[sash]

hi, i'm shopping for a desktop and have a budget of between usd2k to 2.5k. I am a photography hobbyist so I will probably be using Photoshop at times to edit photos and also will be storing photos on my desktop. (I shoot RAW which means that each photo is about 10MB.) Otherwise, I watch movies off Youtube, do general word processing/research work/surfing/e-mail which wouldn't need much juice. I don't play games either. I've done some research and understand that I probably need at least 2G of RAM or as much as I can get and also as much hard drive as possible. I'm not too sure where to start but am eyeing the Dell XPS 420, XPS 630 and possibly the imac or a vaio desktop?

[kcihtred2]

well i run off a c2d e6550 at school with 2gb ram, so its not bad. now for the photoshop, to save you a little money try gimp. Its a free version of photoshop

http://www.pcworld.c...nloads/file/fid,23351-order,1-page,1/description.html

[smax013]

sash said:

hi, i'm shopping for a desktop and have a budget of between usd2k to 2.5k. I am a photography hobbyist so I will probably be using Photoshop at times to edit photos and also will be storing photos on my desktop. (I shoot RAW which means that each photo is about 10MB.) Otherwise, I watch movies off Youtube, do general word processing/research work/surfing/e-mail which wouldn't need much juice. I don't play games either. I've done some research and understand that I probably need at least 2G of RAM or as much as I can get and also as much hard drive as possible. I'm not too sure where to start but am eyeing the Dell XPS 420, XPS 630 and possibly the imac or a vaio desktop?

You will definitely want a lot of RAM. Photoshop eats up memory real fast, especially if you are doing higher end manipulations (various filters and such) on rather good sized photo files (such as RAW photos shot from a camera with a lot of megapixels). You will also benefit from multiple cores and/or multiple processors (if I recall correctly) in Photoshop. Any modern, reasonble, currenlty available Core 2 Duo will work, but the faster the processor, the faster it will rip through manipulations and such. Thus, it becomes a function of what you consider more valuable your time or your money when deciding how much more money to put in to a processor. If you are storing a lot of photos, then you will want lots of hard drive space, but it is rather easy to add additional hard drives to a desktop...whether internal drives (tougher for internal drives on the likes of an iMac) or external drives.



Point is that most likely any of the computers you listed will suffice. I would say that you should max out the memory of which everyone you get. If your budget for the desktop is $2000 to $2500 (US), then you should have little trouble getting a computer that will run Photoshop just fine.