upgrade for an art and design student

[zeroboo]

my friend who is doing art and design wants to upgrade his com. Thing is i havent really been up to date with the latest technology and would really appreciate some advice from someone.


He already has a PC which is a celeren with 199mb ram and 7gb hd.
He's got quite a small budget (eg ~?150) so i advised him to only get

CPU - was thinking athlon xp 1800 or later (pretty sure they ~?40)

RAM - Was thinking around 256mb not sure wat speed ones though

MOTHERBOARD (sound/video (lan is optional) integrated) - totally blank on this one

possibly a HD - was thinking the cheapest i cld find around 40gb

and keep everything else.
As he's doing art and design he'd be doing picture editing quite often, would it be a wiser choice to go with Intel or is AMD ok?
Any suggestions?

thanks in advance

[goldbricker]

If you are on a budget then AMD is definitely the way to go they are much cheaper.

I'd say go with what you've said already you could also try and get a 3D graphics card if you don't have one already. I think you can get a Geforce 4 mx for about ?50-60 now.

[Freddo]

what artists normaly need over everything is loads of ram and fast fast hard disks, i'd recomend dual WD raptors in raid0

[Super Stu]

He said a budget of ?150, not ?1500.

As you have a P2 based system, you'll need a new psu to switch to AMD (and indeed p4). As Freddo pointed out, for generic windows usage, ram and hdd.

What you might consider is this: don't bother updating the cpu (what speed is it, btw?), perhaps a 20 quid ATA133 controller and a nice maxter 40gig drive, probably about 40 notes. Then, upgrade the ram to the max the board will take. Old system like that, might be 256 meg a strip (pc66, 100 or 133 will do - pc133 is probably cheapest these days). I think I had a brand new kingston strip off ebay for 20 quid.

so that's ?120 for a very fast hdd and lots of ram (768meg).

I'm assuming it's an old celeron btw (< 700mhz).

Be more specific and I'll ponder it some more.

[df0notfound]

if your doing graphic design you really need a mac to be honest so he better get saving

[Tom Salter]

if your doing graphic design you really need a mac to be honest so he better get saving

Uh-oh, controversy time everyone!

[Super Stu]

Why does everyone ignore budgetary requirements when recommending hardware. No wonder these companies stay in business.

[df0notfound]

yeah but a mac will save you money when your work comes back from the printers with the correct colours on thus happy client. There are reasons why the whole industry prefers them you know, besides whats your student loan for.

[Super Stu]

So can we blame Adobe's **** programming for PC images not printing the correct colours?

[Burai]

yeah but a mac will save you money when your work comes back from the printers with the correct colours on thus happy client. There are reasons why the whole industry prefers them you know, besides whats your student loan for.

Work coming back from the printers? Clients? Hello? Are you a bit mental? Do you know what a student is? And what a budget is? And how to change Photoshop colour settings under Windows?

[Peet]

I assume your friend will be doing 2D work since that's all I know anything about...

If you're on a budget it's worth saving money on the CPU and spending it on RAM instead. I haven't really followed the development of computer hardware, but I get by just fine doing hobbyist computer graphics on a 650 MHz CPU and 448 megs of RAM, so double both of those (and then some) should be okay. I assume all non-pro GFX cards have decent 2D performance these days, but this might be worth looking into a bit closer.

For HD I'd go with speed over size. You don't really need more than 40-50 gig unless you keep enourmous stashes of pr0n and warez. Or do video editing. Speed, however, is nice to have when (not if) you run out of RAM in Photoshop and it starts swapping.

Add to this a CD burner and/or zip drive and a Wacom Intuos graphics tablet (An A5 or if on a budget A6 should be okay to start with. You can always get a bigger one if it feels cramped.).

[Super Stu]

So, what I said then

[Peet]

Yeah, except without all the useful stuff, like prices.

[Super Stu]

Actually, those Wacom tablets are really good. I'm no artist, but even I can see how they'd make life easier. My sister had the A4 one, cost ?300 a few years back. I'd suggest one of those, rather than unnecessary PC components (after hdd and ram).

[df0notfound]

"So can we blame Adobe's **** programming for PC images not printing the correct colours?"
nope windows lack of a decent colour sync system

" Work coming back from the printers? Clients? Hello? Are you a bit mental? Do you know what a student is? And what a budget is? And how to change Photoshop colour settings under Windows?"
HELLO HELLO? do you know what a student is, its learning how a real world enviroment will function so you need to know how to get your colour settings right or your work becomes utterly worthless, and like i said the problem is not adobe. If you studied graphic design you'd understand, also I know what a budget is and I also know(after 11 years using pcs and amigas before then) if you skimp on your computer parts and go cheap then your only causing yourself hassle, you get what you pay for and the local pc guy did with his computer breaking 2 days before a huge project deadline so in the end the price of a decent pc is about the same price as a mac anyway.

I mean are any of you professional graphic designs and have any clue what I'm on about because if your not and don't understand why the graphic design world is mac centric then theres no point arguing with me about it.