A Phenom II x4 or x6 is a pretty monstrous machine for Photoshop, inDesign, and general computing. I'm not a AMD fanboy at all, but I just built a Phenom x4 3.0ghz server and for 3d renders(very stressful) it's 3.5x as fast as my core2duo and that's while running as a LAMP, Samba, uPnP media server, and Linux software raid in the background. Benchmarks are benchmarks, but in real world use I'd personally notice more money in my pocket than completing photoshop actions/filters 1-10 secs faster. Besides, any machine will be considered slow in the blink of an eye.
All of this advice looks good for building a machine on my own or through a third party. Any suggestions as to third parties to work with? What about going through the traditional manufacturers, such as HP, Gateway, etc.? Seems like there's a sales war going on these days, or is that an illusion?
Mike
Oh for sure. The i5-750 is kind of at a sweet spot now. It's more efficient in some areas than the AMDs so it's about 15% better per clock on rendering, video conversion, zip/unzip etc. That makes it a good photoshop processor as the loads are similar. It's $200 now so a bit of a deal. As it's photoshop more cores from an i7's hyperthreading are not really useful, four is plenty.
An AMD machine can be easily as good, there's not much in it.
Until you try a little OCing. The i5-750s do 4 GHz quite easily and at that speed photoshop ... is fun.
I like to build mine but if you are careful and have the hardware you need well understood you can make some pretty good deals.
OT ... here's a deal:
http://www.kitco.com/charts/livegold.html
But probably only till tuesday/wednesday ...
From "Beyond the Fringe" :
" Now is the end. Perish the world"
Bookmarks