Suggestions for Someone Building an Artist's PC?

albamuth asks: "A friend of mine recently handed me $1000 (in the form of her credit card) and asked me to put together the best artist-friendly PC possible. Though I enjoy reading system guide recommendations put out by the likes of Arstechnica and Sharkyextreme, it seems that most, if not all, of these guides are geared towards gaming purposes. My friend is an artist and was surprised when I approaced with a list of decidedly non-Apple recommendations. I countered that the lousiest new iMac would cost $999 and the reason why "all the other artists" use them is because of brand loyalty. However, now I'm tediously looking through motherboard and monitor reviews for things like Firewire ports and color accuracy, respectively. There's plenty of other things to think about as well: Photoshop vs. GIMP, [slide] scanners, video capture, etc. Though I'm pretty dogmatic on getting an AMD, I would like to hear opinions on hardware/software for a media/arts-oriented box."

Comments

Re:You may HAVE to go with a Mac...

[rjamestaylor]

Yep. It's not merely brand-loyalty, it's training, experience, comfort and ... this is key ... community knowledge. In the artist community there is a lot of knowledge about "how to" do things on Macs using Mac-based software. To venture into a realm where people debate the merits of Scheme-like Script-Fu versus the simplicity of Perl-Fu won't be of benefit to your artist friend...(I'm overstating the problem)

Watching our graphic artists (they're an interesting group to watch...kinda like the giraffes at Wild Animal Park...) they'd be lost without their expensive Mac G3/G4s. One of our designers is a competent network admin (NT) and is a passable perl/CGI programmer on Linux systems, but he would be helpless without his Mac when it comes to his graphic/video design work.

One reason I jumped on Linux a few years ago was the large community availble on the Internet. When IBM dumped the Workpad z50's a couple years ago (almost), I got one and looked to NetBSD and its community to make the machine useful. I found very little information for a non-expert compared to the Linux community.