OT: Hardware recommendation for graphics card?

[Sarah Reichelt]

Peter, I am a Mac person but my sons use Windows PCs for gaming, so
since nobody else had chimed in, I'll have a go. From what they tell
me, integrated graphics are not good enough for any high-end graphics
processing, which I would assume includes Photoshop.

With the newly released MacBook Air, apparently Apple went for a lower
end processor so they could include a separate graphics card as they
reckoned this gave better performance than a faster chip with
integrated graphics. But I don't know how much of this performance is
due to Grand Central distributing the processing between the GPU & the
CPU.

Anyway, I recommend you research graphics cards - Nvidia or ATI seem
to be the favourites at the moment - and spend the money there rather
than on a faster CPU with integrated graphics.

Cheers,
Sarah


On Wed, Nov 10, 2010 at 2:31 AM, Peter Alcibiades
<palcibiades-first at yahoo.co.uk> wrote:
> Friend of mine asked for advice on what sort of graphics card to put in a
> machine he is putting together for his kid.  It will be i5 probably, and he
> wants to get something that will be respectable with photoshop processing.
> An i3 of mine with onboard graphics was definitely not fast enough for him.
>
> Is i5 even enough, should he go for i7?  Its not my area of expertise.  I
> am not even sure about the relative contributions of the graphics card and
> the processor in this.
>
> Any suggestions gratefully received.  Money is an issue, but he wants
> something that will do a decent job first and foremost.
>
> Peter