New rig is running!

[Anthony Martinez]

Still waiting on my 23" pair of screens, but for now the 20" will get business taken care of.

i7 860, 8GB DDR3, ATI HD5750 (1GB gDDR5), LG super-multi-reads/writes every readable/writeable non-BluRay format on the planet.

Win7 Ultimate 64-bit installed very quickly, and all devices were equally simple to configure. The i7 is ridiculously fast, and surprisingly cool-running. Moving over my files was greatly simplified by an older tool called HFSExplorer (though you could boot Ubuntu and mount drives that way to move files around if you wanted - it reads HSF+ ootb).

CS5 runs great, though I've not yet explored the new features. Honestly, I never explored the feature changes from CS3 to CS4. Lightroom 3 imported my Lightroom 2 catalog perfectly, I just had to tell it where the files were (it was still looking for the Mac directory tree, pointed it to their new home on my Win7 tree and off it went).

[utdbear]

awesome man...what motherboard and CPU cooler did you get?

[Some Idiot]

Originally Posted by utdbear

awesome man...what motherboard did you get?

i was going to ask the same thing, what MOBO are you running... also, total cost if you don't mind

[Anthony Martinez]

Gigabyte PA55-UD2 mobo, and a Scythe Big Shiruken heatsink. It's all in a fairly small case to address my lack of space, but idle temps are in the 42-44C range, full load is still below 70C. Comparatively my iMac idled at nearly 50C and was more than 75C under any load.

My total (including tax and rush-shipping on some parts) is right around $1700 for all of the hardware (cpu, heatsink, gfx, ram, hdd, dvd, wifi, psu, case, and screens). After software (Win7 Ultimate 64 bit, CS5 Design Premium, and Lightroom 3)* add another $800 for a grand total of $2500. To compare apples to hand grenades, an i7 iMac with 8GB of RAM (in the 4x 2GB config) tips the scales at $2400 before tax, and without the appropriate software.


* software cost represents the whole student discount thing. In the scope of the comparisons it's not really relevant as both would increase at the same rate from the same starting point.

[utdbear]

Sounds like a good system. You'll enjoy this system for a while.