I saw the forum on recommendations for computers, but I was wondering what members of DPC use. I have a souped up Toshiba M500 13" laptop that I have had for about 7 years. Its been a real workhorse for business and pleasure, but its time to move up. Can you post what brand and type of computer you have, how old it is, if you have been happy with it and anything else you would like to share. Thank you.
A dual core AMD Athlon with an Asus motherboard that I built myself in 2009. Runs Windows 7 and using Corel Paintshop Pro to edit. Will probably start putting together a newer system sometime this year.
I also would recommend building yourself if you can.
My general rule with building your own machine is, buy the best of last year/generation's stuff. The price drops way off when the newest and bestest is released. I couldn't tell you off the cuff what's hot right now because I've had the same machine forever it seems, but the below link is usually my first stop when starting my research. They have some great benchmark graphs.
iMac with 32gb ram memory instead of the standard 4gb, 1TB Hdd and 512 mb video radeon HD 6770
i5 with 2.7ghz processor. Not new (2 years now) but bought from a pro photographer who ended his business.
Works like a charm.
27" imac 32gb ram 4tb hd 512gb flash drive and 18tb of external storage i7 3.2ghz really nice for photos but now fancy the imac 5k so I can upgrade my drone to the 4k inspire 1 :)
Upgradet few weeks ago, own build:
Gigabite Z97X - UD5H Black Motherboard
I7 - 4790K Processor
Noctua NH-D15 Processor cooling
Corsair Vengeance Pro 32 GB @ 2400MHz Memory
PNY 970 GTX Craphic card
Samsung 850 EVO 250 GB SSD
OZC Vertex 450 120 GB SSD for Scratch
WD Black 2 GB for importing and editing photos, 3 x WD Green 2GB for storage + external backup drives
Antec P100 Case
Tagan BZ 1100W, my old power supply from the overclocking and SLI days, overkill for that rig.
Dell 2412M
Dell 2311H
Win 8.1
Rock solid, quiet workhorse that's gonna last a few years.
My Mac Pro is 7yrs old now but 8 Xeon cores at 3.2ghz, 20Gb ram, 4x1TB drives and an updated 1Gb Radeon card keeps it pretty quick. I have a 30" and two 24" monitors attached - I used to have 2x30" which was much nicer but one broke.
I also have a quad core i7 15" Retina MacBook Pro with 512Gb SSD that works pretty well for when I am away.
17-inch Macbook pro
2.4GHz intel core i7
4GB DDR3
Added a 256gb Intel SSD which is a nice upgrade, boots up and loads files more quickly. Might end up upgrading the RAM someday, but plan on continuing to use it until something breaks that I can't easily replace. The original hard drive went out, probably because my son knocked it off the table while it was running.
I have a couple pretty good windows desktops but all I have is an old CRT monitor for those so I don't use them for editing.
My wife has the 13 inch MBP with retina display which is really nice, but I like the size of the 17 and with 1920x1200 resolution it's not too far behind. I got the laptop as new-old-stock for $1400, original price was $2500.
13" White MacBook circa 2008, 2.4GHz, 2 cores OSX 10.7.5 . Maxed out with 4GB RAM and a 750GB HD. I wouldn't recommend it now, but at the time I got it, it was great for doing photo stuff.
The new Apple laptops are fine machines, just be buy the machine you will want to use in the future, because if you need to add more RAM or a bigger HD you will be out of luck.
I'm using a home-built desktop dating from mid-2011. Still a reliable machine, but needs an update. I'll most likely wait to do so until later this year after the introduction of Intel's Skylake processors, then build from scratch again. I'll be using an NVMe SSD for boot and applications, and probably at that point will start out running Windows 10, which should be released in Q3. I'll be updating my graphics adapter to an nVidia K1200, and probably moving to a 4k IPS monitor at some point, though probably not right away.
I looked at an MSI-GS60-003 15.6" Laptop today. It has i7-16GB Memory-1TB HDD + 128GB SSD. Seems like a pretty decent machine for the money. I am looking more for Photo editing capability than gaming. Does anyone have any experience with this make?
