Your dream Photo editing machine...

[charleswilliam3]

I am really curious to know the specs of your dream system.

Mac, Dell, IBM, Alien, custom?

what processor? what memory? what kind of screen (how big, resolution, etc?)?

What kind of extras?

Then I would love for you to give up the identity of the system you currently have?

why? I am in the market for a new system (possibly a notebook) and would like to hear what other photogs use or would like to use. btw, my budget is tight so be gentle...

[fraczekp]

Dream machine...

Well, I guess I am happy with home built Athlon 64 1.8 Ghz with 2 gigs RAM and 4 SATA hard drives RAID-ed. Topped with a GT6800 with dual DVI running 2 x 19 (1280 x 1024) inchers is really a nice PC based system. Of course a 300 GB backup USB drive is nice perhaps with a DVD burner to store your precious files off-site (optional of course).

I recall loading a 1.5 GB (!!) TIFF file into photoshop in less than a minute and the editing wasn't bad either. The RAID really seemed to help with loading large files into memory.

How much did it cost? Um... dunno, but I tell ya, for starters this seems to work rather well. Can't be that bad since I could afford it!!

[bhusk]

I have a home grown with the following specs
Amd Athlon 3200+ (not 64)
2GB PC3200 DDR
BFG Tech 256MB Nvidia 6800GT graphics card (I play games too)
2 36GB Western Digital Raptor 10k RPM SATA HDD's configured in a RAID0
1 60GB Deskstar 7200rpm IDE HDD for storage
cd/dvd burner

It's plenty fast for post processing.
It's pretty good for gaming too!

[djwixx]

What's the tight budget? HP are doing a 17" Pavilion notebook with a 2.2GHZ (AMD), with 1GB RAM, 2x100GB disks for $1,400 from Samsclub, or more from HP direct.