Camera Labs

Motherboard= Micro Atx Gigabyte GA-MA69GM-S2H $ 50.00
CPU= AMD Athlon 64 X2 6400+ Windsor 3.2GHz Socket AM2 $ 120.00
Hard Drives=2 Western Digital 500 gig drives $ 70.00 each
Memory=4 gigs OCZ PC 6400 ram $ 65.00
Case+Psu=Aspire X-QPACK2-NW-BK/500 X-Qpack2 Micro ATX Case with 500-Watt power supply $115.00
OS=Windows vista Home Premium $ 130.00
Grande Total= $ 620.00 CAD

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Nikon D700+Nikon D-80 + Nikon SB 900 Flashgun+Lumiquest Ultrasoft softbox + Nikon 50mm F 1.8 + Tamron 28-75mm F 2.8 + Sigma 12-24mm F 4.5-5.6 + Sigma 70-200mm F 2.8 + Sigma 150-500 F 5-6.3 Manfrotto 190XPROB tripod+Manfrotto 3265 Joystick Head+Gorillapod SLR-Zoom+Crumpler 7 million dollar home bag+ Crumpler Karachi Outpost Backpack
http://www.kristymacleodphotography.com/

No video card and no monitor?

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PhilipGoh.com

The motherboard has an integrated graphics card, one of the better ones as wel, see:
http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/Products/Mot ... uctID=2579

Seems to be a rather good PC for the price

I would have gotten a cheap video card since photoshop CS4 now takes advantage of them. Other than that it's a good price I think.

Integrated video is always going to be a lot worse than a cheap video card because it shares your RAM. When you get a dedicated video card it has it's own fast video ram and processor. Takes a load off the rest of the system.

Having read some reviews of CS4, it appears that using the lower end cards is not such a good idea as using a cheap card can actually be slower than the CPU. The program come into its own when you use a decent video card with it.

Mark

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Canon EOS 40D / EF-S 17-85mm IS / EF 50mm f/1.8 / My Flickr

I guess that could be true. Are you saying that the GPU features are turned off if no video card is present? If that's true it would be best to just use integrated. I've got an 8800GTS so I'm really loving CS4, but I haven't tried it on my laptop which only has integrated graphics.

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I mean that using a low end GPU will be slower than using the CPU without a using a dedicated GPU. To get the speed benefits it appears that you need to have a decent GPU.

See this review: http://arstechnica.com/reviews/apps/ado ... view.ars/4

In particular: "Another limitation: GPU acceleration affects drawing speed. You will find that drawing is slower than in CS3 if you have a weak GPU, and the computer is under a heavy load. I discovered this while doing 3D renders in the background on a Mac Pro with an Nvidia GeForce 7300 GT. Brush drawing was slow, and when I restarted with GPU acceleration disabled, it was faster than with it on. I did some testing on my MacBook Pro, and the difference wasn't as noticeable, so it looks like the crappy Mac Pro GPU was to blame. The lesson: get as beefy a 3D card as you can afford, because it will pay off in the long run. "

Mark

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Canon EOS 40D / EF-S 17-85mm IS / EF 50mm f/1.8 / My Flickr

Alternately - instead of sweating over a possible GPU bottleneck - you can just use an earlier version of Photoshop.

I still use CS2 I don't see anything CS3 or CS4 has to offer that would compel me to change....

Cheers

I wonder why Adobe did it such that the computers with poor graphics cards or none at all suffer a drop in performance. The way I see it, CS4 being an update should improve on performance graphics card or not.

Even without PS, having integrated graphics will leech off the CPU power especially with things like Aero glass running in the background.

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Graham
Flickr