[Sckitty]

Here is the story and i am looking to upgrade and i need the best thing for a person going into graphics design, but i also want to game on the side. I have absolutly no clue what to get though, there is soo much out now that i don't know what to buy?

[Ian]

Are you planning to upgrade just parts of your PC, or a new one all together? If its the first option, let us know the spec of your PC so we can see what is worth keeping

If you are doing to be doing graphics design, you'll need plenty of memory and a good monitor ideally. A good graphics card will suit gaming and the design work, but we'll be able to be more specific if you have a budget in mind.

[Me__2001]

do you want a complete new system ? or to upgrade an existing one? what sort of price range are you thinking of ?

[Alf]

Im not to sure what you need for a Graphics design computer... although you normally need alot of memory, about
2-3 GB of Ram should suffice

[Sckitty]

Well i didn't have a price range just whatever. The whole system is getting redone.

[1nteger]

If by graphic design you mean rendering graphics then loads of memory is essential. Some have mentioned getting a good monitor as well - I would agree, and it might be worth saving some cash on a TFT and going for a big CRT one if you have the space. these are still consider superior for graphics work and cost a lot less that similar sized TFT displays.

For games, I would recommend 1GB of ram as a minimum nowadays, and the essential part is a good video card. For top end games to be run at highest quality, you could go for an nVidia GeForce 6800 or the equivalent ATi...but look to pay over £250. You can get cards for a lot less if you're willing to sacrifice quality settings in some recent games.

Graphic design demands lots of Hard disk space so a couple of 200Gb disks would be handy! However, you can always back things up to DVD, so a dual-layer DVD burnerwould be useful (16x).

...anyway, all this has probably been said before....post some specs for a machine you see and we can give you some feedback on that. Good hunting!

[Sckitty]

Well I was looking at a hard drive and saw the Raptor drives and was thinking about getting a couple of those. Also what type of motherboard should I get? I have a Soyo SY-KT600 plus v2.0.

[1nteger]

Originally Posted by Sckitty

Well I was looking at a hard drive and saw the Raptor drives and was thinking about getting a couple of those. Also what type of motherboard should I get? I have a Soyo SY-KT600 plus v2.0.

I tend to go for Asus or Gigabyte for good build quality and reliability, especially if you're not into overclocking.

Raptors are very fast but have a couple of drawbacks:
1. A single drive has a maximum capacity of 74GB
2. A 74Gb Raptor will cost you more than twice as much as some 200GB 7,200rpm drives.

All my drives are Raptors, but i'm a total idiot when it comes to upgrading. Just decide what's most essential...if you need planty of storage space for graphics, movies, music etc, then go for SATA 7,200 drives with 8Mb cache (Western Digital are also good for these).

If you just want to have the fastest SATA drives available, then Raptors are your only choice...no problem if money is not an issue

[Cache-man]

Hey there Sckitty, I tend to agree with the other guys here when they say about loads of memory for graphics work. You should be looking at a minimum of 1GB, and up to 3GB. Just make sure it is branded by one of the major companies such as Corsair, Crucial, OCZ etc and not generic RAM.
As for the hard disks, the Raptors are fantastic for gaming and quick load times if you really need the speed, but as mentioned they are very expensive compared to equivalent SATA 7,200 drives, for loading your large graphics files they wil probabally save you a second or two.