Need spec advice for photo-editing pc!

[Sony Walkman Prophecies]

Hey guise. Im currently in the market for a pc in order to edit some pretty big (430mb) tiff files. My budget is going to be around 50-60 quid, and on ebay that will seem to get you quite a number of different setups from Pentium 4s to AMD Athlon 64s. What I really need to know is, for intensive photoshop editing, what's the best cpu/ram combination to go for? Been so long since I built a PC it looks like im gonna need some help on this one!

[Marty McFly]

60 quid?!

[Sony Walkman Prophecies]

Seems to be about the going secondhand rate for 2-3ghz tower with 1gb of DDR ram yeah.

[falafel]

I would suggest buying an enormous bag of mosaic tiles, fitting them together in an appropriate configuration on Hampstead Heath and waiting for Google Maps to update its image cache.

[Consignia]

RAM is what you need, baby, yeah. It's the thing you should try and get the most of.

[Sony Walkman Prophecies]

Youre all useless!

[Consignia]

Like I said, RAM is the thing that's going make the most difference. Maximise it within your budget. It's difficult to comment on any other parts when your budget is so low, and you are buying used.

[Sony Walkman Prophecies]

Got a 2.6 ghz dell with 2gigs dd2 ram with stata drives for 24 quid!<3 Gonna buy another 2 gigs of ram and should have a fairly decent machine for a reasonable price.

[mcbpete]

You might want to look out for the cheeky cut down version of Photoshop (I think it's called something like Photoshop portable). It works exactly like the full version but is much kinder on resources (especially installation full print). So I've heard anyway ....

[Sony Walkman Prophecies]

Yeah, already got photoshop portable - thanks thou :D Also been told its a good idea to have a separate drive my 'scratch disk'. Another person recommended having a third one for programs as well, but I think that might be overkill personally.

[mcbpete]

For video work a separate drive certainly helps but for picture manipulation I'd say the difference in seek speeds would be pretty much negligible between having just one and two (or three) drives. Your largest bottleneck particularly with working with those huge files will definitely be the amount of ram as suggested by other folks, as soon as you run out of that then windows will start creating a swap file on your drive for memory and that's when things really start to crawl but 4 gig should almost definitely be enough (N.B. not sure what OS you're running but if it's a 32 bit one then remember that 4 gig is the maximum you can have accessible to Windows ...)

[Sony Walkman Prophecies]

Oh thanks, didnt know that! Thanks for the info :)

[Slaaaaabs]

If you're in the market for a cheap tablet as well I would heartily recommend the Wacom Bamboo. It replaced my higher end Intuos 3 when it started to crap out and the difference is negligible (unlike the price).