Computer upgrading

[tintin40]

as much memory as the board will allow

graphics card - yes

windows 7 - dont know

bluray - er... why?

I've got a bluray on the main/only telly. I'm rarely in control of this so another place to watch a movie would be handy, most of my rentals from lovefilm are bluray now.

Plus blueray is the future (for a while). Saw off the other format.
We did what your doing with the wifes pc laptop new HD, RAM plus some anti virus for a lot less than buying a new pc. Keep her happy till uni finishes .

 

[kaiser]

as much memory as the board will allow

graphics card - yes

windows 7 - dont know

bluray - er... why?

I've got a bluray on the main/only telly. I'm rarely in control of this so another place to watch a movie would be handy, most of my rentals from lovefilm are bluray now.

Plus blueray is the future (for a while). Saw off the other format.
We did what your doing with the wifes pc laptop new HD, RAM plus some anti virus for a lot less than buying a new pc. Keep her happy till uni finishes .

They do seem to be developing alot slower than they did, I think(?). Though I upgradeed my last PC for what must have been about 6 years.

 

[kaiser]

3GB of Ram will do, probably the best upgrade.

Graphics card upgrade, not required for Photoshop/2D graphics work, it won't offload any of the work from the CPU to the GPU.

Widescreen monitor, yep nice, dual monitors just as nice, until you get to bluray, and for full HD you'll want a monitor capable of at least 1920x1080.

Bluray. Add this and it's time to upgrade your graphics card to something that can handle H.264 without a hitch, pretty much anything modern.

Nice one

 

[kaiser]

If you're going to upgrade your system,dont forget to upgrade the power supply.
Not just for a bigger GPU etc,if you buy cheap and it blows,then it will fry everything in your system :shock: mega replacement costs :shock:

And you've got to get one of these

Knowing your penchant for gaming I guess this is a screamer?

 

[JeRkY]

If you're going to upgrade your system,dont forget to upgrade the power supply.
Not just for a bigger GPU etc,if you buy cheap and it blows,then it will fry everything in your system :shock: mega replacement costs :shock:

And you've got to get one of these

Knowing your penchant for gaming I guess this is a screamer?

9800 is old hat these days.

 

[FluffyChicken]

Build yourself a new system at this rate, it can be done quite cheaply and getting a graphics card that will handle the resolution of BlueRay and be off loaded to the GPU is not expensive.

Or just blow it and get a cheap PC, if you don't want to build it, with Windows 7 thrown in.. Saves you that money as well.


WinDVD requirements push it past the P4 3.4 of the non-BluRay version

WinDVD Pro 2010

* Intel® Core™ II Duo T2400 1.83 GHz, AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ 2.0 GHz or higher recommended
* Windows 7, Windows XP SP3 or Windows Vista SP1 (recommended)
* 1 GB of RAM
* NVIDIA G8x and above; AMD M7x and above; Intel GM45/G45 series (Windows Vista/Windows 7). Minimum 128 MB VRAM; recommended 256 VRAM
* 250 MB of free disk space
* Windows-compatible sound card
* Windows-compatible optical drive for DVD/AVCHD playback
* Windows-compatible BD drive for BD playback
* Internet connection required for online features (BD-Live)
though PowerDVD may be able to just about handle it
http://www.cyberlink.com/products/power ... en_US.html

Though my similar power system with high end GeForce AGP card doesn't like HD media and that compressed stuff not full on BluRay Full-HD resolution.

Though for BluRay, I'm not surem but don't you need a complete connection (Graphics/Monitor) on a PC to be copy protection approved else it'll just drop the resolution to DVD style ?

 

[Xesh]

3GB of Ram will do, probably the best upgrade.

Graphics card upgrade, not required for Photoshop/2D graphics work, it won't offload any of the work from the CPU to the GPU.

Widescreen monitor, yep nice, dual monitors just as nice, until you get to bluray, and for full HD you'll want a monitor capable of at least 1920x1080.

Bluray. Add this and it's time to upgrade your graphics card to something that can handle H.264 without a hitch, pretty much anything modern.

Agreed.

With image processing the latest 3D graphics card will have little to no effect on the speed of something like Photoshop.

Stick in as much RAM as the board will take and uprate the CPU, as that will make some difference.

Even better would be to upgrade Windows to a 64-bit version so you can go beyond the memory limit of the 32-bit versions.

Another thing: have you tried GIMP? It's got almost as many features as Photoshop but it's free. If you haven't seriously used either program then it won't make much difference what you get if you have to learn from scratch anyway.

 

[dyna-ti]

In case it hasnt been mentioned but a 32 bit system will only handle 3 GB of ram,above that needs a 64 bit

 

[Neil]

Another thing: have you tried GIMP? It's got almost as many features as Photoshop but it's free. If you haven't seriously used either program then it won't make much difference what you get if you have to learn from scratch anyway.

+1 for gimp.

Not the most intuitive program to use, but plenty of features. And as you say, you can't beat the price.

 

[FluffyChicken]

Photoshop will benefit from the 3D cards, CS4 takes advantage of the general purpose use of them now and accelerates some of it's features, again nothing you should worry about though. They do however enhance and help out in other thing and may become used more as time advances, nothing you'll need to worry about given the low speed CPU you have

Really your system is old and a cheap motherboard, Core2 based or Athlon X2 245 and some DDR2 memory may well give you a better overall system for Blu-Ray and it'll not cost a lot especially if you need to use DDR memory for the upgrade (unless you cannot get it second hand for cheap).


Just for photoshop, then you'll be fine with what you have now



e.g.
GA-MA74GM-S2H motherboard, AMD X2 245 CPU and 4GB of Crucial DDR2 RAM = £155 at ebuyer
(no idea how good the board is but has plenty of stars next to it)

or

DDR PC3200 2x1GB (2GB) if you board has enough room to handle it = £54 (ebuyer)
DDR PC2700 1x2GB (2GB) if you need to use a single stick = £108 at crucial (ebuyer don't sell them anymore)