What kind of increase will high end processor give?

Question

Right now I am running an entry level Dell with a Celeron D 2.53 GHz processor, no video card, and 2 gigs of RAM.

I am willing to put out a couple thousand for a high end PC, for using photoshop and 2D animation programs. I would like to know what kind of an increase in speed I am looking at, and what set up is best. I would like a graphics card that gives extremely accurate colors (I already have a great monitor, a SyncMaster 204B)

Also, it would help if I could get a computer that can use the 2x 1G DDR memory sticks I already have. Im guessing I will want to go to 4 gigs of RAM.

Answer 1

A computer for $2G? Unless you're into gaming, 3D animation or video editing, I don't see much gain. I bought AMD64 3.8 gHz and run Linux 64-bit for $850 (without the WIN OS it saves $200) with 1gig RAM and PCIe video card seeking to increase speed for rendering 3D and video editing. I saw a noticeable increase. Most of the time, most folks have a CPU with a 4% CPU load running a word processor or a web browser.

Answer 2

First off Celeron D processors don't have much cache memory on the chip. I would go with Intel Pentium 4 chip or a AMD chip. When upgrade the memory, you might want to check on the windows version. Because most windows versions will only see 3GB of memory. You computer might see 4GB but windows will only detected 3GB meaning 3GB is all that you'll really be able to use. I think there is one version of Vista that will see 4GB. Search around to find out. You must have a video card to show video. So I'm think it must be bulit onto the motherboard. If you get a high def video card it will use less processing on the processor. 8800 NVidia cards are out. For best PC performance I would go with that. Hope this helps.