Help Me Design a Graphic Design PC

phuschnickens

To those who know more than I-
Please help me design a PC that I can use for the Adobe Suite... mostly InDesign, Acrobat, Photoshop, and Illustrator (in that order). I would like stability, and a reasonable price. I am thinking an Opteron 170 for the processor... and I would like help choosing the rest. This PC will never be overclocked, just looking for performance and reliability. Please help. Thank you.

primesuspect

This is a friend of mine I'm the one who sold him on the Opty 170

muddocktor

The Opty 170 or an X2 4400 are both a great choice and good compromise between performance and affordability, with the X2 4400 having a 200 MHz speed advantage and is only about $50 more. Since you aren't overclocking, the generally better cores for overclocking in DC Opty's doesn't matter but the speed bump would help a bit. The stock hsf that comes with the X2 4400 and the DC Opty's is quite effective and at most only needs an 80 mm fan upgrade for great cooling, so you can save money there.

If SLI/Crossfire operation isn't a factor, the Asrock Dual Sata 2 is a good choice for a mobo and is pretty cheap (around $70 shipped) and has good performance. It also has the ability to run both PCI-e and AGP vid cards natively with no performance hit for either. It can't do SLI (obviously), but it can run an AGP card and PCI-e card at the same time, for a multi monitor setup. Be aware that the onboard sound isn't the best in the world and you would need to get a sound card for premium sound. Asrock also recently came out with the 939SLI32-eSATA2, which has a bunch of really interesting features. One of the neatest features built into the mobo is external Sata 2 ports in the I/O area to connect external Sata drives (hot swapable). It also comes with a 1394 connection onboard and supports 4 USB ports onboard and Gigabit Lan too. It also has a full 32 lanes of PCi-e to the 2 16X PCI-e slots for running SLI configurations and SLI is supported by Nvidia for this board. All this for a board costing less than $90 shipped sounds like a bargain to me, and electrically it's very similar to the Dual Sata 2, so it shouldn't have many hidden bugs, electrically. Anandtech did a review of the board recently and were impressed with it, to say the least.

For ram, the G.SKILL Extreme Series 2GB (2 x 1GB) PC3200 kit looks great, with 2-3-2-5 timings at it's rated speed and is less than $200 and has a $32 MIR on it too.

For a psu, the OCZ Powerstream 520 SLI should be plenty enough psu to handle even 2 7900GTX in SLI and still give you plenty of power for everything else. It also has a $25 MIR on it at Newegg.

For video cards and hard drives and such, I'll let someone else more conversant with your needs help you there. And as to a case, the Coolermaster Centurian cases look to be nice for the price, but I have no experience with that model.

Hope this helps you out a bit.

Sledgehammer70

Well with today’s Graphic market, both ATI and Nvidia offer competitive Graphic Cards. Depending if you want to spend the extra buck you can enter into the higher Fire GL class or Quadro Class but to be honest the performance difference is not there.

Depending on your situation for cash I would go with a higher end part such as the 7900GTX 512 priced at $499.00 or an ATI X1900XTX priced at $549.00. If you really want performance than you can add a 2nd card to both setups either jumping into Crossfire or SLI, While I prefer SLI/ Nvidia cards over ATI’s offerings. Either choice will give you the best performance overall. But to be fair SLI wins the performance crown for dual cards shows to be very stable and rock solid. EVGA, BFG and XFX all make great cards.

If you plan on going mid range the 7900GT or the X1800 are good choices also. Both not being uber high end, but will provide cutting edge graphics for all your graphic needs. Both these cards can also be mounted in SLI offering a performance boost for future add-on’s

phuschnickens

Wow.... Ask and you shall receive.. thanks for the help. From what I understand, I don't need a very nice video card for what I am doing... again, my biggest concern is simply performance... does that sound right.. or will a poor video card hurt my overall performance. Also, please keep the tips coming.. they are much appreciated

Sledgehammer70

Well I use photshop day in and day out. If you plan on using it for photo editing and basic items on a 6" photo than no the graphics card won't bog you down. but if you plan on working with larger images and files. than tons of ram and a nice graphics card will always help you out. I mean you can pick up a 7800GT that would work perfect for about $229.00 now days? or even go with a 6800GS and get good speeds at $189.00 or less...

