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

You may HAVE to go with a Mac...

[Dimwit]

And I'm not being a Machead here. It depends on exactly what she needs. Is she upgrading a machine, or is this brand new? If this is brand new, no problem.

If this isn't brand-new - then you have a huge problem. What if she *needs* some Photoshop-only features? GIMP is nice, but it isn't Photoshop, and won't be for a while. (I'm not going to get involved with a flame war over that.)

Does she use a Mac now? In that case, I doubt she'll want to move to a PC. She's an artist, not a computer person - she may have a lot of money invested in Mac-only software. She wouldn't want to take the time to retrain on all sorts of different stuff, not to mention the price.

But if she's never used a computer for art before, or doesn't use it very often, this shouldn't be a problem. But the fact that you said she was surprised by not getting a Mac recommendation makes me think that she uses a Mac already.

PCs are for *games*, haven't you heard?

[phillymjs]

For starters, your friend's budget is ludicrous. She might as well have given you a garden spade and asked you to fill in the Grand Canyon. Unless she plans to pirate her software, the Adobe Design Collection alone will consume most of her $1000 budget without you even starting to consider hardware.

Secondly, you would not be doing her any favors by pushing a Windows or Linux solution on her. You *want* the fonts and the colors to be consistent from computer to computer, and you don't want her to make enemies at the print shop if they keep having to dust off their lone PC off in the corner to take care of her jobs. Windows may do the shit-work of word processing and database-storing for the planet, but in the design world *Macs* are "what everyone else uses."

I would personally do the eBay thing for a beige Power Mac G3 (if you want to do the video capture stuff, get the MiniTower model, which came standard with RCA A/V In and Out jacks). The original G3s still have a lot of life left in them and can take huge, cheap IDE drives and scads of RAM. You can toss a USB or USB/FireWire combo PCI card in them to use modern peripherals while still having built-in SCSI support for the older, used peripherals that she may need, like a high-quality scanner or a CD-R drive. Upgrading the processor to a G4 (since Photoshop can take advantage of AltiVec) might be a good idea, if you're so inclined and get a good price. You might even luck out and find a whole package deal like this being sold by an artist who has recently upgraded to a new G4.

Spare no expense on the monitor-- when putting together a system for a designer I usually recommend the largest ViewSonic the person can afford. Oh, not that it matters for this project-- no LCDs. IMHO, they're still not where they need to be for serious design work.

As for input devices, you can use a regular ADB keyboard or a nice USB one-- you may want to keep an ADB model around for maintenance purposes (more easily booting from CD, zapping PRAM). I swear by Logitech USB mice. Wacom makes the best graphics tablets, even their small consumer model is very nice.

OS 9.1 is nice and stable, and you can fairly easily optimize the System Folder items to squeeze every last drop of performance out of the machine. Even on occasions when the machine does go belly-up, a quick Nortoning will straighten it out 99% of the time.

That's it. Build her a system like that, and she'll be productive very quickly, and it will last her for years. If your friend is good at what she does, she'll get the debt incurred building it paid off pretty quickly, and then start putting money in her G5 or G6 Tower Fund. :-)

~Philly