emmdubbs

Alright felow technofiliacs...im' gonna be going to college in the fall, and i'm gonna need to make/purchase a computer that's going to be able to handle mulitple tasks of Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. without bogging down. Any suggestions on a machine to build keeping under a grand if possible?

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bltzkriegmcanon

Just about any PC running at 1.5 Ghz and above with a decent (512 MB PC2100 or more) is gonna be able to run Photoshop/Illustrator or anything like that like a damn dream. I mean, opening times for those Adobe products should NOT exceed 3 seconds unless your computer is running some serious bloatwarez in the background.

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jvwgtr

I agree, those apps should run fine on a multi-ghz processor...dump more memory in to get better performance.
I'd also plan on adding an extra hard drive, since Photoshop likes to have its scratch file on a separate drive.
I don't know if it makes that much difference, but you might a separate drive to back up your art, anyway.

And get a good tablet thingy!

theburner

What is your budget teknotoeknee? My wife does video editing and photoediting (sometimes at the same time!) but the system I built for that can more than handle it.
1GB Ram is a minimum, decent video card (you don't need to spend more than $200 here), Raid 0 drive setup would help also. Let us know a budget and we can offer some specific suggestions. I love spending other peoples money!

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emmdubbs

burner...i was tryin to keep it around a grand or 1500 or so if it's possible...the cheeper the better.

__________________
"You're not your job. You're not how much money you have in the bank. You're not the car you drive. You're not the contents of your wallet. You're not your fucking khakis. You're the all-singing, all-dancing crap of the world." - Tyler Durden

Redjake

You don't need much

Since you are on a budget, we'll go with AMD:

Abit NF7-S Motherboard
Barton 2500+ Processor
1 GB PC2700 RAM
Radeon 9600XT Graphics Card
160 GB Maxtor Hard Drive
Generic Case
Generic Keyboard & Mouse
Lite-On DVD-RW
Lite-On CD-RW



Pick your brands for all of those that don't have one. Should be right around 1000 bucks if you choose www.newegg.com.

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theburner

Redjake.. Here is my pentium version:
IC7-II Mobo
2.8 Pentium NORTHWOOD HT
1GB Matched Pair Corsair XMS
Radeon 9600XT
2x 120 GB Samsung SATA in RAID 0
Generic Case
Logitech Wireless KB/M
LG Electronics Multi-Format DVD-RAM Burner
Reuse Current CD/CD Burner (if have)
Reuse Floppy if Have

May be a bit over budget , but you can get it all from Newegg. That is about the only thing I think the PC Community here at TFP agrees 100% on.. Newegg.com

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strife

w0rd on newegg.com

If you have the time, scope out slickdeals.net for decent posts about discounted merchandise. It's not for computers, but they have a lot of tech stuff that gets posted. Try to keep costs down a lil bit.

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strife

scavengertype

Maybe if you're running Photoshop 4 and Illustrator 6. The new CS versions (especially Illustrator) take a good 5-10 secs to start up on my Athlon XP 2000+ with 512 PC2700.

Lasereth

Damn, I'm running Photoshop 6.0 and it starts up in about 3-4 seconds. It started up that fast on my 400 MHz K6-2 with 256 MB of RAM also. I'm running an Athlon XP 2500+ with 768 MB PC2700 right now, and it doesn't open any faster than the K6-2.

-Lasereth

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theburner

Lasereth.. I increased my load times by about 20-40% by going Raid 0 on my main drives. If I had been smart about it I would have gotten a couple of lower capacity Raptors, but bought some 7200 120GB Samsungs. Still, a Raid 0 setup on your boot disk does help load times out. Just make sure to Flash your Bios if you have an IC7-Max3. The intel Raid Chip ships with a bios that doesn't recognize some drives out of the box. Something to do with the timing of the drive.

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bltzkriegmcanon

Yeah, I was using Photoshop 6 as well, and on a brand-new, non-bloatware infested setup like I was discussing, you can bust out photoshop in about 3 seconds.

__________________
What do you say to one last showdown?
- Ocelot, Metal Gear Solid 3

The password is "Who are the Patriots?" and "La-Li-Lu-Le-Lo." "La-Li-Lu-Le-Lo." Gotcha.
- The Colonel and Snake, Metal Gear Solid 3

Eric640

Unless you are going to do serious 3D modeling or something... you could get by on a pretty cheap machine.

My mother "learned" illustrator\photoshop on a 200 mhz Pentium Pro.

She is a very patient person though


You don't really need raw processor power for 2D drawing, what you will need is a lot of RAM. Especially if you plan to run multiple instances of Photoshop.

...and a fast and reliable harddrive, (or two for backup purposes) and definitley a CD burner.

The problem is that this is the exact opposite setup that most "cheapie" PC's are now a days. They like to shove the latest procesor into a machine with as little memory and peripherals as they can get away with.

Graphics Tablets are not cheap either. If you get a large one you may find yourself spending nearly as much on that as the PC itself. So keep that in mind if you think you will need one.