*Note* In an ideal world I would love to have 4 Gigs of ram allocated just for Photoshop! as I work with very high res images and opening 4 or 5 of them on my Dual Xeon machine with 3 Gigs of ram takes time...

muddocktor

Yeah, you bring up a good point about the ram requirements of Photoshop and large images, Sledge. He could go with 2 of the 2 Gig kits and have 4 gigs on the mobo. BTW, the Anandtech article on the eSata 2 board had no stability problems running 4 sticks of ddr at 2T timings, which you would have to do regardless of which mobo you use.

Leonardo

Quadros of all speeds can be found on Ebay for good prices. Retail and "Buy It Now" prices are insane. I think only people ignorant about computer hardware would pay those retail.

Sledge, excuse my ignorance, but what on earth would phuschnickens need SLI for? He's not building a gaming rig.

Sledgehammer70

Not knowing what he was aiming for I suggested the best and worked my way down. As in the following thread i got a better idea what he was looking for and suggested more reasonable items... just wanted to cover all ends of the graphic's world

phuschnickens

I guess I could clarify.. the "graphic design" I am doing, might be a little exaggerated. I make phone directories for printing- using InDesign to layout the books and using acrobat, photoshop, and illustrator for the advertisements that get placed into InDesign (EPS format). The stuff I do in Photoshop is very simplistic, and the files I'm editing are not extremely large by any means. Maybe this can help zero in on what I might require. Thanks again.

Sledgehammer70

Well with that said I am thinking a 7600GT Card. being a pretty low price card that replaced the 6600GT. "which the 6600GT is what I would ofrecommend" the 7600GT isn't the highest end nor the lowest end card but will provide perfect quality and run just about anything you can throw at it

Can't go wrong with this beauty at $189.00
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814130283

Leonardo

Thanks for the further description of application. You don't need Quadro cards for that.

primesuspect

Okay, but he's on a budget, and the video card is almost totally unimportant to his work. You can better spend the money elsewhere, and go with a cheap video card like this radeon X300SE for $45. It will run everything you need. Video card has very, very little to do with what he's doing, and most especially won't affect his speed in any humanly noticeable way. CPU and RAM are the most important for running InDesign.

ryko

anybody else here think much of what has been recommended is total overkill? i work as a web/graphic designer-- my main work rig is the intel one in my sig and it is plenty fast--no slowdowns whatsoever.

photoshop and the rest will run plenty fast on a single core and 1gb of ram (2gb if working with raw imgs). video card really has very little to do with it.

when traveling, i run photoshop 7.0 on my old compaq armada laptop which is a p3 733mhz, 256mb ram, 8mb ati rage, 14.1" lcd and it does just fine. granted it is a little slow when dealing with 10+ images, but my point is any modern cpu and video card is going to be more than adequate.

if you don't plan on gaming don't spend over $150 on a video card. and i think that a cpu like the amd a64 3700+ sandiego (2.2ghz, 1mb l2) is more than enough for your needs. i would think a monitor would be the item i would spend the most money on. get a 1600x1200 lcd or better yet 2 x 19" 1280x1024 lcds w/ DVI.

i would put together something like this and save some moola...

case and psu
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16811129155

cpu and hsf
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16819103539

mobo
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16813131530

ram, 2gb
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16820231047
or 1gb
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16820145440

dvd+/=rw
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16827152058

hdd (get the most space you can afford, i like these right now...)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16822144417

video card , ati
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814131318
or nvidia
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814150098
(as long as it has 2 dvi inputs for your monitors)

lcd (i would get 2 of them)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16824116380

primesuspect

He is currently using a P4 2-something-or-other with 2gb of ram, and indesign crawls at times. He needs dual core. I use indesign and illustrator on a regular basis and dual cpus are a MAJOR improvement over single core (all Adobe creative suite products are heavily multithreaded), so I don't think a dual core system is overkill at all. The reason he is shopping for a new machine is because the slowdowns are making him less productive than he could be.

Sledgehammer70

well no one said it was a budget system... when I see "just looking for performance and reliability" I think okay he wants something mid range higher end. Hence why I suggested what I did.

