Suggestion for a new PC

All,

a friend of mine needs a new pc, and he want basically to do graphic work - he scans his hand drawing, and then want to edit it.

So, the system (a windows xp system) should be fast enough, and include a rather good good gfx card, at least 512 Mb.

The processor don't have to be a dual core, so far a single one is fast enough, preferably AMD.

HD must be with fast access, so I guess a S-ATA would be ok.

Could you give us some suggestion ?

Putting simple:
- reliable mother board
- fast AMD processor but not necessarily dual core
- 2 GB ram
- good and fast gfx card with at least 512 Mb
- good and fast HD
- affordable price

Thanks,
Sergio.

As long as he doesn't buy it where puki orders his PC's :-)

Get an Intel Core Duo. They're reasonably cheap and work very well. AMD seems to have dropped the ball this time around.

Yeah. Get a couple SATA 3.0 in a RAID configuration, and you'll be cruising.

Here is the motherboard I'd chose.

For RAM I'd go for Corsair or Kingston HyperX.

For a graphics card any last generation high-end model should do the job just fine, particularly if you're on a budget.

For the hard drive anything from Hitachi or Samsung is always a pretty safe bet. The Hitachi drives are usually faster, the Samsung drives usually quieter. If you're hooking them up in a RAID 0 configuration, the individuals drives speed is IMHO less important than the noise level.

Do not buy used computer parts, especially from ebay. I can't name the number of times I've been scammed this way.

If he's doing gfx work tell him to get a decent tablet, even if he has to reduce cpu etc. a little.

This might sound silly but -

does it need to be as 'high end' as that? Good artists have used various quality art packages whether they be things like 2d packages such as photoshop or 3d packages like Maya/SoftiMage/3dsMax on machines much lower spec than what was suggested above quite well.