Trying to help my artist friend build a PC

TSR

I'm trying to put together a list of parts for a PC on newegg.com for a friend of mine who wants to go into graphic design and digital media at the local university.

She doesn't have a lot of money, so I am trying to find components on the less-expensive side that play well together so that she can still get a lot of performance out of the machine. It will be running Windows XP and use such programs as Maya and those in Adobe CS3.

Because she's stepping up from using an older Toshiba laptop, she will need everything to go with it, including a new monitor.

I would like to keep all of these parts under $1000 and cheaper than that if possible, since she is already planning to pony-up for a WACOM tablet and the necessary graphic design software.

Thanks in advance for any input or suggestions about how to go about this.

saltiness

Lots of RAM. That's one thing I'm finding out now working with tiff files in Photoshop. I'd say at least 2GB.

TSR

Yeah, definitely, 2GB is a given.

Any other tips?

Koekjes

I am taking classes in Maya and Photoshop right now and I can tell you that both are major resource hogs. Maya is by far the worst offender. Special effects and higher level texture work will not be visible until the image in rendered. This will take a lot of juice and a lot of time. The lighting computations alone are going to suck up the juice fast.

The three most important things you'll need are:

1. Memory - 2 GB is good but you may want to concider more. I am using 2 GB and I have noticed a quick rise in render times once I added lights to my scene. These render times got even longer after I added several layered textures.

2. CPU - Faster is better. If you're worried about cost stick with AMD. I've been using a AMD dual core chip with some good results. I think what I have is a 4800.

3. Hard drive size - Project files in Maya and Photoshop can get very big very fast. I saw a 400 GB drive for $99 on Newegg not to long ago. Check in the Western Digital section.

saltiness

On the contrary, for hard drives I would recommend Seagate. I've seen far better reliability out of their drives in addition to them being quieter than their WD or Maxtor contemporaries. Reliability is paramount when it comes to long-term, large-size projects.

ElectricTurtle

saltiness wrote: »

On the contrary, for hard drives I would recommend Seagate. I've seen far better reliability out of their drives in addition to them being quieter than their WD or Maxtor contemporaries. Reliability is paramount when it comes to long-term, large-size projects.

On the contra-contrary, I've worked in tech support jobs for my entire professional life, and I've seen many more dead or dying Seagates than WDs. I only use WDs for my own systems, and the one time that one of my own failed on me, the RMA process was smooth and fast.

My earliest hard drive failure memory was watching my one of my dad's Seagates fail. When I worked at SU Law School IT dept. (which had a hard on for Seagates) I found it almost humorous how often they kicked off. Every other technician in my circle of friends holds them in similar contempt... but of course nothing's worse than Maxtor.

If I didn't get a WD, it would be Hitachi or possibly Fujitsu if I were desperate.

Make sure whatever drive you get that it's SATA2. The hard drive is probably THE biggest performance bottleneck otherwise.

I would also recommend MSI motherboards, and for balancing quality with financial practicality get an Antec case with PSU. Avoid generic PSUs like the plague, and that includes any case manufacturer that you wouldn't buy PSUs from separately.

gneGne

A monitor might be the most important and probably real expensive if you want something professional.

saltiness

A color-accurate monitor is going to cost more than $1,000 alone (if it's an LCD, used CRTs can be had cheap) so it's not even something worth considering. A decent quality LCD (~$200) will be good enough for a student. I use my 2-year-old Dell 20" widescreen for my photoshop work and it's usually not too far off the $1,000 LaCie LCDs in my school's lab.

saltiness

ElectricTurtle wrote: »

saltiness wrote: »

On the contrary, for hard drives I would recommend Seagate. I've seen far better reliability out of their drives in addition to them being quieter than their WD or Maxtor contemporaries. Reliability is paramount when it comes to long-term, large-size projects.

On the contra-contrary, I've worked in tech support jobs for my entire professional life, and I've seen many more dead or dying Seagates than WDs. I only use WDs for my own systems, and the one time that one of my own failed on me, the RMA process was smooth and fast.

My earliest hard drive failure memory was watching my one of my dad's Seagates fail. When I worked at SU Law School IT dept. (which had a hard on for Seagates) I found it almost humorous how often they kicked off. Every other technician in my circle of friends holds them in similar contempt... but of course nothing's worse than Maxtor.

If I didn't get a WD, it would be Hitachi or possibly Fujitsu if I were desperate.

Make sure whatever drive you get that it's SATA2. The hard drive is probably THE biggest performance bottleneck otherwise.

I would also recommend MSI motherboards, and for balancing quality with financial practicality get an Antec case with PSU. Avoid generic PSUs like the plague, and that includes any case manufacturer that you wouldn't buy PSUs from separately.

Interesting. I guess it's just different strokes for different folks. I've had several Maxtors and WD's shit the bed. Seagates have never given me or anyone I know any problems. I still have an IBM(Hitachi) 40 gig from 7 years ago that I accidentally ripped a pin out of and it still works with the aide of some aluminum foil and scotch tape.

TSR

Awesome, thanks for all of the advice.

Right now I've got parts picked out for a system for her that's based around a Core 2 Duo 6320, (starts at 1.86 GHz, will be overclocking on a nice Gigabyte motherboard,) 2 gigs of G. Skill DDR2 RAM, a Seagate 320 GB SATA hard drive, and a 20-inch widescreen LCD that displays at 1680*1050.

Does this seem like a sound plan? Disregarding the argument about whether Seagate or WD hard drives are better, (I'm going with Seagate since I have one and trust the brand.)

TychoCelchuuu

I'm running Maya 7.0 and Photoshop CS2 on this computer right now. It's an old-ish computer: Pentium 4, 2.6 GHz + 800MHZ FSB courtesy of the ASUS P4P800 mobo, 1 gig of RAM, and a Radeon 9600. The hard drive is 7200RPM with an 8MB cache. Maya and CS2 (running simultaneously mind you) are sometimes a bit sluggish and once in a very blue moon one or the other will crash, but it's definitely workable. You really only need MEGA CRAZY SUPER POWER if you're screwing around with fluid dynamics, particle effects, paint effects, and gigantic-poly models all at the same time while you open up a bunch of gigantic textures in Photoshop, but 2 GB RAM would still probably be worth it just for the speed increase. I do mostly game art, not graphic design, but 2 GB and maybe a nice fast hard drive for the Photoshop swap file should really be enough to get by on. Obviously you could go for crazy smoking performance with better parts, but if she's short on cash, it's kind of a myth that you need a supercomputer to run Maya/PS.

Then again if she's going to be rendering caustics and GI and stuff, it's going to take eons on something like what I'm using. Also make sure that whatever 3d card you go with, Maya's fine with it. Alias|Wavefront, no, wait, discreet (dammit) is kind of bitchy and goes "olo you can only use t3h sup4r 1337 cards wif maya" but obviously my 9600 works just fine, and so will lots of others.

Core

I second the idea of a nice big widescreen lcd. I upgraded to a 23 inch widescreen and I'll never go back. I have so much more room to work with in Photoshop. And if she's going to be doing color correcting or anything like that you can buy a little device that will help you calibrate your monitor and printer. I think it was called the EyeOne. It worked pretty well for me, but like I said only get one if shes sure she will need a fairly accurate color on screen cause they can get a bit pricey.