjs

look at getting an solid state drive for the system and program files if you want things to open quickly

Anonymous

You're not going to get much storage on an SSD drive for £500. And they're a bit excessive for opening up CS5 quickly.
A minute? SERIOUSLY? :shock:

submityournentries

yeah it was quite upsetting, considering i spend my whole life using CS5. once it was open it wasnt too bad, but yeah just the time it takes to get it open that made me want to look for a better option

ry1978

Once you try a Mac you won't look back, I've been using a mac for about 12 years now and hate having to use windows now. At work I need to run windows although I do this through some software on a 28" iMac.
It sounds like you're interested in design or at least something creative if you use Adobe software, during the last 10 years I've been in and around the design industry and a large proportion use Macs! The shortcuts will come naturally although all of the popular software (office, photoshop etc.) runs in the same way on both operating systems so you don't need to re-learn anything, the shortcuts just speed things up.

camerauk

mac all the way bit over priced but they just work and work very well
once you get one you will wander why you didn't sooner

tx14

if you're building it, it will be much much cheaper for the same performance compared to a mac. there is alot of markup for OSX.
you could build a windows box with 8gb memory and the new unlocked i5 (beats last gen i7 easily) for 500-600.
do you own a nice display? that's arguably the most important thing for image editing.

edit: I see you need a screen. I'd spend at least 200 on a display if I want good picture quality.

Anonymous

camerauk wrote:

mac all the way bit over priced but they just work and work very well
once you get one you will wander why you didn't sooner

Or in several people's case, you will think "shite, how come that guy's getting things done faster on a machine that cost half as much :shock: "
Macs aren't the be-all and end-all. They're an option. An option that a few people like. That's all there is to it.
Personally, I can't stand the "finder" thing or the dock, and find it easier to get things done in windows.

submityournentries

at the moment ive got a 1080p tv, so displays not too much of an issue, and everyone keeps etlling me mac is the way to go, and ive used them, i just struggle abit with them, and am not sure if its worth the extra for one?

camerauk

yeehaamcgee wrote:

camerauk wrote:

mac all the way bit over priced but they just work and work very well
once you get one you will wander why you didn't sooner

Or in several people's case, you will think "shite, how come that guy's getting things done faster on a machine that cost half as much :shock: "
Macs aren't the be-all and end-all. They're an option. An option that a few people like. That's all there is to it.
Personally, I can't stand the "finder" thing or the dock, and find it easier to get things done in windows.

yes your right some people will not get on with them some do
I love em now after coming from a pc background think vista was the last straw, windows 7 is much better but still not a patch on mac OSX (but thats just my view)
I have to use a pc for work and yes it gets the job done but I do find that over a few months it slows down and the IT tech has to rebuild it to speed the thing up again, we use em for photo editing I dont get this problem on my mac and its been used for over 18 months

Anonymous

camerauk wrote:

coming from a pc background think vista was the last straw, windows 7 is much better

I'm sorry, that sentence makes all your points null and void, since they're the same system under the skin, essentially.

We've had Vista audio workstations running for years, with not a single slowdown issue, or without ever throwing a wobbly.
Likewise we've had macs do the same.

On the flipside, we've had PCs become bogged down by people installing google toolbar, MSN toolbar, and god knows what else. And, we've also had macs end up the same, for mostly inexplicable reasons.

I've also seen very very expensive uber-workstations based on windows and Mac arrive supposedly "turn-key" and ready to run, and suffer catastrophic failures immediately.

There is so little difference, it's quite amusing that the argument still goes on.

camerauk

yeehaamcgee wrote:

camerauk wrote:

coming from a pc background think vista was the last straw, windows 7 is much better

I'm sorry, that sentence makes all your points null and void, since they're the same system under the skin, essentially.

not on my son's laptop vista was a dog was very slow even with a fresh install and win 7 runs much faster and has stayed running fine for 6 months so must be different

would agree that there now seems to not be a lot in it, but for me its mac all the way must be the nice styling I like lol, takes up much less space at home (Imac)

Anonymous

I can see why some people like the idea of iMacs, but I just do not get the styling at all. They look like a rejected set prop from a Blake's 7 episode. Utterly disagreeable.
But, they do save space.
Shame they contain laptop internals though.
And that the screen is disposed when you upgrade.

tx14

yeehaamcgee wrote:

camerauk wrote:

coming from a pc background think vista was the last straw, windows 7 is much better

I'm sorry, that sentence makes all your points null and void, since they're the same system under the skin, essentially.

