.....what? no Athlon 64 3000+ Venice? you guys offered sammo just too much money to be wasted, if he had budget more
than $190, it would be much more worthed for a pentium system.
otherwise, use sempron (socket 754) for a value solution and Athlon 64 3000+ "venice" for mainstream
performance in either gaming or photoshop performance. semprons are perfect fit for Barebone.
Pentium are usually for overclockers, which cost more than $200 for extra coolant if they need to run the super hot
Pentiun 2.4 C "prescott" which can boil at more than 70 degree celcius in full load when working at 3.2 ghz.
(so far, Fooger at xtremesystem.org Overclocked Pentium 2.4 C to friggin 6.6 Ghz in somehwat unstable condition.
O_o" )
for motherboard, you can offer him either Gigabyte or Abit (user-friendly, yeah.) that cost less than $200 for Athlon 64
system. -stay way from ASUS or EPOX and DFI LANPARTY series if you are not Overclockers. Foxconn are the best for
stablility and performance.
-it's kinda hard for MicroATX, but ECS does have many of them.
Memory....... Kingston did the job, but the Value version of Corsair did the job extra well, but that wasn't made
for value purpose. ^_^' so i recommend V-Gen or Visipro for it (the value thingy, still...it's barebone,
right?)
Chipset - many variables for this one, depends on motherboard - you can get either NVIDIA NForce 4 (normal, ultra, SLI),
SIS, and VIA. (intel didn't support chipset for AMD, dooh)
video card....Well.....if your motherboard covered PCI-Express, Radeon X550 did the "value purpose" very well,
in fact...stock are low because this hardware sells like a hot cake! people love this.
For AGP version, GeForce 6200 did the best in low-end video card. (choose Inno3D and avoid ASUS at all cost, they are
too expensive in many factors.)
-Video card are the biggest part of computer...but dont worry, low-end VGA card are small......size.
Sound card - if your motherboard supports onboard soundcard, it wouldn't be necessary to buy PCI-based soundcard,
since many of onboard soundcard these days are based on either Karajan or AC97, which in comparable quality with
creative soundblaster Audigy 1 & SBlive 24 bit.
Speaker - this is the power of your multimedia, buy a logitech Z series should greatly increase the quality of sound, in
which most people told me to.
Hard disk - photoshop? ^_^' well........a single 200gb WDC SATA hard disk would suits him, since hard disk is the
most crucial part for storage.
-if you are lucky, try to find a motherboard that supports RAID 5 (0+1)
Monitor - let sammo decided by himself, and try to buy CRT since the color output are more intensive than LCD
monitor.
-power supply - dont use bad-quality power supply! it reduce your computer age's!
warranty - it depends on the user, not the way the hardware works. 80% of the computer trouble that goes to reparation
service are usually software problem, it happens in my country.
while 20% other are people who pushes the limit of their processor, like some crazy-a55es who pull off his Athlon Fx 53
to 4.5 Ghz or other, the workload are so full that the results are distressing the other component, like burning some
transistors at motherboard, or break the hard disk, some even destroy a chipset since the heat caused by the workload
are somewhat too intense, it's just blown. my motherboard once sparks when i overclocked my Pentium 4 2.4 Ghz to
2.8 Ghz, luckily.... only one resistor are burned down in the motherboard, and it was replaceable....some unlucky guy
thrashed his motherboard.
-x86-64 architecture (64 bit supporting) is not necessary~~ are you going for some server application or what? theres
only few program that runs at 64-bit environment for now, and most of them are for server and workstation uses.
-SSE3 ....... its for 3D application, not much use in photoshop.
-3Dnow! .....as you can see from the title....its for 3D application acceleration, only AMD supports it.
well...that's all my comment...i sorry if any of these are a little offensive for you.
oh, if you are really focusing for photoshop, i suggest you to buy Dual O****** 244 "sledgehammer". It's
really fast! trust me. XD
