Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Building a PC....

Eh, I wouldn't worry about part compatibility. Just choose good parts.

My opinion is that if you are looking for a home or small business class machine, it's tough to save by building unless you really scrutinize the parts and wait for deals.

However, if you are a gamer, have serious graphics needs or like to play with over clocking then it it is worth your while to build with the components that best match your needs and budget. It can really deep dive you into research mode though as it leads down a path of really having to research what makes motherboards, memory and other parts different from one another and also which ones play nice together and which may not.

Fun though if you are into that sort of thing. Nothing like that feeling of excitement vs. fear when you have to flip the switch on the power supply for the first time to see if it will actually work or set off the smoke alarm.

I was just pricing out a Dell XPS 9100 setup. It had 6GB Tri Channel DDR3 SDRAM at 1333MHz- 3 DIMMs and has 6 slots, so I could add another 12GB kit (4GBx3 DDR3 PC3-12800) from Crucial despite it being a different speed?

Crucial doesn't offer any 1333MHz RAM for the Dell....

I'd try very hard to keep the speed matched, just different makes are OK.

Wait until you get the thing, and see what brand RAM they used. Then search for those parts.

I remember I spent a lot of time reading the reviews on the newegg site.

Thanks, Chris.... that makes sense.

I've spent the last hour looking at video cards. They offer the GeForce G310, the Radeon HD 5670, 5870 and 5970.

Looking through reviews, it seems as though the GeForce and the 5670 are nothing great, and the 5870 and 5970 are overkill.

But it's hard to say, because most of the reviews are for gaming, and this will be used for Photoshop, Lightroom, & Portrait Professional only on a system that will likely have 12GB of RAM.

I'm not sure whether I'm over-looking or under-looking, but I get the feeling that I wish they had a card between those four....!

Hey, here's a question: I haven't been concerned with processor speed as much as RAM and the video card (many retouched photos, saved as a PSD with layers, run 350MB to 700MB in size). But maybe a faster processor negates some of the RAM and video card needs?

I don't want to end up with an "unbalanced" system.

My choices are an i7-930 (included), i7-960 ($470 add'l) or i7-990X ($1,000 add'l.... can't imagine i need THAT!).

Any thoughts on where I should put resources for a PS computer? Processor, memory or video card?

I put the GeForce GTX260 in mine. I've been satisfied with it, but it's been overkill for what I've needed.

Get an nVidia GTX 285 video card. That's the cheapest one that will provide the most compatible acceleration with Adobe's products.

What ever processing is not picked up by the GPU, which is still quite a lot, will fall on the CPU. So if you don't like waiting for filters to run upgrade the CPU. If you're patient keep the stock model.

RAM will allow you to have more, larger files open at one time before starting to swap to the to hard disk. When you're swapping you'll hit about a 1000x speed penalty. So make sure you have enough RAM. 6 GB should be enough, 12 is definitely enough. (32 GB is insane, and anyone who puts that much in a home machine shouldn't be trusted.)

Somehow I get the feeling you have 32GB in your home machine.