Wow - 30" screen really changes things

jfriend

I just upgraded to the HP LP3065 30" LCD monitor. Wow. I had been on a fairly old 17" CRT and I'm blown away by how much the larger screen changes the way I can work.

It totally changes the way I use Adobe Bridge because now I have enough screen real estate for meta data on the left, a large group of thumbs in the middle and a large preview image on the right. I never had enough screen space before to effectively use the preview pane in Bridge.

In Photoshop, I can have two images fully visible at a good size without having to overlap them.

I have room to leave other things open on the screen and still see them while I do my other work.

These babies are not cheap, but wow it really impacts the way you can work. I also built my own quad core PC ($1400) which screams through RAW files so that adds to the experience too.

wxwax

You're not helping, Mr. J-not-so-friend. :bluduh

Rhuarc

LoL, Seriously! Lens Lust is bad enough, now you are making me jelous of your monitor AND computer! It shouldn't be allowed!

wildviper

Rhuarc wrote:

LoL, Seriously! Lens Lust is bad enough, now you are making me jelous of your monitor AND computer! It shouldn't be allowed!

Yeah, I recently bought the Soyo 24" for less than $300 and it is awesome. Anyone looking for a good monitor should look at this. Color is awesome and it doesn't shift from side to side.

Jfriend, seems like you got a good computer build. Would you mind sharing the specs? $1,200 is a good price it seems.

jfriend

wildviper wrote:

Yeah, I recently bought the Soyo 24" for less than $300 and it is awesome. Anyone looking for a good monitor should look at this. Color is awesome and it doesn't shift from side to side.

Jfriend, seems like you got a good computer build. Would you mind sharing the specs? $1,200 is a good price it seems.

If there was ever any doubt before, now I really feel like a computer and photo nerd. Here's my computer (all prices from Newegg):

$279.99 - Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 Kentsfield 2.4GHz LGA 775 Processor
$159.99 - GIGABYTE GA-P35-DS3P motherboard
$179.98 - Crucial Ballistix 2GB (4 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) ($80 rebate available)
$184.99 - Western Digital Raptor X WD1500AHFD 150GB 10,000 RPM Serial ATA150 (for OS installation)
$164.99 - EVGA 256-P2-N761-AR GeForce 8600GTS 256MB 128-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 ($20 rebate available)
$124.99 - CORSAIR CMPSU-520HX ATX12V v2.2 and EPS12V 2.91 520W Power Supply ($10 rebate available)
$114.99 - Antec P180b case
$111.99 - Microsoft Windows Vista 32-Bit Home Premium for System Builders Single Pack DVD
$5.99 - Arctic Silver 5 Thermal Compound
$44.99 - Tuniq Tower 120 P4 & K8 CPU Cooler
$37.99 - LITE-ON 20X DVD±R DVD Burner with LightScribe Black SATA Model LH-20A1L-06

Total: $1410.89
Rebates: $110.00
Net: $1300.89

I bought half the parts from Amazon and half from Newegg. I would have bought all of them from Newegg except that Newegg charges CA residents tax and charges everyone shipping and I get things from Amazon with no tax or shipping so the things that were similarly priced or lower and available through Amazon, I bought from Amazon (which was the video card, the power supply, the processor and Vista).

I also bought the HP monitor I mentioned above (from B&H) and the only other thing I had to buy was some cable ties for doing clean cabling.

This was my first system I built myself and it probably took me 12 hours to figure out everything and assemble it all. The second time around it would be a lot, lot faster (probably could do it in a few hours).

I spent a lot of time reading reviews and forum postings on Tomshardware and Anantech to figure out what to buy. I haven't yet, but I plan on boosting the clock speed to 3.0GHz which people think is pretty conservative, but still a 25% boost. That's why I bought the Tuniq CPU cooler rather than using the stock cpu heatsink from Intel.

The whole system has 6 fans in it (1 power supply fan, 1 cpu fan, 1 video card fan, 3 air circulating fans) which all run at very slow speed and are very quiet, but really move the air through the case. It makes only about 1/4 the noise my previous Dell tower does (with it's single fan). If you fill it up with hard drives, it has mounting spots for two more fans to help circulate air across the hard drive bay. I have three hard drives in it now. The case if very nice, but also very big. It's size comes from the fact that it's very expandable and has a very thoughtful design for cooling.

The motherboard has 8 USB ports on the backpanel, two more for the case, 2 Firewire ports, 1 ethernet port, 5.1 sound, mouse port, keyboard port, 2 ESATA ports externally and 8 SATA ports internally. It has seven total PCI type slots (I'm only using one PCI-E x16 slot for video).

wildviper

Jeeez. I am jealous. That is a fine piece of machine there. It will fly the pants of many many computers. That OS hard drive alone will amazing.

Now you are making me think if I should upgrade my desktop AMD 64 2800+. Hmmmm....