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I'm thinking of of getting a new PC and I'd like some advice.
All I'll be buying is the system itself, no monitor or keyboard, I won't even need new hard drives. I won't be playing games on it, it'll be just used mainly for photo editing and the odd bit of web design/graphics work and the rest of the usual surfing and paper work. It will a dual monitor setup to.
Budget is around £400.
Is it worth going down the dual core road or should I spend more on memory?
What about graphics cards, as I'm not playing games will a cheaper one be just as good?
Is there anything I really should have included?
Many thanks.
P.S.
I don't do Macs 
For a desktop PC which is likely to be seeing medium to heavy use I would recommend a dual core processor. You can upgrade the memory at a later stage but can not easily switch to a dual core motherboard.
When you do buy memory make sure you buy in pairs and add equally to each of the channels, otherwise one processor will have less RAM than the other and this will reduce the machine's ability to use the dual core architecture.
Ian
Quote: It will a dual monitor setup to.
I have seen this mooted before, what's the reason for it?
...Mike
Increased work space, when your editing a photo say, you can have the tools and palette on one monitor and the photo on another. In web design you can have the code editor on one and the web page, as it looks in a browser, on the other.
I'd agree with the previous post by getting a dual core CPU up front. If you get the new Core2 Duo you'll be better placed for future software with 64bit, virtualisation, etc.
That said the Core2 Duo uses the same socket type as some of it's brethern, so could be easily swapped in at later stage if you can't justify the funds being spent on it.
Either way, memory counts, so more is always good and I'd add memory first over processor speed given a hard choice.
is there any speed differance for existing software using dule core technology ?
it normally takes a year or two for software to catch up with hardware, by whitch time the hardware is a quater of the price, or you can get somthing twice as fast for the money
Depends if your existing application software is written to be multi threaded capable. Most of the standard software you get on home PC's isn't designed for multi threading. But you may say a bit of a performance increase because the OS is able to execute across dual cores.
But you'll see some advantages when you're running multiple applications and one of the apps has stalled, tieing up one of the cores. Other software will still be able to execute on the second core, instead of the PC just sitting there and hanging.
Don't make the mistake of thinking that multi core chips will be twice the speed of their single core counterparts. You'll lose a certain amount of the dual core processing power to administering a dual core environment.
CAD/CAM, highly arithmetic applications and audio or video processing are the real beneficiaries of dual core technology, so long as the application has been written to be multi threaded.
To be honest, memory would come first for me. It's likely that any prog that uses "dual core" will be memory hungry anyway and my experience of photoshop without a good chunk of memory is that it's painfully slow.
(I should add my opinion is not based on any technical knowledge)
For the slight difference in cost, it's well worth going dual core. I've had Dual CPU machines on and off over the years, and a Dual CPU (or Dual Core, same difference really 
) is by far a better machine to work with in terms of productivity. Same goes for multiple monitors, I've had dual monitors for 5 years now and I'd never ever go back.
You seem to have a healthy budget, should be able to get a nice system out of that, you've no need for a hugely expensive geaphics card - it won't make Photoshop any quicker (We're well past the point where graphics cards made much of a difference in 2D work).
My personal preference would be for a Tyan Motherboard - But that could stuff your budget, and the new Core2Duo ones aren't in volume yet (Or at least they weren't when I spoke with our distie a couple of days ago). Core2Duo will provide you with the most performance per pound spent. 2GB of RAM would be a minimum really for any new PC I was building. XFX made some good graphics cards.
I'd probably build something like this:
256Mb XFX 7600GS Graphics Card ~ £80
Asrock CONROE945G-DVI ~ £50 (You can ignore the onboard video, or have a 3rd screen )
Intel Core2Duo E6300 ~ £120
2Gb (2X1Gb) Corsair Value Select, DDR2 PC5300 (667) ~ £145
All in, that comes to about £395. Sorted 
Just to really throw the cat in amongst the pigeons and give you another headache....LOL.....Quad Core machines are just around the corner, they're already being made! Although expect prices to be very high, but as with everything electronic, give it 6-12 months for the prices to fall.
So what's my processor?.....An old AMD Athlon 1.6Ghz, does the job I need it to do, but in fairness it is due for renewal after Xmas as it's coming on for it's 5th birthday now! State of the art when I first had it.....Now considered to be a real dinosaur, well actually a bacterial lifeform.....But hey it works!
Ade
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