64 bit Vista: not very stable, drivers not available or not fully enabled for many peripherals, especially color management issues. And Video card drivers.
In the real world 8gbs of RAM will never be used as it should by a Windows OS and most motherboards have problems handling even 4gbs or RAM, let alone
8. But its your money.
Vista in any flavor?
Your life will be easier, unless you enjoy endless tinkering with a beta OS, if you stick to a 32 bit OS. In which case more than 2gbs of RAM is a waste, but its your money.
Dual boot: XP for real work, Vista if they ever get it to work. SP1 for Vista 32 bit sounds like it is mainly aimed at increasing disk access speeds, which are abysmal as things stand, and not the several other horrors that render Vista a step backward from XP. VIsta 64 is a low priority for Microsoft, but its your money and your aggravation.
RAID 0 will do nothing for Photoshop except maybe load it marginally faster. If you do not backup your RAID array regularly the overwhelming likelihood is it will go down with complete loss of OS and installed programs, saved files.
A Raptor scratch disk/swap file may be marginally faster but probably not worth the money, but its your money. I would rather have 500-1000gbs of extra storage at less cost. Swap disk performance would probably time out the same whether you use a Raptor or 7200 rpm drive because spindle speed is not likely what limits performance. Many tests are showing that the performance benefit of Raptors has diminished because of increased in disk read/write speeds with newer technology.
If you must have RAID you would be better off pursuing RAID arrays that create redundant backups (there are several flavors).
If you are a gamer then the video card you describe will be fun, otherwise it is another money pit, but its your money. Presuming you use an LCD you have to make sure the video card can support the panel at its native resolution, possibly requiring dual DVI.
And make sure you have a massive power supply for this beast.
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For working on 1GB PSD files:
Specs:
CPU: Intel quad-core 2 extreme qx6700
RAM: 8GB
OS: XP 64-bit
Disks: 2*Raptor RAID0 (OS), 1*Raptor Scratch, 2*Raptor RAID0 (Drive for PSD file)
Video: 512MB PCI-X
Comments/Suggestions?
