Looking to setup a computer focused on Photo Editing.

[Ian]

One clarification. Once again, does photo editing require the service of a good graphics card ? Some say no, many say yes.

For photo editing the graphics card is just as important as the monoitor and together these two items are the single most important aspect of a quality photo editing system. Processor speed, amount of RAM and RAM speed are of secondary importance unless you are processing hundreds of large RAW files per session. (Read D2X NEF's, or MF RAW etc).

Photo editing is a 2D task so 3D performance is not needed, thus the latest and greatest gaming cards are definately not required. However, what is needed is fantastic colour accuracy and subtlety in the rendering engine. This leaves out all of the popular gaming cards as frankly their colour rendition is very ordinary to say the least.

When the above is taken fully in to account the only cards that live up to the requirements are Matrox, however they aren't very cheap, can be hard to source in some locations and are not good 3D performers, so gamers tend to hate them. However if you are after a noticable improvement in your on screen display of graphics, photo images etc then there is no other real choice at present.

 

[linse]

The DDR2 400 ram is super expensive man... I wonder if that 1GB is really that incredible. And fans, I was thinking of minimising the fans to keep noise down.

Have you ever considered AMD64? With Cool and Quiet, they run so much cooler and hence quieter than the Pentium4s. My friend's Pentium4 3.2GHz is driving him nuts because of the fan noise. Don't forget a decent quiet case. Do check out the Antec Sonata II.

 

[Minimalis]

I set a 40GB hddsk into 2 partitions of 20GB each as photoshop primary and secondary scratch disks. So far no probs, although it may be due to my RAM (2GB).