whilst you are waiting for a response in here, search the forum, this question has been asked many times.
I wouldnt go for a lcd monitor myself. But at the end of the day, you want the fastest CPU you can afford, as much ram as you can afford, no less than a gig of ddr, graphics cards aernt that important, you certanly dont need a 3d beast.
Personaly i would stick wiht a PC, but maccers wouldnt agree, but they never do 😉
Look for a machine with a one-button mouse. I used to use those, and boy do I miss ’em.
Too much effort is wasted trying to time a particular computer’s speed at performing a specific task, like rotate an image 20 degrees or convert a 40 Mb file to CMYK. If I had to do those things, unattended, 50 times a day with an action I might care. What matters to me is how quickly it takes me to do the things I need to do. Some of those depend on processor speed, but not most. How many people do you know who buy a car based solely on the red-line RPM?
Thanks for the comments so far. I have reviewed the board fairly extensively. My primary issues are CS and its compatibility, what dual procs have to offer, and then which one, video card and monitor.
I am about to retire from my present position as the owner of a computer integration company. I am very familiar with tech issues for general business, ethernet etc etc.
Photography has always been a passion of mine and I wnat to build a great system. I do not know the underpinnings and related compatibilty issues around CS. I am also not well versed in video interpolation and output. I am looking for standards based, not super over clocked or a no name brand.
I hope this clears up any misconceptions. I am a PC guy from way back and have no great desire to venture into the MAC world. Sorry just me.
Thanks again
Pete
Pete,
How long do you expect to keep this system for?
If you anticipate a machine life-span of more than 18 months, it would definitely be worth considering a 64-bit chip, but probably not if less than that.
Twin monitors, a Wacom Tablet, lots of RAM and at least two large and fast HDD’s are nowadays considered essential components of a Photoshop workstation, as well as the fastest processor you can afford. Raid, whilst not considered an essential, would be handy for speeding up disk I/O
Hyperthreading appears to be causing problems for some folks at present.
Len, THanks for the input. Do you know Adobe’s intention to support 64 bit processors? Is there a distinct advantage to dual procs? I kinf of understand the jalue of dual monitors, can you elaborate? Which video card?
I am presently using an Intel D845 Motherboard and Hyper threading with no issues. I am just using the on board graphics which is very adequate and 1 19" Hitachi Tube monitor.
How long do intend to keep it? Well is can wish forever, but do realize that 24-36 months is about the best I can get.
Pete,
When thinking about putting together a Photoshop oriented machine, memory bandwidth tops the list of what’s important. Dual processors get you less and less of a performance win as the processors can now easily saturate the memory bus on most operations.
Disk speed is important, as is the number of disks. Having a RAID available for Photoshop scratch helps, but the most important thing is to get Photoshop’s scratch and Windows’ paging file on separate physical disks.
As for RAM, I think 3GB is about the sweet spot right now – Windows limits what Photoshop can allocate to 2GB, and the extra gig leaves room for the OS to do aggressive file caching and to keep other programs running as well.
And I do recommend XP, Pro or Home (I use Pro, mostly for the remote desktop features).
-Scott
just addin in case pete doesn’t know,
pete, scott’s an adobe engineer.
Maybe this is a good place to ask a question about scratch, the two physical disk advice.
I have two disks, but one is an older 5500RPM drive. If I were to do as you suggest, it would seem to me to keep PS scratch on the 7200 RPM disk. However, I am unsure of placing the paging file on a volume other than the OS volume. It appears possible, and I tried it, but in the last go around with a memory problem, I needed to use the Minidump, and Windows said without paging on C, it wouldn’t work, something to that effect.
Any thoughts?
Scott going on your advice, what physical dimensions of document do you feel 3 gig of ram will comfortably handle?
For example running with 512MB right now and a single 7200rpm HD with easily 80GB space free, I’m beginning to run into slow downs working with 300dpi files of 1 meter x .5 meters in area (files showing at the 150-250MB size level).
I very much want to work at poster-size in terms of print output right now. The work’s getting done but many effects are taking for ever to process I’m beginning to find.
Can you give any advice for optimizing the P4 2.8 system I currently have? (Win XP Home).
Thanks,
Adam.
If you can afford to set the history states from it’s default 20 to 1 you will gain a lot with no cost involved. Any time you do an operation PS makes a copy and after 2 steps PS must use the HD which is much slower than Ram.
PS should have 3 times the memory of the file. You should (must) put in more memory.
Thanks Norbert – history states impacts the undo levels doesn’t it? I think I’ve got about 50 set in my preferences so will look at that as soon as I’m in front of my system. I’m the type of user that heavily experiments so possibly running history states to 5 or 10 may be suitable and using snap shots for other major changes may suffice.
I’ve noticed that at times merely wheeling through blending options creates a series of history states in itself in PS – this isn’t the case in PSPro. Other times I’ve noticed that no history state changes result from this behavior until the blending mode is chosen and set. I’ve yet to discover the mechanics behind this.
I’ve a feeling though, that other than Ram I may need to invest in a new box and use my exisitng P4 as a second system/disc but I must be honest – 2nd discs, slaving, running dual systems etc is totally beyond this business person meekly acknowledging, a complete lack of IT engineering nouce.
