The right computer for the job

[Zachary McLean]

Hi. I am upgrading pretty much all my digital painting tools, because right now I have:
~10 year old mac mini w/ 2gb of ram
~10 year old wacom bamboo tablet
~11 year old original Adobe Photoshop CS

(all still work great, surprisingly!) Great tools, but for the higher res images that I'm starting to do, it just isn't enough juice, and sometimes Photoshop crashes and whatnot. I won a small wacom pro intuos from the Autodesk CG Student awards contest, so that's nice, but still need a new computer and Photoshop. I also have a nice 22" monitor, keyboard, mouse, so Is a laptop a good idea? I am still likely going to just plug in my monitor to the laptop if I get one and if I need to go somewhere, I can easily just unplug and go. + Should I get Photoshop CS6, since CC is a payment per month, thing?
I am looking at:

Lenovo Y50 (I like this because it's 15" and is much lighter)
specs: http://shop.lenovo.com/ca/en/laptops/len...#techspecs

Asus ROG G750JX (Seems in general a more commonly bought computer)
specs: http://www.memoryexpress.com/Products/MX51347

Thanks, and I realize maybe a computer site might make more sense to post this on, but if you guys have a different computer suggestion with similar specs, then let me know!

[Spiffy]

for the money, building your own desktop yields about twice or more the power for the money plopped down on any laptop. You give up 99% portability (I take my desktop / wacom places...) but you will get far more power for serious work / learning. E.g. you could get the 6 core i7 or equiv AMD, more like 32 gigs of ram, and a couple beastly gaming cards or a single workstation card, for the price of a $1500-$1800 laptop. Or alternatively, you could get slower but still awesome PC hardware (4 core i7, 16 gigs ram) for about $800 brand new, with a gaming GPU which will get you through all of photoshop creative suite (brand new version), and any 3D programs you plan on picking up in the future. With the money you save on hardware, you could put that towards a true mobile solution like a Wacom Companion i7 powered tablet computer.

I built my first computer when I was about 9 years old, with my uncle. By 11, I could build them alone with ease. I'm not even that smart or anything, computers are insanely easy to build. If you can put together an Ikea bookshelf, you can assemble yourself an ub3r b055 rig.

links brah:

Wacom companion glory:
http://www.amazon.com/Wacom-Cintiq-Compa...+companion

Computer hardware shopping land of pr0z:
http://www.newegg.com/

4K line of monitors: - Especially the dell ultrasharp 4Ks that just recently came out, are pretty much gonna be future proof for the life span of that monitor (I would guess 8-10 years) - these would also feature in some of them, Full Adobe RGB coverage and extremely large gamuts. This is good for color sensitive work like your drawlings.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductLis...20x%202160

24 inch Dell Ultrasharp: - a cheaper LED IPS panel. This would have good color gamut on the cheap, probably. If you don't know what Gamut is, read more. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamut
http://www.amazon.com/Dell-UltraSharp-24...ultrasharp

I would avoid mac, purely from a cost effective stand point. They think a 4 gig stick of ram costs $200. Even the extreme cost of the wacom companion is about average to a high end mac laptop, and said mac wouldn't be also a wacom tablet built right in. (best in the business, yo!)

[Zachary McLean]

Awesome! YES, I've been doing research and have been thinking about what to do. I've decided that I am going to build my own desktop computer and am not worried about building it as it's known to be quite straight forward. Later, if i need a portable device, I'm going to buy a cintiq companion or surface pro.

What build would be really good? I want to spend about $900 - $1300.

- should I get an 8 core AMD CPU, or i5 intel 4 core?
- do I need a good video card?

I want 256gb of SSD and also a 1tb harddrive likely. Is it common to have two internal hard drives? I also want just 16gb of ram for now and I have a monitor already.

Thanks!