Computer Power?

Cedar wrote in news:6b4pg.22237$:

How much "juice under the hood" does it take to be able to properly work with PhotoShop and Illustrator CS2? (I understand CS2 is the newest version.) Is a separate video card necessary? Would a 850 mhz machine with 384 mb of ram do the job?

Ever heard of google?

http://www.pugh.co.uk/Products/adobe/photoshop-cs2.htm

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"Cedar" wrote in message

How much "juice under the hood" does it take to be able to properly work with PhotoShop and Illustrator CS2? (I understand CS2 is the newest version.) Is a separate video card necessary? Would a 850 mhz machine with 384 mb of ram do the job?

Hi.

I am guessing that it might work, but only with very small image files.

Even though it did work, it would run very slowly, and you would not be able to do very many edits before it hung.

Photoshop is RAM hungry, and CS2 is even more so than earlier versions. Most people nowadays have a Minimum of 1 GB, and many have 3 GB of as fast RAM as they can get.

A fast processor, ( 3000mhz and over ), will also help, as will more than one fast HDD. One of these is usually left empty, so that Photoshop can use it as a "Scratch Disc" (Virtual memory).

The video Card is not important. Almost any 64 Mb Card will do the job. Fast powerful cards are really only important to Gamers.

The other factor which most people forget about is the Monitor, you need a big one so that you can see the picture and all the Tools at the same time, or even better 2 Monitors.

Roy G

In article <6b4pg.22237$>,
Cedar wrote:

How much "juice under the hood" does it take to be able to properly work with PhotoShop and Illustrator CS2? (I understand CS2 is the newest version.) Is a separate video card necessary?

No. Photoshop and Illustrator are 2D image manipulation programs. They do not use or benefit from an accelerated 3D graphics card.

Would a 850 mhz machine
with 384 mb of ram do the job?

Sure–painfully, agonizingly slowly. Will Photoshop and Illustrator runo n that machine? Yes, in the sense that you’ll see the welcome screen and you’ll be able to use the tools. But with an underpowered computer like that, especially with that paltry amount of memory, you’ll likely be very disappointed by their performance.

Illustrator in particular may give you problems. If Illustrator CS2 can not allocate enough memory when it starts up, you’ll see a dialog saying something along the lines of "Unable to complete that request" and Illustrator will close. I’ve run into this problem on a machine with 512MB of RAM, if I’m running several programs like Photoshop, GoLive, and Flash simultaneously and try to launch Illustrator.

Computers are cheap. In terms of computing power, the machine you have is not yesterday’s hardware; it’s last century’s hardware. I would say an upgrade is due.

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Cedar wrote:

How much "juice under the hood" does it take to be able to properly work with PhotoShop and Illustrator CS2? (I understand CS2 is the newest version.) Is a separate video card necessary? Would a 850 mhz machine with 384 mb of ram do the job?

You did not mention what how you plan to use CS2. If you are a student or are just learning to use CS2 then the machine you describe will be fine. If you are a pro moving from some other product then it will run slow. If you are a pro in the right environment even a slow machine could be worked around but the danger is that it will increase the risk of others seeing your intermediate work, which is always bad, or it could cause delays, which is intolerable.

Good luck,
Ron

Cedar wrote:
How much "juice under the hood" does it take to be able to properly work with PhotoShop and Illustrator CS2?

It depends on the size of the image files.

Is a separate video card necessary?

No.

Would a 850 mhz machine
with 384 mb of ram do the job?

There’s a description of the min hardware and OS requirements somewhere …. I’m too lazy to look it up but I think what you have is close to minimal but might be OK, depending on your OS.

If you are working on small files for the web (say gifs or jpegs) or if your photo images are from say 5 – 16 Mpixel digital cameras then you can work fine with near-minimum hardware configurations. As the files get bigger you’ll find it really slows down as you don’t have enough RAM, but contrary to other posts in this thread you probably won’t crash. As a benchmarking exercise I’ve gone down to 256 MB of RAM and ran tests with image files up to 550 MB (high rez medium format film scans) and Photoshop CS ran fine (very slow, but no crashes).

Just curious as to why you are putting a $600 program on a $400 computer though … if you’re just learning you might give Elements a try instead.

Bill

In article <6b4pg.22237$ says…

How much "juice under the hood" does it take to be able to properly work with PhotoShop and Illustrator CS2? (I understand CS2 is the newest version.) Is a separate video card necessary? Would a 850 mhz machine with 384 mb of ram do the job?

Good question, but one that I cannot answer. Also, a definition of being "able to properly work… " is in order.

The last legacy machine that I used with CS/CS2 was a dual-P3 1GHz with 1.5GB RAM and a Matrox G-450 64MB VRam and 4 SCSI 160M HDDs. It ran nicely with big files (1-2 GB) with multiple Layers.

In short, the more RAM, fast HDD real estate, then processor power, that you have the better.

Hunt

Bill Hilton wrote:

Cedar wrote:
How much "juice under the hood" does it take to be able to properly work with PhotoShop and Illustrator CS2?

It depends on the size of the image files.

Is a separate video card necessary?

No.

Would a 850 mhz machine
with 384 mb of ram do the job?

There’s a description of the min hardware and OS requirements somewhere … I’m too lazy to look it up but I think what you have is close to minimal but might be OK, depending on your OS.

If you are working on small files for the web (say gifs or jpegs) or if your photo images are from say 5 – 16 Mpixel digital cameras then you can work fine with near-minimum hardware configurations. As the files get bigger you’ll find it really slows down as you don’t have enough RAM, but contrary to other posts in this thread you probably won’t crash. As a benchmarking exercise I’ve gone down to 256 MB of RAM and ran tests with image files up to 550 MB (high rez medium format film scans) and Photoshop CS ran fine (very slow, but no crashes).
Just curious as to why you are putting a $600 program on a $400 computer though … if you’re just learning you might give Elements a try instead.

Bill

Well, actually, it’s complicated…but here’s the short version: In order to obtain funding from a specific source for graphics courses, I needed to know if the school’s computers would be able to handle the software or not. (They do not yet have the software but are looking into getting it.) Since it sounds pretty "iffy" according to these posts, it would make more sense to try and work online from my machine at home (which is another battle with my funding source…:-( ! ) I figured Adobe’s system requirement guidelines were kind of …um.. "out to lunch" (as is so often the case, it seems).
Thanks for the info.

Kingdom wrote:

Cedar wrote in news:6b4pg.22237$:

How much "juice under the hood" does it take to be able to properly work with PhotoShop and Illustrator CS2? (I understand CS2 is the newest version.) Is a separate video card necessary? Would a 850 mhz machine with 384 mb of ram do the job?

Ever heard of google?

WELL….DUH!

http://www.pugh.co.uk/Products/adobe/photoshop-cs2.htm

Interesting stuff! Thanks so much for all the responses, "eh"!