Seeking Advice: Midrange optimized for photoshop

[serf bored]

Howdy,

I have a friend who is looking to set up a new build, primarily for Photoshop. He is trying to hit the lower part of the midrange on price. Budget for the hardware (just what's in the case, not the monitor, keyboard, etc.) is $1200.00. He would like about 1 TB of storage, but can work with less if it provides enough performance increase.

Operating system will be XP Pro, 32 bit. He'd like to be able to upgrade at a later date, but the budget will not allow one of the 64 bit OS versions at the moment.

Not looking for anything specific when it comes to case aesthetics, mostly interested in functionality and cooling.

Thanks in advance for your help with this balancing act.

 

[omicron_15]

From the benchmarks I have seen photoshop still does not benefet enough from quad cores to warrent the use of a quad core over a wolfdale. You will see more of a performance increase from running at a higher clock speed then running at lower clock but with quad cores.

8400@3000 > 6600@2400

If you feel like overclocking I still belive the wolfdales will provide a better price/performance for photoshop.

The biggest performance boost would be for him to get a velociraptor as his main hard drive, he would need to load any projects he was going to work onto that drive. His load times would be decreased signifigently. Using a large secondary drive in the 500-750 MB range for his long term storage would give him both speed and storage room.

I would suggest then.

Velociraptor $300
500-750 HD $100

E8400 $200
P35 Mobo with sata II support $100

4GB DDR2 800 2x2 $100

ATI 4850 $150

Quality PS No more then 600W $150
Case $100


total 1,200