Digital Illustration with Cintiq

[theobear]

I need to put together a system as my iMac is on the way out. I'm a total newbie at building a pc... the most I've done along these lines is upgrade the hd/ram in my imac. I create illustrations using Photoshop and a Wacom 17" Cintiq. Unfortunately I don't have a lot of time for research and I have to be budget minded. BUT, I'm tired of painting on the Cintiq and waiting for the brush strokes to catch up with me.

Color management has never been my strong point, so I thought I would try and get up to speed thanks to a link found in these forums I am going to go with the the EIZO Foris FS2333-BK as the cheapest option available.

Here's what I was thinking.... Thanks for any advice you can offer me.

Gigabyte Intel Z77 LGA 1155 AMD CrossFireX/NVIDIA SLI Dual LAN Dual UEFI BIOS ATX Motherboard GA-Z77X-UD5H - Gigabyte

$182.99

Intel Core i7-3770 Quad-Core Processor 3.4 GHz 4 Core LGA 1155 - BX80637I73770 - Intel

$279.99

Corsair Carbide Series Black 500R Mid Tower Computer Case (CC-9011012-WW) - Corsair

$119.99

Corsair Enthusiast Series CP-9020039-NA650W ATX12V v2.31 / EPS12V 80 PLUS BRONZE Certified Modular High Performance Power Supply - Corsair

$89.24

EVGA GeForce GT 640 2048MB GDDR3 Dual DVI, mHDMI Graphics Cards 02G-P4-2643-KR - EVGA

$86.49


Corsair Vengeance 16GB (2x8GB) DDR3 1600 MHz (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory (CML16GX3M2A1600C10) - Corsair

$109.99


Datacolor Spyder4Express S4X100 Display Calibration Device - Datacolor

$99.99

Foris FS2333-BK - LED-Monitor - EIZO

$400.09

Seagate Barracuda 1 TB 7200RPM SATA 32 MB Cache 3.5-Inch Bare Drive - ST31000524AS

SanDisk Extreme SSD 120 GB SATA 6.0 Gb-s2.5-Inch Solid State Drive SDSSDX-120G-G25 SanDisk Extreme

 

[zaptoons]

If you can swing it, I'd upgrade to a GTX 650 with 2GB of DDR5.

I'd highly recommend the one from the current buyer's guide.

Since you want as responsive an experience as possible with the Cintiq, I highly recommend the upgrade in graphics horsepower, and the GTX650 is a much better card, and doesn't cost that much more.

I've built two systems for animation artists using Cintiqs, both using the same motherboard and CPU as yours. One, has a 22" Cintiq and a 23" monitor using the GTX650 card, and another a 24" monitor and 24" HD Touch with a GTX670. (A truly awesome system). Both are quite happy with the performance and use their systems to produce professional artwork.

As I always recommend for those building a Hackintosh they plan to do critical work with (and really, everyone): be sure to plan your system around a bootable clone backup of your main OSX drive/partition. Cloning OSX is super-simple using tools like Carbon Copy Cloner or SuperDuper, and once your system is cloned you can rest assured that you'll always be able to boot and retrieve your work, even if a system update borks OSX or other unforeseen calamity. My advice is to keep a small partition and the boot sector of your 1TB backup drive for a working clone of OSX and possibly your critical applications, like a life raft so you can keep working in the (thankfully unlikely, but possible) event of disaster, or also to fix/repair your main install and to test system updates, etc.

Good luck! I know many artists happily using Hackintoshes. As long as you realize it's not a real Mac, but can be just as reliable so long as you operate within the specific rules of running OSX on PC hardware, you'll be well served.

 

[theobear]

Thanks so much for your reply. Do you think you could give me an amazon link to the card you are referring? Maybe it's too early, but I can only find the 650 with 1 GB option.

 

[zaptoons]

http://www.tonymacx86.com/339-building-customac-buyer-s-guide-march-2013.html

Scroll down to graphics cards. The 650 recommended in the guide is the EVGA 2048GB model.

 

[theobear]

THANKS. another question: Do you have any recommendations about which build/golden build to use?

 

[Going Bald]

THANKS. another question: Do you have any recommendations about which build/golden build to use?

You are already fairly close to http://www.tonymacx86.com/golden-bu...d5h-i7-3770k-gigabyte-geforce-gtx-660-ti.html parts-wise other than the gfx card.