I did. I underspecc'd myself a bit (again lol) but the price was so ridiculous that even if I only use it for 18 months I'll feel I had my money out of it:
Costco special - Dell studio 15" with an i3 processor, currently with 6g ram (which I will expand to maximum capacity as soon as I can) 1tb hdd, and including licensed copies of Word/Excel 2012 (our MS Office is really, really old -useable, but I was starting to have compatibility issues) .... $499 including 2yr extended warranty.
It's fine. It handles 7d files quite quickly; it's not quite as happy with 5dII files but it doesn't crash on them, just slows down a bit. The only things i regret are that it only has USB 2.0, and there's no dedicated video card; the Intel card *displays* fine, but I suspect a separate card might have been a bit faster. Still, not a problem and at the price I really can't complain.
The big difference this time is I've hooked it up to my IPS monitor and a keyboard/mouse - this gave me the best of both worlds for a "desktop" unit which I can then use on the road as needed without having to swap between machines; for that price it seemed a no-brainer to give it a try and so far I'm quite happy with it. It runs CS6 with no problems at all so far. The biggest challenge I've faced in photo editing is adapting to the monitor - although we've had it for a couple of years, I'd been using my laptop mostly and so hadn't really used it; I've had to rethink my processing mindset, but am slowly figuring it out vs the screen on the old monitor which I was *really* used to. Simply a "transition" rather than a "problem".
I did. I underspecc'd myself a bit (again lol) but the price was so ridiculous that even if I only use it for 18 months I'll feel I had my money out of it:
It's probably best you did. A couple years ago I bought Dell's top-of-the-line Studio 13; I was amazed that they could fit so much power into such a tiny package.
It turned out they couldn't. The GPU melted through the awful thermal pad they put in there and the heat issues damaged the LCD screen. I paid a small fortune for that thing only to see what awful QA Dell has
I ran LR3 on a 4GB ram, 220GB HD Acer netbook with something like a 11.4" screen..
It worked fine, but it was sluggish at times.. I usually had it connected to my external monitor via HDMI.
I'm tempted to buy another 512GB Samsung SSD to stick in the laptop, since LR4 doesn't use gfx, but the SSD.. I just don't want to transfer everything over... which would be such a royal pain!
But the SSD makes an enormous difference, as I experienced with my desktop.
-Mike Jin
D800
16/2.8, f1.4G primes, f2.8 trio, 105/200 macro, SB900. It never gets easier, you just get better.
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Costco special - Dell studio 15" with an i3 processor, currently with 6g ram (which I will expand to maximum capacity as soon as I can) 1tb hdd, and including licensed copies of Word/Excel 2012 (our MS Office is really, really old -useable, but I was starting to have compatibility issues) .... $499 including 2yr extended warranty.
It's fine. It handles 7d files quite quickly; it's not quite as happy with 5dII files but it doesn't crash on them, just slows down a bit. The only things i regret are that it only has USB 2.0, and there's no dedicated video card; the Intel card *displays* fine, but I suspect a separate card might have been a bit faster. Still, not a problem and at the price I really can't complain.
The big difference this time is I've hooked it up to my IPS monitor and a keyboard/mouse - this gave me the best of both worlds for a "desktop" unit which I can then use on the road as needed without having to swap between machines; for that price it seemed a no-brainer to give it a try and so far I'm quite happy with it. It runs CS6 with no problems at all so far. The biggest challenge I've faced in photo editing is adapting to the monitor - although we've had it for a couple of years, I'd been using my laptop mostly and so hadn't really used it; I've had to rethink my processing mindset, but am slowly figuring it out vs the screen on the old monitor which I was *really* used to. Simply a "transition" rather than a "problem".
It's probably best you did. A couple years ago I bought Dell's top-of-the-line Studio 13; I was amazed that they could fit so much power into such a tiny package.
It turned out they couldn't. The GPU melted through the awful thermal pad they put in there and the heat issues damaged the LCD screen. I paid a small fortune for that thing only to see what awful QA Dell has
It worked fine, but it was sluggish at times.. I usually had it connected to my external monitor via HDMI.
I'm tempted to buy another 512GB Samsung SSD to stick in the laptop, since LR4 doesn't use gfx, but the SSD.. I just don't want to transfer everything over... which would be such a royal pain!
But the SSD makes an enormous difference, as I experienced with my desktop.
D800
16/2.8, f1.4G primes, f2.8 trio, 105/200 macro, SB900.
It never gets easier, you just get better.