I have been struggling with running Zerene and Nikon Capture NX2 on my existing (workstation-class, but that was five years ago) Dell M90 laptop. In particular, the 2GB RAM and the laptop HDD are bottlenecks. It has a 2GHz Core 2 Duo and a Quadro FX2600M graphics card. It is also on its second motherboard, third graphics card (replaced under warranty, but still) and is failing in various other areas.DQE wrote: If one were to avoid impulsively throwing in too many "extras" like blu-ray DVD burners, and if one were to (probably wisely) stick with a single video card instead of the dual-video-cards I splurged on, a maxed-out Intel i7-2600K-based, air-cooled tower as I described would run about $3000 or so.
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Perhaps one should think of the price range of such a system as being between a minimum of $2500 and a maximum of $4000.
So after a careful budget review I just sprung for a new desktop system (prebuilt off the shelf, with cost being a major consideration). The system is an Asus Essentio CG8250 (link is in French, to a major high street store, fnac). Specs (in English, but a lower spec it seems) here. Basic specs of the machine I ordered:
Intel Core i7-2600K @ 3.4GHz, 8Gb DDR3 RAM, 1Tb SATA 7200 rpm disk, Nvidia GeForce GTX560 Ti, combined Blu-Ray reader and DVD writer, 2 USB3, 8 USB2, Gigabit ethernet. Base price €1,139 (including 5% discount) but then with 5% extra for 10 months financing.
I also ordered a LaCie 1Tb 7200rpm USB3 external disk at €89 so I don't have to crack open the warranty-breaking seals straight away. Although I will be tossing the keyboard asap and blowing off the pre-installed Win7 family edition (in French) in favour of a Win 7 64 Ultimate (in English, which I already have).
I realize the performance won't be on par with the SLI, SSD marvels discussed in this thread but then, the price is quite a bit lower too.
Yes, I will need a screen with that. The laptop can then be relegated to light email/Web use.