Hey guys,
I'm usually hanging out in the "photography on the net.com" forums as that's my area of expertise... I answer a lot of newcomers questions there, so I'm posting here banking on the "pay it forward" philosophy.
My last custom build was done back in.. oh.... 2002 I think it was? I ordered seperate parts on eBay and slapped together a configuration consisting of a P4 3.2, 1GB of dual channel OCZ platinum, 0-Raid 10,000 rpm raptors (x2) .. and, well, i'm no gamer, so a basic agp vid card.
Not being in the market for so long, I've lost touch with advancements made in the pc market. I've got a 21 megapixel camera and my system just doesn't cut it when it comes to heavy duty photoshop editing. Obviously, my RAM factor is NOT helping one bit!
After having spent thousands in photography equipment, there's a liiiitle bit of room in the budget left for upgrading the pc. Since I have a decent case, 500w PS, DVD-RW-DL, 7.1 sound card, 24" LCD, bluetooth dongle/board/mouse, I figure there's not a lot of expense to worry about for some performance boost. I have such little time, and with a lot of searching and googling I came up with the following selections:
I chose the Core 2 E8500 because of some decent photoshop benchmarks in the charts area. I know photoshop doesn't support quad core, and I'm willing to invest in the best value for the present time knowing that a full upgrade may necessary in as little as a year or two (when quad core is THEN supported)
Intel Core 2 Duo Desktop Processor E8500 3.16GHz
OCZ 4GB (2x2GB) DDR2 PC2-8000 1000MHz Platinum XTC
ASUS P5QL PRO Motherboard/IntelP43/DDR2 1066/6SATA
(1) Ok, so like I said, I've been out of the game for a long while.. don't have a clue about the performance these configs can deliver compared to what I'm using now. While this is a cheap upgrade, will this be like a night vs. day comparison? Will my productivity go through the roof? Things are quite slow now. Even some web video stutters (on a 512mb AGP nvidia card)
(2) Does AGP even exist anymore or do is everything pci express?
(3) Should I look at a DDR3 based chipset for the few extra hundred i7 would cost?
I'm confident there are a lot of knowledgeable people out there to help bring me back to present day computing! Thanks in advance!
I'm usually hanging out in the "photography on the net.com" forums as that's my area of expertise... I answer a lot of newcomers questions there, so I'm posting here banking on the "pay it forward" philosophy.
My last custom build was done back in.. oh.... 2002 I think it was? I ordered seperate parts on eBay and slapped together a configuration consisting of a P4 3.2, 1GB of dual channel OCZ platinum, 0-Raid 10,000 rpm raptors (x2) .. and, well, i'm no gamer, so a basic agp vid card.
Not being in the market for so long, I've lost touch with advancements made in the pc market. I've got a 21 megapixel camera and my system just doesn't cut it when it comes to heavy duty photoshop editing. Obviously, my RAM factor is NOT helping one bit!
After having spent thousands in photography equipment, there's a liiiitle bit of room in the budget left for upgrading the pc. Since I have a decent case, 500w PS, DVD-RW-DL, 7.1 sound card, 24" LCD, bluetooth dongle/board/mouse, I figure there's not a lot of expense to worry about for some performance boost. I have such little time, and with a lot of searching and googling I came up with the following selections:
I chose the Core 2 E8500 because of some decent photoshop benchmarks in the charts area. I know photoshop doesn't support quad core, and I'm willing to invest in the best value for the present time knowing that a full upgrade may necessary in as little as a year or two (when quad core is THEN supported)
Intel Core 2 Duo Desktop Processor E8500 3.16GHz
OCZ 4GB (2x2GB) DDR2 PC2-8000 1000MHz Platinum XTC
ASUS P5QL PRO Motherboard/IntelP43/DDR2 1066/6SATA
(1) Ok, so like I said, I've been out of the game for a long while.. don't have a clue about the performance these configs can deliver compared to what I'm using now. While this is a cheap upgrade, will this be like a night vs. day comparison? Will my productivity go through the roof? Things are quite slow now. Even some web video stutters (on a 512mb AGP nvidia card)
(2) Does AGP even exist anymore or do is everything pci express?
(3) Should I look at a DDR3 based chipset for the few extra hundred i7 would cost?
I'm confident there are a lot of knowledgeable people out there to help bring me back to present day computing! Thanks in advance!