System for Graphic Designing.

You really need a budget of twice that. With Adobe utilizing 3D acceleration, and all the more RAM the better. You should consider an extra hard drive to use as a scratch disk etc...

I know that you stated you aren't fond of AMD, but I have both a intel Q9550 and an AMD 955 BE system. An AMD system will save you at least $200 and serve you well.

You will need a graphics card, and all the RAM you can afford. Being budget minded I would recommend:

AMD Phenom II X61055 T
8 GB DDR3 RAM
890 chipset motherboard
ATI HD 5850 or GTX 460 Graphics card.
64 bit OS

Using particle systems for foliage in 3D max still lugs my system down.

hey thanks,
you are right,I need to increase the budget.  

what is the difference between 32bit and 64bit os ? do I need different hardware for 32bit and 64bit ?

why should I go for AMD Phenom II x6 1055T instead of intels i5-760 ? Difference in rate is only $5. Is it because AMD Phenom II x6 1055T has 6 cores ? the performance benchmark shows i5 is better at most of the things. : http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/147?vs=109

Thanks

32-bit will only recognise <3GB of RAM, where as 64-bit supports quite a bit more. So if you're getting 8gb RAM, you'll need 64-bit.

Some programs may not support 64-bit, but this should be rare now as win7 has been out for a while and is mostly backward compatible with 32-bit software


And for graphic design, the more cores the better, so the 1055T is probably much better suited to your needs. It's also better for multi-tasking

Darkpagey beat me to it. the 760 lynnfield does not have hypertheading, so you have 4 threads vs 6 threads, and for the use of more than 3.25 GB of RAM 64 bit OS is required. I am using dated information. The price of P55 motherboards have dropped, as well as the price of intel i5 and i3 chips. It is much closer in price now, so that argument is fairly mute. I thought that the major savings would come from the motherboard, that is no longer the case, when I was shopping motherboards months ago. My apologies, for my knee jerk post.

My wife is a Visual Technology major and is looking at Adobe CS5 design suite. Her solution was to buy a Mac book Pro, a little spendy for my taste, but she is happy. I have a feeling that as she progresses in her schooling she is going to be wanting more processing power.

She doesn't do any 3D modeling, but I do a fair share in architectural renderings and animation for prospective customers. That is where you will need the extra graphics power and RAM. It kill me not to have a fluid Viewport to work with and the second machine comes in handy to pass off rendering to, as I continue to work.

I see no reason not to go with Intel, if that is what you prefer. I just thought that a $400 budget was a little unrealistic for the resources you would need to be satisfied in your machine and workflow.