Mainly photo editing

C

Cochoa

Member
Hi there

My old machine has finally given out. I use a PC mainly for photo editing and general surfing. I don't do gaming. I'd like a system that is fairly well balanced, loads programs fairly fast and will last a few years without me feeling I need to upgrade. I'd also like it to be quiet. Would the spec below be good or is it overkill?

Where we live there is also a slight problem with occasional electrical brownouts where the electricity flickers/goes off very briefly. I've noticed that my partner's PC is often not affected by these whereas mine goes off/re-boots. I guess this is because her power supply rides these brownouts better than mine, so would appreciate any advice on that particular aspect. This may have been one of the reasons my hard drive finally packed up. I don't really want to have to use a UPS. I had one once and it was naff and probably used a lot of power.

Case
STYLISH PIANO BLACK ENIGMA CASE + 2 FRONT USB

Processor (CPU)
Intel® Core™i5 Quad Core Processor i5-3470 (3.2GHz) 6MB Cache

Motherboard
ASUS® P8H61-MX USB3/SI: uATX, USB 3.0, SATA 3.0Gb/s

Memory (RAM)
16GB KINGSTON DUAL-DDR3 1600MHz (2 x 8GB)

Graphics Card
1GB NVIDIA GEFORCE GT 610 - DVI, HDMI, VGA - 3D Vision Ready

Memory - 1st Hard Disk
240GB KINGSTON V300 SSD, SATA 6 Gb (450MB/R, 450MB/W)

2nd Hard Disk
1TB 3.5" SATA-III 6GB/s HDD 7200RPM 32MB CACHE

1st DVD/BLU-RAY Drive
24x DUAL LAYER DVD WRITER ±R/±RW/RAM

Memory Card Reader
INTERNAL 52 IN 1 CARD READER (XD, MS, CF, SD, etc) + 1 x USB 2.0 PORT

Power Supply
450W Quiet 80 PLUS Dual Rail PSU + 120mm Case Fan

Processor Cooling
Super Quiet 22dBA Triple Copper Heatpipe Intel CPU Cooler (£19)

Sound Card
ONBOARD 6 CHANNEL (5.1) HIGH DEF AUDIO (AS STANDARD)

Would much appreciate any advice.

Many thanks
 
keynes

keynes

Multiverse Poster
To fully benefit from an SSD you need to upgrade your motherboard for one that supports SATA 6gb/s and for a quiet PC one of the silent cases will help like the coolermaster silencio.
 
C

Cochoa

Member
Many thanks, Keynes

Have upgraded to

Case
COOLERMASTER SILENCIO 550 QUIET MID TOWER CASE

Motherboard
ASUS® P8H77-M: M-ATX, DDR3, USB 3.0, SATA 6.0Gb/s, CrossFireX™

Would still appreciate if anyone has any ideas on the power supply.

Thanks
 
mantadog

mantadog

Superhero Level Poster
Something like the silencio 550 from coolermaster would be a good case for you, the case you have at the moment is very cheap and not very good at all. If you upgrade the motherboard as suggested above everything else looks fine apart from you could maybe consider a caviar black for the 1TB drive, will load anything on it a bit faster which is especially handy if you run out of SSD space.

As far as the PSU and the power outages goes, you have selected a fairly low end PSU which may well be better than whatever one you have now but I really couldn't say. If you wanted to provide protection against that by upgrading to a quality power supply then you should upgrade to a corsair PSU. If that doesn't help then you would need some sort of external power supply I would think.
 
C

Cochoa

Member
Many thanks, Mantadog

Cost rapidly escalating! Appreciate the advice, however.

When I upgraded the PSU, the automatic checker gave me the following:
"You have selected a 650W power supply, but based on our calculations you actually only need a 350W power supply. We have calculated your specification to require around 256W of power including a 20% allowance. Although it is not a mandatory requirement to select a lower wattage power supply, doing so will save you money and the last thing we'd like to do is over charge you!"

Looking into PSUs on Wikipedia I found "Although an overly large power supply will have an extra margin of safety against overloading, such a larger unit is often less efficient at lower loads, and therefore wastes more electricity than a more appropriately sized unit. For instance, an 80 PLUS 520 watt supply is 70% less efficient at the 60 watts that is the typical idle power for a desktop computer."

My partner actually has an Antec 500W Dual 12V rail PSU. Can't find the details for mine which is away being looked at, but it is probably quite basic.

Thanks again
 
mantadog

mantadog

Superhero Level Poster
yeah well Antec is a better brand than most, and it is true that an overly large PSU can be much less efficient but if you suspect that a better PSU is going to save you the problems you have with power ( I honestly don't know the answer on that) then it is really your only option.

Overall it obviously costs more in both electricity costs which should be fairly minimal to be honest but you do get a much better quality PSU at the end of the day. That is about all the advice I have, if I could think of a better way I would certainly put it forward as advice but I cant unfortunately.
 
K

Karnor00

Bright Spark
My only concern about your upgrading the PSU is that I don't know whether the corsair PSU will be any better at riding the brownouts you mentioned.
 
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