| Photography Forum: Photography Help Forum: |
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Q. Custom PC Specifications
Asked by Nuno Silva
(K=335) on 7/31/2007
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Nuno da Silva Photography
Hi there,
This is my third forum on the subject of Custom PC's.
Please see the other two below.
My question is simple, can you tell me what would constitute the best specifications for a Custom PC and for a photographer who will be dealing with wedding photography and portraiture.
Please mention anything you think will be helpful from Motherboards, Memory, Hard Drives (sizes), Screen (1 or 2 and sizes), Graphic Cards, PSU,Etc...Etc...
Anything you would want to add will be helpful to build the perfect machine for the photographic needs.
Thank you very much. :)
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Jeroen Wenting
(K=25317) - Comment Date 7/31/2007
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I'm not current on current production types, but some guidelines:
- buy a motherboard with as many RAM slots and PCI slots as you can get.
- it should also have 4 SATA connectors and 2 or 3 IDE connectors for plugging in lots of harddisks, DVD burners, and other accessoiries.
- Get a dual or quad core (depending on your budget) CPU. Anything currently on the market is plenty fast enough to last for years (and you can always decide to replace it with a faster one next year).
- memory, the fastest that will fit the motherboard. At least 2GB, 4 if you have the money (else save up and plug in another 2 in a few months, it's easy to do yourself)
- harddisks, 2 250GB disks. I prefer slower ones myself as they're less likely to fail (and current harddisks have a disturbingly poor MTBF compare to only a few years ago).
- screen. I'd go for a 19" TFT. You can always add another if you feel you should have more screen realestate. Whether you go for regular or widescreen is personal, I'm so used to the normal 4:3 that wide screens always look a bit weird to me.
- graphics card. For photoediting any midrange card on the market from NVidia or ATI should do well enough. Buy one of the major brands though, Asus or XFX for example, as they're higher quality and offer better customer service.
- PSU. The person building the system should know what to get. In general, bigger is better. I rather like Antec cases, which come complete with PSUs.
Be worried about cooling the thing (though with the current summer you could just put it in a watertight container and float it in the cellar).
Again the person building the thing will know what to do. In the extreme you could invest in water cooling. Highly effective, but very expensive. For most purposes adding extra fans should be enough if you have a good case.
Of course you should include a built-in cardreader for your CF cards. Cheap and easy to use, and you don't loose them like you do external readers.
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Nuno Silva
(K=335) - Comment Date 7/31/2007
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Hi Jeroen, thank you for the input.
What about the screen, are there any specific things i should be looking for since i would imagine is one of the most important aspects of editing faithfully an image? Specifications like Glossy or Matt screen?
Resolution? any other important thing to remember when comparing Screens? Also in terms of processor, i am inclined to go dual core and not quad simply because of price but in terms of dual core would you go for anything above 2.33Mhz or it doesn't really matter?
TRhank you very much once again for your help.
:)
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Jeroen Wenting
(K=25317) - Comment Date 8/1/2007
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If you go for a midrange to top model from a major brand, there's precious little difference in quality between them.
Remember that there are only a very few (2 I think, maybe 3 by now) manufacturers of TFTs, everyone else just buys the components from them and packs them in a fancy plastic case.
The cheap brands buy older models still in production or stock or accept lower quality control runs from the production line (thus higher incidence of dead pixels and other problems), which is how they can sell more cheaply.
Resolution between brands is pretty much the same for models of the same age, as it is dictated by the screen manufacturing process (the size and spacing of the light emitting elements) rather than in CRTs by the precision of the electrical system which was largely a QA issue (as well as choice of materials, thus economics).
What resolution you're comfortable with is personal, most people wouldn't want something higher than 1280x1024 on a 17" screen, maybe 1600x1200 at most on a 19" screen. Anything higher than that and it becomes too small to see well, which is uncomfortable and can lead to migraines when working for prolonged periods.
My current machine is a Pentium D 3.2 with 2GB RAM.
Pretty spiffy machine, Bibble usually takes just a few seconds to decode a 10MP NEF.
Slowed down sadly by what appears to be a memory leak in Bibble.
Gloss looks nice in the store, but can easily lead to a lot of glare and reflections off the screen when there's direct light falling on it.
If you're only going to use it in position where there's no sunlight that can fall onto the screen, it's fine.
If there is, matte would be a better choice (plus you don't see fingerprints and stains on it so easily).
With laptops of course you have no choice, they I think all come with glossy screen these days to make them look good in the demos.
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