Agreed, especially on the PSU. I personally wouldn't recommend Antec, they're living on their name and reputation imho, their current stuff is not good quality. Better exists elsewhere. But definitely get a high quality PSU and definitely get a top quality motherboard.
My advice is (take it for what it's worth) - a smallish fast boot drive (WD raptor) for your operating system. A 2nd drive (500gb or larger) for your general data. Another 2 drives in Raid 1 for your images and essential data. Go hardware raid if possible - it's more expensive but a LOT better.
Don't worry too much about graphics - most modern cards excel at 3D but you don't that for image processing. As to RAM, get as much as possible, 8GB is fine and go for a quadcore - it does come in handy. It's not as fast (outright) as similar priced dual cores, but having 4 cores to load balance the work is better than 2 imho.
Final thing - get a good case, I'd recommend Lian Li. Expensive, but really nice cases, awesome finish, easy to work with, keep your PC cool, and they're beautiful to look at. I use a PC-V1010.
Dave
edit: if you're working on images - make sure to get a good monitor, m-pva or s-ips, rather than the cheaper tn stuff. Better colour consistency and accuracy. You pays for what you get. Oh, and get a calibration tool, at the least, a Huey Pro or similar, better still an Eye one. Shoot in RAW, Adobe RGB and make sure to always embed the ICC profiles.
Quote:
Originally Posted by g__day
A suggestion - get a really good power supply (Brand and peak power on the 12V rails - e.g Antec, Topower) 600 Watts or more minimum and a top end motherboard (better quality capacitors). They're the core of your hardware platform - skimp there and you'll wish you didn't.
3D accelerators are so fast these days - ever since NVidia launched the 8800 GT they've got so powewrful its generally CPUs holding them back. $260 - $490 buys a hell of alot of bang for buck today. Sure you can go > $700 and or get two in SLI or Crossfire - but what resolution monitor are you driving that needs that? The technology of the mid range < $500 is still lead by ATI I believe (performance per $) but at the uber high end (too $$$) its NVidia.
You combination sounds reasonable indeed.
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