Adam.
Yes It is nothing else than undo levels, but it must create a history to be able to go back. It is there where you fill the ram quickly.
Of course it does not make a copy if you do not commit (finish) the step. If you make a snapshot this is also held in Ram, unless you save it to disk.
To put a second HD into your system is very easy if you are not afraid of opening the box. Asigning this disk as a scrach is only a few mous clicks. Just ask and you will get hel or better yet do a search on this forum and you can read.
What you can do is to make a small sized copy at 72ppi to experiment with.
Pete,
Do you know Adobe’s intention to support 64 bit processors? <<
No, I don’t work for Adobe, and if I did, I wouldn’t be allowed to say…..but my best-guess is that the next version of Photoshop will be XP-only with support for Win2k being dropped and probably 64-bit support (depending upon how the O/S 64-bit development goes).
Of course, that will probably mean we will all need terabytes of free disk space, and another 5 bucketfuls of really fast RAM to see any performance improvements (Oh, and applications shipping on DVD because they’ve grown too big to fit onto a CD – but then we will need DVD-R to backup our precious image files!)<vbg>
Is there a distinct advantage to dual procs?<<
Only minor improvements in performance in certain operations. I doubt you would be aware of any real overall performance benefit.
I kind of understand the value of dual monitors, can you elaborate? <<
Photoshop uses a LOT of palettes, which can take over a lot of available screen space. Being able to move those palettes over to a 2nd monitor, leaving the prime monitor free for image display is a major benefit. Otherwise you are forever moving, opening, or closing palettes.
Which video card?<<
I’m a long-time fan of Matrox cards. Their drivers are good and reliable and regularly updated to cure any obscure problems that do occur.
Len,
I’m a long-time fan of Matrox cards. Their drivers are good and reliable and regularly updated to cure any obscure problems that do occur
……unless, as I’ve said before, you were one of the poor suckers who bought a Marvel G-400 card a few months before XP was released. (Take a look at Matrox’s driver download page for the support they offered in drivers for XP with that card…….. and then wonder if that lousy attitude might transfer to other cards.)
Pete,
Before you follow the lemmings, take a good look at any nVidia based cards. Huge value for money, generally. Outstanding performance, too.
Fred.
A question about setting the scratch drive.
My current PC is configured as raid 0 (there are 2 hard drives installed, seen as one by OS). I have also got an external hard disk connected (USB2 / 7200rpm).
Would you advise to set the external hard disk as scratch disk?
Kind regards,
I have done it inthe past with no problems.
The key is: Does the OS recognize it as not a removable drive? If it is classed as removable, PS won’t use it.
I think from past communications here, Adobe frowns on that. However, there were times that I forgot to switch on the external, and PS reverted to "C" drive for that session. Depending on how much free space on C, that could be a problem, but that would also be true if the scratch was full and PS had to look elsewhere for more scratch.
If it is classed as removable, PS won’t use it.
I think there’s a reg file in the goodies folder of cs that will allow it to use an external drive…
ahh… AllowRemovableScrtch_ON.reg and _OFF.reg
Adobe Photoshop CS does not list removable media drives, such as Zip or floppy drives, in the Plug-Ins & Scratch Disks preferences window by default. Using a removable media drive as a scratch disk may significantly decrease Photoshop’s performance and may contribute to file corruption.
Running the Allow Removable Scratch registry key allows you to use a removable media drive as a scratch disk, by listing the removable media drives currently attached to your computer in each of the scratch disk pop-up menus in Edit > Preferences. Writable or re-writable CD-ROM drives are not listed. To disable this function, use these instructions to run the AllowRemovableScratch_OFF_D.reg file.
Pete,
Amongst these knowledgeable replies, please note that I’m a software engineer with a serious bent towards both motion graphics and photography. My equipment choices are conservative; a canon 10D (digital SLR) and a Sony TRV900 (DV), if this gives you a baseline for the following hardware recommendations. In line with the general view here in the forum: max out on memory and fast storage, worry a bit less about computes, and care deeply about monitor space and input/output devices. So…
procs: I’ve always built dual proc machines, as they are generally very cost effective. My wife’s machine is a dual 1gig PIII that just keeps running. I even use it as a network render node for AE. My most recent machine is dual AMD 2000+. With the next gen of procs near (for once this seems to be real) – I expect to use this machine for a year, then relegate it to another AE network box, ie wait to enjoy the splendor of 64 bit when the new bus architecture works itself out.
Memory: I’ve always used 2 gig – but this might be due to previous wintel application limits (anyone remember compiling with the 3G switch?).
Hard drives: I’ve always used hardware or software IDE RAID. Amazing speed and capacity; RAID 5 if you need it, etc. Even if everyone says that the typical 7200 RPM drive is ‘fast enough’, I’d rather not be concerned at all. Again cost is a factor: I can buy cheaper quieter drives, knowing that striping multiple drives will give me the required speed.
Monitors: All LCD… yeah, yeah it’s tough to color match, especially two different brands; but I’ve got one nec on my dual 17" LCD system that I can count on for color fidelity. One current weakness of dual head Matrox cards (and maybe others) is that you can only use one color profile for both monitors.
