Username?

TheMadScot

Age/Occupation/Location?

I’m 31 Years Old and I work as a professional photographer, specialising in portraits, weddings etc. – I also have a profitable sideline selling prints of my landscape and architectural shots as office art. I live just south of Glasgow, Scotland with my wife Claire and our 3 year old Collie/Stafford cross dog, Fuzz.

How long have you been a member of the Guru3D.com forums?

I’ve been lurking around the forums for a few years now and don’t post all that much; most of what I need to know is usually answered by other member’s posts.

What did you first come here for?

Since my PC is accounts for more than 50% of my core productivity, I like to stay abreast of developments in software and components. I find that the forums are a good sounding board for “real-world” opinions that often cut through the marketing hype of the product manufacturers.

What do you mainly use the system for?

If I had to divide up my time, I’d say it’s 60% in Photoshop or other digital image processing software, with 15% surfing and 25% gaming time. I can easily spend around 10 hours a day in front of my PC on a work-day, and this only goes up if I have an important project to finish.

How much did you spend on the rig?

In its current form the cost has been around £1800 –the last time I upgraded was a wholesale move from Intel P4 to an AMD Athlon 64 based system, and that was quite costly.

How often do you update/buy a new rig?

I’d say around every 18 months as merits, though usually the upgrades are incremental: a little more RAM here, some HDD capacity there – anything that will benefit my workflow. Admittedly some choices are made with an eye to gaming, such as choosing which graphics card will be in the system!

What components are used?

• AMD Athlon 64 4000+ CPU with stock cooler
• MSI K8N Neo2 Platinum Motherboard (Socket 939, nForce 3 Ultra)
• 4 x 512 MB Corsair DDR PC3200 @ 3-3-8-3 timings
• 2 x Western Digital 80GB ATA-100 HDD, 8Mb Cache; used as 4 x 40GB Partitions
• 2 x Western Digital 200GB S-ATA HDD, 8Mb Cache in RAID 0
• MSI NX6800GT 256Mb w DVI / VGA and VO
• Samsung SD-616Q DVD-ROM Drive
• LG GS-4163B DVD±RW / RAM Drive
• Antec TrueBlue 480W PSU
• Coolermaster Stacker Case with Cross Flow Fan and 2 x 4-in-3 modules
• Belkin F6C800 UPS
• Iomega Zip750 USB
• Iomega 7-in-1 USB FDD / Card Reader
• Logitech diNovo Bluetooth Cordless Desktop
• Wacom Intuos 2 A5 tablet
• Logitech QuickCam Sphere
• Samsung SM 191T 19” LCD on DVI
• Samsung SM 510N 15” LCD on VGA
• HP DeskJet 1220C A3+ Printer
• HP ScanJet 3570C
• Logitech Z-3 Speakers
• Dual boot as either Windows XP Pro SP2 or XP Pro x64.
  

All of my rig components run at stock speeds, since I need stability rather than bleeding edge performance.

Why ATI or NVIDIA, why Intel/AMD?

I’ve chosen nVidia cards back since the GeForce 3 Ti200; this was mostly because my wife’s laptop at the time had a GeForce GO in it, and I was impressed with the feature set -  and I was looking for a decent card to replace my old Voodoo 5 5500. Ever since then I’ve had an nVidia card in my PC, mostly because I’ve had very little issues with the drivers.

As regards switching to AMD, the choice was really made for my by the fact that they seemed to offer a better price/performance ratio than the Intel chips. I know that Intel is a stronger workhorse for Photoshop performance, but on aggregate the 64 bit support and CPU side memory controller make my Athlon 64 4000+ a very stable and responsive system when using Windows x64.

Does the system work as expected?

For the most part, yes! It’s very stable in Windows x64 and the only issue I have is that a lot of my peripherals don’t yet have 64 bit drivers to support them; at least I got my tablet to work in x64 and that’s all that really matters to me!

What's the best part of your rig?

Tough question: if the question was more “what part of your rig could you not give up,” I’d say without hesitation my Wacom tablet. Using Photoshop with a mouse is like trying to sketch with a lump of charcoal!

This aside, I’m very happy with my 19” Samsung LCD. I made the jump from a 19” CRT to LCD two years ago and it made one hell of a difference from a work perspective since I took back so much desk space! I was initially concerned about colour reproduction issues, but I’ve got access to a Colorvision Spyder calibration device, so it was a moot point. The 15” LCD was added mostly because I got it for a very good price, and it allows me to work in PS whilst keeping Outlook or IE readily available to me.

Is there anything you dislike and wish you hadn't bought?

I wish I had paid more attention to the amount and type of RAM that I had installed. I went with Corsair PC3200 but, when running at 200MHz DDR, it latencies are 3-3-8-3. In hindsight I should have bought better modules at 1GB densities with lower latencies and phased the installation as one lot of 2GB, then another. When I make the switch to a multi-core CPU, I’ll probably refresh my system’s RAM configuration at the same time. I like the look of Crucial’s Ballistix PC-4000 1GB modules and, with the rumour that AMD are going to be officially supporting 250MHz RAM, it will probably be the route I’ll take. Still, the current cost of it is £175 per stick, so I’ll hold off for a while yet!

Modified case/video card/other?

My case is pretty “vanilla” and there’s nothing remarkable about it other than the Stacker design. I do have two blue LED fans in it and the TrueBlue PSU gives off a pleasing enough glow, but I don’t feel the need for a side window or anything like that; the blue led fan mounted on the Stacker’s mesh grille gives it an interesting look without going OTT in my opinion. I chose the CM Stacker mostly because it was a very spacious case which had good airflow considerations and allowed for expansion in the future. I honestly don’t think I’ll need another case for a good many years.

3DMark scores?

3DMark05: 4735

http://service.futuremark.com/compare?3dm05=645844

3DMark03: 11230

http://service.futuremark.com/compare?2k3=3756794

Future upgrades?

I’m looking at replacing my monitors with a single wide aspect LCD such as the Sony SDM-P234; my wife’s laptop is a Sony with a 17” screen that uses their X-Black technology and it’s looks great at 1920 x 1200. All that extra real estate would come in handy for long Photoshop sessions… and wouldn’t hurt for gaming either! LCD technology has advanced so much in the last two years in terms of screen brightness, colour reproduction and response times that I feel that I’ll be a good time to switch soon.

Other than that I’ll be keeping an eye on what’s happening in the world of multi-core CPU technology since I know that it will really stand to benefit the professional user like me. All that needs to happen along with that for me to reach my personal nirvana is for Adobe to get on the 64 bit bandwagon!