Digital Light & Color

I am building a new system this summer and will upgrade to PWP 5.0. While its easy to find articles about system requirements for Photoshop, I will only be using PWP and I don't want to over buy. At this point I am looking at a Intel E8500 (3.16 ghz?) Core Two Duo and 4 gigs of DDR2 800 RAM. I do not plan on using a 64 bit system at this time, nor do I really want to mess with any overclocking, and the system in on Windows XP. I am shooting with a 5d in RAW, so files are big but not as big as many new cameras. My current set-up in an old 3.0 ghz AMD XP.

MY questions are: is there any noticeable benefit from quad core for PWP? what about 64 bit and the extra RAM that comes with it? And the big one--what do I need from a graphics card? Is there anything else about photo editing that I should take into account when looking at a new system?

Thanks
Dave

Dave, your suggested system would be very adequate for the purposes of PWP editing. There are some other topics about hardware but briefly, PWP is only 32bit so using 64bit would not help even with additional memory. There are only a few instances where multiple cores are used in PWP so I don't believe a quad would be much better than a dual processor. The CPU you have chosen is the one I would choose if I were upgrading right now as it gives the best 'bang for your buck' right now. Faster memory would make a difference though so I would suggest getting the fastest memory you can afford. Also go for fast hard drives.

High end graphics cards are for high intensity moving graphics (gaming, video etc) and would not provide much benefit to PWP. I use a low end graphics card (or even embedded graphics) without any problems. A fair amount of graphics memory should help though but I have not tested this. If you have a large resolution screen then get a card with more graphics memory. Try go for dedicated graphics memory rather than shared as used by embedded graphics.

Photo editing does not have as great a demand on resources as video and gaming so there is no need to spend a fortune.

Hope this helps.