Lastly: cost, cost cost! My dual AMD 2000+, 2 gig ram and a terabyte of RAID storage, all in a nice aluminum case with lots of cooling cost me less than 3K; want to price out a Mac with those specs… otherwise I’d have both (and run FCP).
– Nicholas
A 2.8 P4 is plenty fast, processor-wise. For handling 250MB images, I would at least go to 2GB RAM. Those are fairly large images, and 512MB is definitely not enough for images of that size. And consider a second drive. Image that large will end up using scratch disk heavily, even with 2GB RAM, and a second disk would help that tremendously.
-Scott
Scott – as I’m currently running a really sweet P4 2.8 system (it’s barely given me a headache), I understand now that I’m going to receive massive benefits in PSCS boosting by RAM from 512Mb to 3Gb. That’s roughly a $2k investment.
I’m running a GeForce (I think 4200ti) 8AGP 128Mb graphics card currently too, so unsure of it’s role/benefit in this equation.
If I can maintain roughly 70Gb on my solitary hard drive, is there any benefit in installing a second hard drive as a scratch disc and what size do you recommend it be if so – I’d presume 7200rpm too?
However – rather than buying a second internal drive I could use the funds to invest in an external unit for storage purposes only – ie: not as a scratch disc reading Dave’s advice but if the internal drive is a must – that’s the way it will need to be).
Thanks again,
Adam.
One current weakness of dual head Matrox cards (and maybe others) is
that you can only use one color profile for both monitors.
Umm, that’s a WinXP limitation, not a Matrox limitation. If you use the (Matrox supplied with some cards) Coloreal calibration software, you get a single profile that has calibrated both monitors independantly.
cheers
Klaas
Thanks, Klaas.
I’d forgotten the hours spent trying to calibrate an old Samsung 170MP with a relatively new NEC LCD1760V. Don’t think it’s a limitation in the Coloreal calibration software, just two very different monitors and/or user error. They were always just off – so the Samsung is now mostly for tool palettes and the NEC for image/content. This allows a decent visual work-flow in Cubase SX2, Premiere Pro, AE and PS.
Yeah, I gave up on Coloreal myself, and stuck with Adobe Gamma on the primary, for the image, and manually tweaked the secondary, to get close enough for the palettes and stuff (I have a Sony 21" G520 primary, and a Sony G420 secondary).
cheers
Klaas
Before upgrading to 3GB, shop around. I can’t imagine 3GB of RAM costing that much! Note that you’ll get a *lot* of benefit going to just 1GB, and it will be more affordable.
Of course, living here reading the San Jose Fry’s Ad (aka Mercury News) every morning, I’m probably spoiled having very cheap RAM prices in the paper every morning.
-Scott
Scott – I should have said $2k Australian – then again, we are 80 cents to your dollar now so I will research 😉
How mandatory is a second disc for performance? What if I could keep a 50GB space on my current solitary HD free at all times with the RAM upgrade?
Thanks,
Adam.
I have the Matrox G750 video card. It is of course dual head (actually 3 head but I only use 2) It has 2 digital outputs which can drive 2 analog monitors via furnished adapters. You could also have 1 analog and one digital or to digital monitors.
I have been happy with it.. No problems.
ALSO!! I can calibrate each monitor separately.
(I use the Gretag MacBeth Eye One system for monitor calibration.)
Erv
How mandatory is a second disc for performance?
It depends very much on the size of images you will be working with. If you expect to be working with 40MB images or larger, consider a second disk. It’s not so much about the free space on the disk, but more about physical drive head positioning when both Photoshop and the OS are trying to page in/out large amounts of data.
-Scott
Everyone I thank you all for your contributions. I have done some additional research and have come to the following conclusion
Intel D865PERL motherboard
Intel P4 3.4E Processor
4 gb ram
Matrox Parhelia 256MB Graphics Card
4 250GB CAVIAR 7200RPM 8MB SATA dual RAID 1&0
2 NEC MultiSync FP2141SB-BK
WACOM Intuos2 9X12 Tablet
EPSON P2200 Printer
XP PRO
DVD Reader
DVD Writer
This system should keep me in business for a bit.
I hope this exercise has helped someone other than me!
A formula handed to me from an Adobe article in 1996 believe it or not, provided the following RAM requirement formula: 10MB+(5 x the size of the file worked on). The 10MB being necessary for the Windows OS alone. Hence a 400MB file would optimally require 2.1GB RAM to service.
The article also gave a nice explanation of the scratch disc phenomenon being part of the PS Virtual Memory system. Actual RAM the article explains, only does part of the memory workload, so without a scratch disc in the above example, even 2.1GB my not optimize performance. Video RAM it seems is a tertiary issue in the equation.
Though the need for RAID is less clear, I will be adding a second 7200RPM 120GB HD to my unit as a dedicated scratch disc and installing a RAID card between the two.
Thanks Scott for answering my questions btw. Pete – insure your system for self combustion 😉
Adam.
Intel D865PERL motherboard
I love that board. Been running it for a couple months now.
I believe the 875 chipset gets a bit better performace though.
