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Suggest 3 power photoshop PC builds.

Gary C-G

New member
Join in here to help bring us up to date on what's the latest and greatest for a kicking photoshop box.

I use a two or three year old 2.8Ghz P4 with 2 GB of RAM and various large hard drives for my photoshop workstation. The graphics card is a 128MB Radion 9600 Pro.

I'm thinking of building a new photoshop box as I'd like a bit more oomph.

I'm about a year out of date with processors and chipsets. Would someone like to put together say three suggested photoshop box builds at three different price points? To include mobo/proc/graphics/RAM/HDD but not to include case/PSU/KB/screen/mouse etc. I'd suggest price points of $1000, $1500 and $2000.
 

Michael Tapes

OPF Administrator/Moderator
This will not answer your request, but is an interesting piece of information.

I recently build a PC and bought a PC (sort of).

The built PC was an upgrade to my main imaging machine. I added an ASUS MB, socket 939, with AMD 64 X2 4400+ (2.2GHz), 2GB Crucial memory, and I use external FW800 drives.

The machine I bought was the new 17" PowerBook Pro!, with 2GB RAM, sata 7200RPM drive. It is also a 2.2GHZ machine. I installed Windows XP SP2 using boot camp.

Bottom line, is the Mac machine is faster than the PC tower when benchmarking raw conversions in RawShooter. Gives one pause...
 

Josh Liechty

New member
I consider the ideal point for most serious photographers in terms of self-built PCs to be the high-end enthusiast workstation (as opposed to the low- to mid-range professional workstation). Making the leap from single-socket mainboards to double-socket mainboards (and the required ECC/registered memory and server-class CPUs) involves a large increase in cost for a relatively small gain in performance (though there is a large gain in flexibility and expansion capacity).

I consider this a nice system based on the AMD Athlon 64 platform that one could build today without spending an extreme amount:

Athlon 64 X2 processor
NForce4 Ultra or SLI-based mainboard (choose the SLI for an extra PCIe x16 slot for a high-performance SCSI, SAS, or SATA RAID controller)
2GB or 4GB of RAM
A basic PCIe video card, preferably passively cooled (check for dual-link DVI compatibility if a 30" LCD is in the future)
74GB 10,000 RPM hard disk for operating system and programs
36GB or 74GB 10,000 RPM hard disk for scratch files
As many large hard disks as necessary for storage; a mix of internal and external is ideal for backup purposes.
A DVD+/-RW drive, USB2 or Firewire memory card reader, and all the other little stuff that isn't critical for performance.
 

Josh Liechty

New member
Gary C-G said:
Thanks, I'm now googling SLI. Not familiar...
SLI is a way of linking two video cards for better gaming performance (supposedly). It's not at all important to photographers, but motherboards that support SLI happen to have two PCI Express slots that can take x16 width cards (even though the slots may be x8 width electrically). This allows you to have a PCI Express graphics card and a PCI Express HBA (or "host bus adapter") for a high performance array or individual collection of disks without spending a ton of money on workstation motherboards with PCI-X slots.
 

Nill Toulme

New member
Josh you pretty well described my new system, and I think you might have been one of the people who so kindly helped me configure it. (BTW, instead of wrestling with building it myself, I special ordered it from Monarch Computer in Atlanta, which turned out to be about 20 minutes from my house, and which did a great — albeit somewhat slow — job for me on putting it together.)

One thing I did a little differently was to skip the fast second drive. I don't do a whole lot in PS — my main apps are Capture One, BreezeBrowser and Qimage — so I wasn't concerned necessarily with getting the PS scratch file off the C: drive. Instead I stuck a PATA drive in the second slot and use it to clone the C: drive using Acronis True Image. Having gone thru the hassle of rebuilding a hosed system from scratch one too many times, I decided never (knock wood) again. If the C: drive self-destructs, I can boot from D:, reclone C: from D: and be back in business in about 10 minutes.

For data I have a 1.1TB internal RAID5 using four 400GB SATA drives off the Asus A8N32-SLI's onboard RAID controller. I know I'll get better performance — and the ability to handle eight or more additional drives — with a dedicated RAID controller, and as you mention the mobo's second PCI Express slot gives me the ability to add that when the time comes.

Nill
~~
www.toulme.net
 

Josh Liechty

New member
You have a good point about using a second drive to clone your OS for simplified recovery from a drive failure. In fact, while on the surface a RAID 1 array (two mirrored drives) may seem like a better idea, having an older and known-working copy of your OS is also useful if you need to reset the system to a good state for reasons besides drive failure.

I should also point out that I suggested a separate scratch disk based on received wisdom from people that I trust. I would like to hear from an expert how much Photoshop actually depends on having a scratch disk if it has "enough" memory already (on my 4GB system, it has been assigned 72%, or 2GB out of the 2.7GB that it could use).

While the efficiency would indicate that PS is not using the scratch disk while working on an image, I've heard that it still writes things there during file open and save operations and so forth (which seemed painfully long when I saved a 200MB PSD recently - I have only two disks, and scratch is on the data disk). If that isn't true, then I can't see the point of having an extra disk solely for scratch.
 
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