I'm a designer and developer and I haven't bought a new desktop PC in ages, so I'm a bit out of touch about what I ought to be spending my money on. Any advice on a solid spec that will be reasonably future-proof but won't cost the Earth? Please don't try to sell me anything. I won't be buying a new machine till later this year anyway unless this one breaks down sooner rather than later. I need to be able to use Photoshop and occasionally Premiere, so some graphics power is important. Aside from that I'll be using SQL Management Studio or MySQL Workbench quite frequently, I'll have Outlook/Word/Excel and a text editor open all day long plus (obviously) multiple web browsers running concurrently. Finally a few other apps like FTP. ICQ and Spotify. I'd really welcome any recommendations - particularly the size, make and model of CPU, memory and graphics card. And of course: why.
I expected you to have a pot-load of suggestions by now. But since you don't, I'll throw in my two cents' worth. Web development is neither rocket science nor gaming, so you don't need the latest and greatest and its attendant higher cost. Look at boxes that are a step down from the top. Do go with multiple core, 64bit processors. AMD or Intel, either one is fine. Memory is cheap, so fill your MB. Spend money on the video card and on your monitor. If you can afford it, get a 2560×1600px monitor. That'll allow you to tile four browsers, your text editor and an xterm. If you don't get the big monitor, at least get a graphics card that will support one. Monitor prices keep coming down, so this is good future proofing. have fun in your shopping, gary
Hey good to know that we both are in the same position.. Finally after lot of RnD and googling I have planned to build this below configuration AMD FX 8 cores 4ghz processor with Asus Crosshair VFormula motherboard, 8Gb DDR3 Corsair ram, and 2 gb graphic card(I think will go with nvidida graphic card) and other standard components like cabinet, smps, DVD or blue ray writer. A Microsoft wireless keyboard and mouse( which comes as a combo). And comming to monitor would prefer any brand's "IPS display" of some 24-27 inch size. I feel its a good investment and mainly this configuration will run any software and most of the high end games also(if you thought of playing some games some day ) Cheers
I'm trying to cultivate the opinion that it *is* rocket science in order to put my prices up enough to be able to afford this new PC! Thanks for the reply, Gary. I currently use two monitors at different resolutions and different degrees of brightness, contrast and colour balance which I find makes it easier to get a quick view of how a web page might look on different browsers and screens. I haven't bought a new monitor in a really long time so I haven't given that much thought, either. I definitely think I want to continue using two.
Thanks for doing some of the spade work for me, onlineworkers. So, tell me a bit about how you concluded this was the best set-up. Why the Asus Crosshair VFormula motherboard in particular? And how much do you think you're going to end up paying (and where will you spend your money)? IPS monitors look pretty expensive, like around twice the price. What do you think makes it worth the money? On the one hand, I can see the value in getting the "true" colour but on the other hand it's probaby more useful to be able to see the same thing your average website visitor will see.
Yeah, but the necessary 'computing power' is in your head, not a piece of machinery. It simply does not take gamer power to run the apps you mentioned. The speed and memory in the run of the mill commodity boxes is even sufficient for your graphics stuff. To be frank, that's silly. Just how the hell do you even know how much to miscalibrate. Whatever does it give you? Are you going to screw up your colors and contrast to accommodate some unknown, aberrant, imagined monitor? Today's digital monitors are quite stable as compared to old analog monitors with their gawd-awful drift, and are generally well calibrated out of the box. Two screens in crossover mode is a great idea for increasing your screen real estate at a low cost. See comments above. cheers, gary