Building a budget PhotoShop computer

[joeyck]

Title says it all, the customer only does Photoshop and his athlon is holding him back needs a new workstation

I saw a couple reivews that showed a Core 2 Duo making light work out of a bunch of i7's, but also am skeptical of the core 2 duo because it is an out dating 775 platform, I am planning on getting the E8500 @ 200$

would this be a viable solution? I am also planning on a getting a gtx 460 768 since the Adobe suite likes the CUDA cores. Any advise would be lovely.

The budget is $1000 or less.

 

[Wetbehindtheears]

Don't use so not 100% sure, but I believe that PS is still not multithreaded so a decent CPU (E8500 is a great chip btw) with max Ram should be OK for (near) future. I've always thought it was more memory than CPU intensive, unless its changed drastically over the years altho you're right about GPU. Could always email Adobe (?) and ask them .....

 

[joeyck]

yea,, i can only find board that support only 8GIGs... so thats what I am going to order, maximum RAM, and yes the Photoshop still only thrives off of dual cores... the E8600 was dominating all but two of the i7's lol all the core 2 quads, pretty sick, but the e8600 is like 100$ more? for just like .2 MHz more? :S lol

 

[Wetbehindtheears]

8500's are generally good clockers so its down to a decent clocking mobo and max out the ram ...

Edit:

Look at Xeons as well... better clockers....

 

[JrRacinFan]

Athlon II x4 6XX with as much ram as you can afford with a large hdd & nvidia gpu(for CUDA).

EDIT:

For 1G, 1055T(am3) or X34xx(p55) based. Remember I'm a casual photoshop user ( look at specs) and I could use more ram but get by with 2x2GB.

 

[LAN_deRf_HA]

Seems to favor cores and threads, but that's just one feature. I'm pretty sure though I've seen it used in multicore cpu reviews for a few gens now. http://www.anandtech.com/bench/CPU/25