We've had Vista audio workstations running for years, with not a single slowdown issue, or without ever throwing a wobbly.
Likewise we've had macs do the same.

On the flipside, we've had PCs become bogged down by people installing google toolbar, MSN toolbar, and god knows what else. And, we've also had macs end up the same, for mostly inexplicable reasons.

I've also seen very very expensive uber-workstations based on windows and Mac arrive supposedly "turn-key" and ready to run, and suffer catastrophic failures immediately.

There is so little difference, it's quite amusing that the argument still goes on.

God, this!
saw my friend working on his laptop, which overheats (stuffed vent probs) and freezes after 15min of usage. he had half his desktop covered in shortcuts linked to bloatware. I checked task manager and there was 97 processes running! :shock: I never had problems with windows slowing down after continuous usage, vista or 7. I think most of the problem is just down to the users.

Anonymous

Well, to be fair, I wouldn't blame the users, as such. It's the fault of adobe, apple, Google, Yahoo, etc, etc, etc, etc who force their bloatware to be included with some other piece of software, and have the default options set to YES, INSTALL THIS CRAP.

Oh, and I wouldn't worry exclusively about the number of processes. This suppsedly lean and mean linux laptop has well over a hundred processes running right now. Seeing that many and freaking out is a common misconception.

camerauk

Would agree most problems are users but there was not crap installed on the vista machine as it was a clean install but it was way slower than win 7 when I installed that

Don't get me wrong I am not saying macs are much better than pc it's just what I prefer and would get
Although for my son I got a pc laptop as it was far cheaper and for what he uses it for it would not have been worth double the price

tx14

that's just after startup, and all he had ran was google chrome. and this is vista

Anonymous

Well, for £500-£600 you'll get a fairly decent PC, which will happy run CS5 without breaking a sweat. Dude's already got a monitor.
As far as I'm concerned, there just isn't any apple alternative.

tx14

well the basic mac mini is £612 and it's basically a laptop from 2008 with no screen or battery, but it's within his budget though.

Raymondavalon

I use Macs at home and have done for years, mainly because I grew up with them
OSX offers me nostalgia combined with the stability of a good user interface and UNIX which is my background

The iMac is essentially a beautifully made PC, Core i5 and Core i7 makes for the best of both worlds. I run Windows XP and Vista through VMware Fusion, it works very well. The downside is that you cannot use an OEM version of Windows with VMware Fusion, it has to be "retail"
Another option is BootCamp so you can choose on power up whether you want to boot OSX, Windows or any other x86 OS (LINUX, FreeBSD etc)

As for SSD disks, I spent a week being taught the fundamentals of SSD at Intel early last year. They are interesting devices.
Based on NAND technology they can either write fast, read slowly, or read fast and write slowly. The technology is very new and although there are products out there, they are still in their infancy. Most over the counter / OEM disks ready very quick with an average write throughput, but then again we do mainly read from boot disks after all

The advantage of a vanilla PC is the ease of upgrading it, however a Core i5/i7 processor with 4GB+ of RAM should serve you well for many years.


Another thing to keep in mind with SSD is that you have to under provision the disk by 15-20% Doing this can improve performance significantly.
SSD also has limited life, for example a 256G SSD has a data throughput life of circa 3.5 Terabytes then the NAND "cells" start to degrade. Most disks come with software that informs you of the disk life.
As drastic as this sounds, on one of the labs I attended we worked out this if a 128GB SSD was to have about 20GB of data written to/erased from it on a daily basis, it would still last years.

Anonymous

Bit of a toy though.

submityournentries

would i be correct in taking that the current opinion is suggesting getting a tower with 4gb+ of ram, and a good processor (is this intel dual core/i5 is that the processor?) and use my 32" tv as the moniter either using an HDMI or an RGB cable (tv has inputs for both)

if that is the case, what sort of processors (inteil i5 bit, if its not actually called the processor) should i look for in a machine, cause i know with numbers (ie ram) i should aim for bigger numbers, but with the other named bits im not sure what to look for and what to avoid


also, cheers for the help guys

Anonymous

Bang for your buck, a PC every time, nothing against Macs, they're great.

Only thing that's putting me off getting a Mac is I think it's a bit like becoming a ex-smoker, you'll constantly be banging on about how amazing your Mac is. I can't help but feel part of a Mac owners enthusiasm over their machines is to justify [to themselves even] the inflated price tag they paid over a similarly performing PC.

Seriously if I go in to a customers house and they have a Mac I give it 2 mins at the most before they feel the need to bang on about how much better than a PC it is.

I have used Macs, and I do like them, but more different than better.

