I’m about to upgrade to a new system and I’m not sure wether I should go with the new Athlon 64 FX bit processor or dual Intel processors, all else being equal. Also, whether to go with XP Pro or with Win 2000 Pro with either of the above, especially due to the new capabilities of CS. Anybody out there know? Thanks in advance, Dan
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Athlon 64 and Intel chips are both good choices for this application.
Photoshop can take advantage of multi-processor or multi-threaded systems. Some PS operations will complete quicker if the system has more processors. The latest models of Pentium IV’s are hyper-threaded and take advantage of PS ability to multi-thread. Having dual AMD Opterons will also crunch, but I don’t think the Athlon 64 FX is hyper-threaded.
Though it will run nicely on 64-bit machines, PS CS is still a 32-bit application which cannot take advantage of one of the best characteristics of 64-bit machines–the ability to address huge amounts of memory as compared to 32-bit machines. If you work with large images, ideally you’d like to have a 64-bit machine, a motherboard to hold lots of RAM, a 64-bit Windows XP, and PS CS-64. You can get a dual-Opteron board now and packed it with multi-gigabytes of RAM, get a beta version of 64-bit Windows, but there’s still a weak link in the chain, what with the application still being 32-bits.
I think as important as the chip you are researching is the motherboard…having the capability to RAID 0 SATA disks. Everybody warns us PS is memory hungry. When your 2 gigabytes dedicated to PS is sucked dry, scratch is king.
New poster to this board… this is a topic I am also interested in, doing some tax-saving end of year shopping. Do we ever get answers from Adobe folks in here? I’d like to hear what they, or other experts have to say about the dual processor value of CS.
I know only a handful of PS7 processes utilized dual… among them were NOT the big time wasters like image size, transform, or change color mode (as far as I recall). Does anyone know what new processes in CS are not multithread capable?
In addition, other big time killers, like simply just opening a 500MB+ file… I imagine performance is based 99% on your hard drive speed rather than processor speed…?
I am a web designer, so I don’t really need to RAID set up, as I always shrink the big print files down to 72dpi anyway, it’s just getting there that’s a pain… right now I’m looking at a dual processor as my main goal, with 2GB RAM, and a 7200 RPM hard drive in that order as far as performance priority. If anyone knows any better please let me know… and how CS will make better/different use than PS7. Appreciate the help!
The big problem right now with the Athlon64 and Intel’s new 64 bit CPU soon to hit the market) is that while they are super fast, there is not yet an OS or apps to take advantage of them. So if you want 64-bit processing now, you sort of are stuck with Mac.
Give your photos a professional finish with sharpening in Photoshop. Learn to enhance details, create contrast, and prepare your images for print, web, and social media.
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