Purchasing desktops to run CS5.5 Suite

[Easy_506]

I'll keep this short and sweet. I'm in the process of gathering quotes for upgrading a couple of our ICT suites during the summer.

 

We currently have a load of Core2 Duo's in the rooms, but software-wise mainly we use MS Office 2010, and the Adobe Web Premium Suite CS5.5.

 

There's a bit of a discussion going on at the moment over what we really need in terms of hardware to run these software packages comfortably. Obviously Office programs run fine on virtually anything, but the likes of Fireworks, Flash Pro & Photoshop need a little bit more oompf behind them (oompf is the technical term).

 

I want to see what people on here think... If you were specifying a system to run those Adobe programs comfortably, what would it be? i3? i5? Onboard 2500, or 4000? Standalone graphics?

[FN-GM]

The spec of machines we currently purchase are a minimum of i5. We have some older i3 machines in service and they run the CS6 suite just fine.

 

All onboard graphics, with a minimum of 4GB ram.

[ICTDirect_Dave]

How many machines are you thinking? I've got some lovely core 2 quad machines with 8gb ram and a GFX card for far less than you'd pay for something new and not much more powerful.

 

Also I've got a number of high end core 2 duos with 1GB GFX cards and 8GB RAM again that have been running adobe suites successfuly in a few schools for a while now.

 

give me a call / email if you want to discuss it and get a quote >

[sonofsanta]

We run CS5 just fine on Core i3 machines - a mix of i3-550 and i3-2100/2120 CPUs. Put RAM ahead of CPU - the CPU comes into play for big Photoshop filters, but how often do you do them? Whereas lots of RAM makes handling bigger files less painful. SSDs are also magical for this.

 

Onboard graphics across all of them.

[Easy_506]

Thanks all for your replies. Still seems to be a question between the i3 and i5, but I guess that's down to what the user considers to be 'fast'...

[bwestlake]

for our art machines we brought i5-2500 with 8gb of ram and normal machines are i3-2120 with 8gh ram

[Easy_506]

How do you get along running 64bit OS? I'd thought about making our 'power-user' rooms 64bit but it completely throws a bunch of other depts' software out the window because they won't run in compatibility mode...