I wouldn't waste my money on a 6600GT anymore not with a 7600GT on the market. Also Dual core is the way all new builds should be.. i mean you can get a 3800+ for dirt cheap and he already has a 170 Opty

phuschnickens

I guess I wasn't clear.. I am indeed on a budget... I would like to keep the machine in the $1000 to $1200 range. Thanks for clarifying that, primesuspect.

ryko

i don't use indesign, so it might be a little different. but in ps cs2 is a dual core really going to improve things that much? are you going to see a %50 improvement over his current setup? so something takes 24s to load instead of 17s? just doesn't seem worth the price premium to me. you can almost get a whole system for the price of an amd dual-core cpu.

and a 7600gt seems like a waste of $80 compared to the 6600gt--i mean are you really going to take advantage of any of the extrea features if not a gamer? all he needs is dual dvi.

muddocktor

The eSATA2 board I proposed has more features and is cheaper than the Asus board you picked, ryko. The ram you picked out is ok, but the ram I chose runs a lot better timings, which should give him about 5 % better performance. The case and psu you chose look to be decent.

phuschnickens, are you including a new monitor in your budget? If you have a decent monitor already, that gives you a little more wiggle room on upgraded equipment like an X2 4400 instead of the Opty 170 and ram with tighter timings.

primesuspect

Ryko, it's hard to explain. I've witnessed with my own eyes what he's experiencing. In Indesign, things just sort of ... lag.. When he's got a lot going on, a 30-40 page booklet open and he's doing text changes to pages worth of text, or dragging pages around, or doing other intensive operations, things ... pause ... for a moment. It's a pretty strong buzzkill. Yes, dualcore makes a huge difference in that regard - nothing you can measure quantitatively (like 50%, 35%, whatever), but more like a 'feeling' of smoothness, an aid to the flow that really makes working more pleasurable.

muddocktor

primesuspect wrote:

Ryko, it's hard to explain. I've witnessed with my own eyes what he's experiencing. In Indesign, things just sort of ... lag.. When he's got a lot going on, a 30-40 page booklet open and he's doing text changes to pages worth of text, or dragging pages around, or doing other intensive operations, things ... pause ... for a moment. It's a pretty strong buzzkill. Yes, dualcore makes a huge difference in that regard - nothing you can measure quantitatively (like 50%, 35%, whatever), but more like a 'feeling' of smoothness, an aid to the flow that really makes working more pleasurable.

Exactly, Prime. I first got hooked on multi processor systems with my first AMD dually and dual core is even better because you don't need to buy specialized boards and ram. Dual core/dual proc is just so much smoother running. A P4 with HT gives you a little of that smoothness, but it's not like having 2 physical cores running.

phuschnickens

docktor-
I didn't really plan on monitor(s) in the budget... I currently have one 21" CRT (the screen is big, but the whole unit is huge). It would be really nice to have dual monitors, as I frequently reading a Word file, and either typing or cutting and pasting to InDesign... If I could have the word file on one monitor, and InDesign on the other, it would save me a lot of desperately trying to remember what I just read, or what I just loaded into the clipboard, and what goes where etc.
So, the short of it.. a monitor was not included in the original budget, but maybe if the budget was more like $1400 and included one LCD (that I could place next to my CRT), that would be nice... Is there a good reason not to have one CRT and one LCD?

muddocktor

No, that's not a problem at all and for you I can see a lot of advantages in dual screens. For a LCD, I recently bought a Samsung Syncmaster 913T from Sam's Club for around $300 with tax (8%). It's a 19" 8ms response flat panel and has great colors, IMO. It also has both analog and digital inputs, but the digital cable isn't included. It does come with the analog cable, which is what I use, since it's on a kvm switch and is shared by 4 computers. i would highly recommend that LCD to you, unless someone else can come up with one for cheaper and has the same quality. BTW, a 19" LCD has around the same viewing area as a 20-21" CRT. It's native resolution is 1280X1024.

Mine also has no dead or stuck pixels and is the second Samsung LCD I've bought with no screen defects. The first one I bought (it's on my daughter's rig now) was the 913V, which is an analog only version of my new monitor.

primesuspect

If you want dual monitors, I know a place where you can get CHEAP CRTs

Leonardo

...he's got a lot going on, a 30-40 page booklet open and he's doing text changes to pages worth of text, or dragging pages around, or doing other intensive operations, things ... .Yes, dualcore makes a huge difference in that regard - nothing you can measure quantitatively....but more like a 'feeling' of smoothness, an aid to the flow that really makes working more pleasurable.

If you want dual monitors, I know a place where you can get CHEAP CRTs

I will NOT go back to single core CPUs or CRT monitors. Dual core is just superior. The simile I've used in previous threads: it's like the difference between a V8 and high-performance inline-4. The four may fast, but the V8 (dual core) just has smooth, instant torque as soon as you touch the accellerator.

Concerning TFT monitors - I've seen a lot of specials lately at Newegg for high quality 19" models for around $250. Every now and then, CompUSA gets serious about competing has big sales too. I think starting this Friday they'll have CRT or two at great prices.