Budget = ?1000

[Shez]

Hey,

My brother is looking for a new computer, doesnt matter if it is a laptop or a desktop/tower.

Building isn't an option, mainly because he lives to far away from me, and also because he is next to useless with that side of things. Also if something happens to go wrong, I can't get to him in a hurry.

Primary use is going to be home movies and photography, there will be very little or no gaming.

Any opinion/advice is welcomed, cheers

[charlesr]

He'll need 2 drives then (one for backup), unless he has an online solution for that.

http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/pc/range/irush.html

£630 with windows. Add on the price of another HDD.
No monitor with that, so he can choose his own size and price.
The i5 will be fast enough for his home movie production.

That's a microATX case, so best check with them that it has room for another HDD.

edit: will he need to plug this into his TV? It doesn't have an hdmi port.

[abigsmurf]

To be honest, for that usage he doesn't really need to spend £1000

There's this one: http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/pc/range/irush.html

Add windows Premium and it's £629 which'll give you money for a monitor (and will still have £200 left over).

It won't do intensive gaming (single digit frame rates in crysis) but otherwise it's a very powerful PC. Has a nice PSU too so if he decides he want's to game in the future., he could put in pretty much any video without having to worry about it coping.

You could probably knock off another £100-£150 going for a core-i3 CPU which is significantly slower but in real usage terms for him would probably mean videos take 50% longer to encode and a few of the more advanced photoshop functions would be slower (but general image editing wouldn't be notciably different).

*edit*

lol hivemind

[smouty]

I'm just about to list my Shuttle on ebay.

Details HERE

Looking for £300 delivered

If interested please let me know before 8pm this evening and I'll cancel the listing.

[Shez]

cheers for the info, i'll chat with him tonight, and head him in the direction of novatech.

Smouty, he's after something new, shiney and more importantly some warranty, I very much doubt he'll be interested - Thanks anyway.

[smouty]

No probs. It is on ebay now. Personally I don't think a warranty is an issue with Shuttles. I still have both of my previous ones which have never let me down over the past 6 or 7 years but you never can tell. Personally I'd much rather buy a high quality second hand item than a cheap new one especially with PCs.

Have you considered an iMac? You might just be able to find one for £1k

http://store.apple.com/uk/browse/home/specialdeals/mac/imac

[charlesr]

lol hivemind

Freaked me out for sure.

[capcom_suicide]

No probs. It is on ebay now. Personally I don't think a warranty is an issue with Shuttles. I still have both of my previous ones which have never let me down over the past 6 or 7 years but you never can tell. Personally I'd much rather buy a high quality second hand item than a cheap new one especially with PCs.

Have you considered an iMac? You might just be able to find one for ?1k

http://store.apple.com/uk/browse/hom...deals/mac/imac

I just picked up an iMac, the new ones actually run games at reasonable levels too. You can also connect your xbox/ps3 to the 27" with an apapter. Not cheap though.

[BaudAttitude]

Going to second (or third?) the iMac suggestion. Make sure he gets an external drive with it and turns Time Machine on, and your support calls should be kept to a blissful minimum.

[Matt]

How serious editing, what software, and what camera are you shooting with?

If you're doing anything in post, say using a compositing program like After Effects, you need a **** load of RAM. And the important thing to consider is you need a **** load of RAM for each core - no point have 6 cores and only 6 gig of RAM. I'd aim for 4 gigs of RAM per core if it's serious, otherwise 2 gig will probably suffice. I get hard page faults at times despite running with 8 gigs of RAM and only 2 cores. That tends to be on stuff with 60 odd layers and heaps of effects, but still.....

On the other hand, when you're rendering out something in 3D and it's going to take over 700 hours (I'm not joking, and that's only 1280x720) getting more cores makes a lot of sense - in this example, we're rendering on a quad core Xeon, but have just bought 3 new servers, each with 2 dual core Xeons in it, effectively quadrupling the power in that part of our rendering process.

If it's movie editing, yes RAM is important, but hard drive speed becomes more critical. Getting a few in a decent RAID configuration makes a big difference, as does having a different drive used purely for the scratch disc.

I believe some of the latest Adobe products make use of the GPU for rendering, but I do not have those myself so can't really say.

And make sure you get a 64 bit OS.

[wakka]

Have you considered an iMac? You might just be able to find one for £1k

Forget the refurb store, they start at £999 with free shipping anyway. A pound saving!