Anonymous

submityournentries wrote:

would i be correct in taking that the current opinion is suggesting getting a tower with 4gb+ of ram, and a good processor (is this intel dual core/i5 is that the processor?) and use my 32" tv as the moniter either using an HDMI or an RGB cable (tv has inputs for both)

if that is the case, what sort of processors (inteil i5 bit, if its not actually called the processor) should i look for in a machine, cause i know with numbers (ie ram) i should aim for bigger numbers, but with the other named bits im not sure what to look for and what to avoid


also, cheers for the help guys

The two things Photoshop likes is lots of memory and a seperate HDD to the one the programs and OS are stored on to read write it's scratch file to.

I built my computer about three years ago, but I still have 8Gb of RAM (I use XPx64 for the OS), for the main HDD I have two 250Gb drives in RAID0 and a 74Gb Western Digital Raptor for Photoshop to use as a scratch disk. Works very quick and programs load faster than anyother computer I've used.

tx14

submityournentries wrote:

would i be correct in taking that the current opinion is suggesting getting a tower with 4gb+ of ram, and a good processor (is this intel dual core/i5 is that the processor?) and use my 32" tv as the moniter either using an HDMI or an RGB cable (tv has inputs for both)

if that is the case, what sort of processors (inteil i5 bit, if its not actually called the processor) should i look for in a machine, cause i know with numbers (ie ram) i should aim for bigger numbers, but with the other named bits im not sure what to look for and what to avoid


also, cheers for the help guys

http://www.scan.co.uk/TodayOnly/Index.aspx
check the first thing 'Intel Core i7 2600K Unlocked Combo'. add an oem win7 disk for £75.

the new i7 (sandy bridge) has graphics chip integrated into the cpu package, for image editing you don't need a powerful graphics card so it should work well enough.
edit: the page refreshes every weekday at 1pm so the deal is only for a limited time.

Anonymous

tx14 wrote:

for image editing you don't need a powerful graphics card so it should work well enough.

Not quite right. Photoshop (the only CS5 program I use) makes extensive use of your graphics card to render effects and to speed things up when working with large images.
So, true, you don't need a gaming card, but a good solid workhorse like a Geforce 260 or something makes quite a big difference.

tx14

yeehaamcgee wrote:

tx14 wrote:

for image editing you don't need a powerful graphics card so it should work well enough.

Not quite right. Photoshop (the only CS5 program I use) makes extensive use of your graphics card to render effects and to speed things up when working with large images.
So, true, you don't need a gaming card, but a good solid workhorse like a Geforce 260 or something makes quite a big difference.

I'm not really up to date with gpu computing. It might be more cost effective to skimp on cpu and use a graphics card for muscle, but then you might limit computing power in other tasks. I think it really depends on the user.

Anonymous

Photoshop (again, I don't know about the other CS5 stuff) does a lot with the graphics card, but not everything. So a good balance of both is what you need.
Any modern half-decent CPU should be absolutely fine though. I'm still running a Core2Quad 6600, and have no real CPU-based issues. Most things you can buy these days will be quicker than that.

Raymondavalon

RichardSwt wrote:

Bang for your buck, a PC every time, nothing against Macs, they're great.

Only thing that's putting me off getting a Mac is I think it's a bit like becoming a ex-smoker, you'll constantly be banging on about how amazing your Mac is. I can't help but feel part of a Mac owners enthusiasm over their machines is to justify [to themselves even] the inflated price tag they paid over a similarly performing PC.

Seriously if I go in to a customers house and they have a Mac I give it 2 mins at the most before they feel the need to bang on about how much better than a PC it is.

I have used Macs, and I do like them, but more different than better.

Agreed they are different, I am not a Mac convert I've used them for years, since the Macintosh II series.

I also own a PC too and although it's convenient I prefer the look/feel of OSX, plus it has a true BSD UNIX system beneath it, which is what I was playing with for a living over 23 years ago.

For long term you cannot beat a PC, but its Achilles Heel is Windows and also the fact it clutters up so much space

TuckerUK

If you go the self build PC route, get a MoBo that takes tons of RAM, and then use some of that RAM as a drive for the programs you need fast access to. If you don't use an OS that supports that, there is after market software (free) that will turn some of your RAM into a RAMdrive.

I think the most compelling case for self build is that you can install the OS with your choices, and then just the programs YOU need.

My partners laptop was twice as quick after we overwrote the pre-installed OS with a new copy of the same OS but without all the bloatware.

Anonymous

But RAMdrives lose all their data as soon as the PC goes off :?