Here's the deal then... I need to put together a dead quick PC, for the primary purpose of Pro-level photo editing and retouching. It's not for me, but I've been asked to take a look. Price isn't too much of an issue, but lets not get silly...
We're looking at throwing around several hundred megs of image data per file, so it needs a pretty powerful IO chain... I guess we're looking at:
* A Metric Shedload of quick RAM
* RAID SATA Setup - More interested in mirroring than striping, but if there are any decent controllers out there these days that'll do mirror + stripe (or other suitable RAID thingy - It's been a while since I looked), that'd be lovely
* A decent graphics subsystem - It's never going to be used for 3D (probably), but a decent graphics card would be best. If anyone knows of recommendations for photography work on either graphics card or display, that's be useful. I guess matrox is the way to go here.
* Reasonably quick processor, though that's probably less important than the IO stuff. Willing to take suggestions on multiple CPUs/cores/whatever. Don't care about 32 vs 64 bit, unless it's really important.
* As many USB ports as you can shake a stick at
* Needs to have firewire, though I guess that's pretty standard these days
* All the other normal "That'd be nice" bits... DVD writer, Gig ethernet, Drive bay card readers, USB missile batteries, blah blah blah.
Guess that's about it... I'm happy to build it meself from bits, or if anyone has OEM system recommendations, that'd be lovely too. Links to dabs/scan/whoever would be good, so I can be sure of getting the right bits.
I realise that I should probably be able to do all this myself, but it's been so long since I bought PC bits that I have no idea what's what these days. My pre-LAN hard drive upgrade is about as much as I can manage
And seeing as I offered prizes, the most useful participants get beer at the LAN. Assuming you're 18+ and so forth. If not, you can have Dr Pepper. In case of dispute, the monkets descision is final. Blah Blah Blah.
