yeah ram is important (would say 4gb is recomended, nn to go higher), a high end graphics card is not important for photos and editing them
my pc is almost a yr old and handles it all fine

yeah, I was only worrying about cpu, but no need then

thanks

my old laptop is three years old, and it manages..

Bought it when intel c2d Txxxx was well known for laptops.
Intel c2d T8100 @ 2,1 GHz.
2 gb ram.

I've found a few that I'm looking at.
13,3" - 14,5" size
intel i5 or intel i7 cpu's, the intel i7 computer is out because it's way more expensive then the others
512 - 1 gb GPU memory
4 gb ram

Will buy when next salary is on my bank account

If you're really into editing you'll need a powerhouse.

Last time when i did the pano that was like 1.6gb in size.. My 4.4ghz overclocked desktop core i7 920 (quad core with hyper-threading = 4 physical cores and 4 logical cores) was choking with 6gb of ram. 8-12gb is really recommended if you deal with large photos alot.

But for single 18mp output. 4gb should be enough.. I would really recommend 8gb.

And get i7 for the extra logical cores, lightroom and photoshop will put them to work.

P.S- Make sure it's the sandy bridge i7s and not the nehalem based silicons.

lol i think you are officially better than google

Heh, I don't doubt I could find use for such a monster. But I'm not really overdoing editing in any kind of way ;p
I won't make any panorama picture at 1.6gb size.
But I may look into 8 gb ram, it's not that expensive anyway

Thanks!

A Dell Precision should suit your needs, you can configure them to have up to 12GB of ram I think.

According to Nvidia's marketing, a Quadro card can help in Photoshop, but they cost quite a bit...

Only problem is that it's too large. 14.x" is the largest I'll go for

Unless he's running a render farm.. A Quadro isn't worth the price premium IMO. PS CS5 takes advantage of OpenGL which both ATI AMD and Nvidia cards support. Some apps in the creative suite however does take advantage of CUDA that higher end nvidia's gpu provide.

This post was edited by Eek on Mar 10 2011 01:12pm

Aha, makes more sense that more render intensive stuff, like After Effects would benefit the most from it.

Incidentally, as you're the resident computer nerd here, I just bought a new laptop, but the display is defaulting to being output by the integrated GPU, rather than the Nvidia 420M, is there any way to change that?


/edit ignore that. Just had to go to the Nvidia Control Panel and set the Nvidia card as the preferred graphics processor.

This post was edited by Veilside on Mar 10 2011 01:31pm