I'm in the process of upgrading to a more powerful workstation, and once I switch over I'll be putting the one I am using now (a Dell Precision T5400) up for sale on eBay.
My current machine is no slouch. It a dual quad core system and even by modern standards still well up there in power (it starts Photoshop CS6 in 3 seconds and scores over 10,000 on the Passmark CPU benchmark). It's a perfectly functional, reliable system; I just need even more power for some of my development activities.
I'm toying with the possibility of making it more attractive to potential buyers by putting a bit more money into a couple of SSDs for it.
If you were looking to buy a reasonably powerful Photoshop machine on a budget, which of these would seem more attractive to you? I've highlighted the differences in bold.
$1200 for:
Professional quality Dell Precision T5400 workstation, Dell keyboard, optical mouse
Dual quad core Xeon x5460 3.16 GHz processors (8 cores total)
16 GB 1333 MHz ECC RAM (4 x 2 GB FBDIMMs)
Drive C: 2 TB total (2 x 1 TB 7200 RPM hard drives in RAID 0)
VisionTek ATI Radeon HD 5670 1 GB DDR5
Windows 8 Pro, along with a copy of my Configure the Windows 8 "To Work" Options book.
-or-
$1400 for:
Professional quality Dell Precision T5400 workstation, Dell keyboard, optical mouse
Dual quad core Xeon x5460 3.16 GHz processors (8 cores total)
16 GB 1333 MHz ECC RAM (4 x 2 GB FBDIMMs)
Drive C: 256 GB (2 x 128 GB new OCZ Vertex 4 fast SSDs in RAID 0, boots up Windows 8 in under 15 seconds).
Drive D: 2 TB total (2 x 1 TB hard drives in RAID 0)
VisionTek ATI Radeon HD 5670 1 GB DDR5
Windows 8 Pro, along with a copy of my Configure the Windows 8 "To Work" Options book.
If you have another suggestion as to what I might add or change that would make it seem more attractive, I'm interested as well.
Would it seem attractive to say it will have Windows 8 already set up and ready to go? Or do you think people would prefer to install the OS themselves afresh? Also, I could sell it with Windows 7 instead of 8, as I do have a license for it; I just thought that having it be set up with a modern OS would seem more attractive.
Thanks in advance for your opinions.
-Noel
Yes, if one follows the steps in my book it can be a powerful system. The desktop looks a bit austere without the Aero Glass feature, but Windows 8 actually is a fair bit more efficient than Windows 7, both booting up faster and running less stuff that uses resources all the time. My minimum yet fully configured installation has only 37 processes running.
-Noel
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