New build specific for Photoshop

[wernehawen]

Hi guys,

I am new to this forum but certainly not new to Anandtech.

I am building a new PC specifically for photoshop and i would hope that you guys are ablbe to help me answer a few questions that i have. The version of PS i am using is CS2.

I have been wondering and i hope you guys can help me out. Which would be better suited to photoshop or rather to my requirements listed below? A dual core with a higher clock speed or a quad with a slower clock speed?

I have been searching online but i havent really found the answer that i am looking for. I am predominantly working with vector graphics in Photoshop. I am building a mapping system and thus there will be a lot of paths, lots of layers, lots of bitmap image layers and it will become larger both in file size and also pixel count as time goes on as more portions of the map are drawn in.

At this time, i do not have unlimited budget so i would like to know which configuration would be more beneficial to what i am doing....

And would let's say going from 4gb of ram to 8gb show a marked improvement on the responsiveness of photoshop? Any idea what is PS CS2's addressable memory limit?

Oh and finally, anyone have any idea whether PS CS2 would run fine on either XP 64bit or Vista 64bit bcos of the 8gb of ram which i wud eventually like to use if this amount of ram proves beneficial and PS works fine and isn't 'bottlenecked' in anyways in 64bit environment as it's a native 32bit app.

Thanks a million in advance for any help rendered!


Oh and btw, forgot to mention, i am looking at the amd phenom 9500 quad cpu but if a dual core would give me the same performance at a lower price point then i would rather save the money.

What about the intel Q6600? would there be an advantage by choosing intel over amd for Photoshop application?

 

[aigomorla]

Originally posted by: wernehawen
Hi guys,

I am new to this forum but certainly not new to Anandtech.

I am building a new PC specifically for photoshop and i would hope that you guys are ablbe to help me answer a few questions that i have. The version of PS i am using is CS2.

I have been wondering and i hope you guys can help me out. Which would be better suited to photoshop or rather to my requirements listed below? A dual core with a higher clock speed or a quad with a slower clock speed?

I have been searching online but i havent really found the answer that i am looking for. I am predominantly working with vector graphics in Photoshop. I am building a mapping system and thus there will be a lot of paths, lots of layers, lots of bitmap image layers and it will become larger both in file size and also pixel count as time goes on as more portions of the map are drawn in.

At this time, i do not have unlimited budget so i would like to know which configuration would be more beneficial to what i am doing....

And would let's say going from 4gb of ram to 8gb show a marked improvement on the responsiveness of photoshop? Any idea what is PS CS2's addressable memory limit?

Oh and finally, anyone have any idea whether PS CS2 would run fine on either XP 64bit or Vista 64bit bcos of the 8gb of ram which i wud eventually like to use if this amount of ram proves beneficial and PS works fine and isn't 'bottlenecked' in anyways in 64bit environment as it's a native 32bit app.

Thanks a million in advance for any help rendered!


Oh and btw, forgot to mention, i am looking at the amd phenom 9500 quad cpu but if a dual core would give me the same performance at a lower price point then i would rather save the money.

What about the intel Q6600? would there be an advantage by choosing intel over amd for Photoshop application?

Q9450 or Q6600 is your best bet option.

Also load up on the ram, and get a dedicated Raid card, like promise 8350 or Areca 1210.
Get 4 Samsung Spinpoint F1 750gig's and put them on raid0

Have another 2 1TB drive and put those on Raid1 mirror for storage and WIP if your work is very important.

AMD blows, dont bother looking at them until they fixed the erata bug.



Um you know a MAC is also a very good option if your needing it for stuff like this.

 

[BladeVenom]

Quad core doesn't seem to offer an advantage in photoshop, at least according to this particular benchmark. CPU Chart

 

[krnmastersgt]

It is in CS3, I doubt that CS2 is optimized or will be optimized to do so.

 

[Idontcare]

You would do well to spend extra attention and $ on your disk-subsystem.

I've ran Ramdisks (superspeed), raid-0 gigabyte IRAM, and Areca 1280ML with 2GB cache...all in the name of doing whatever I could to ensure the CPU would be the bottleneck.

It gets real easy to find yourself spending 1000's of bucks in this area, so just beware of that.

PM Fullmetal Chocobo and Rubycon to get some good advice on building good fast disk subsystem.

 

[aigomorla]

Originally posted by: Idontcare


PM Fullmetal Chocobo and Rubycon to get some good advice on building good fast disk subsystem.

definitely +1 this.

 

[heyheybooboo]

Premiere 4-core - :thumbsup:

Photoshop 4-core - :thumbsdown:

And as noted ram/disk I/O is of utmost importance.

A $95 X2 5400+ 2.8GHz AM2 65W will perform quite well as opposed to what some may say ...

 

[Markfw]

I second the Q6600 + 8 gig ram and a fast disk subsystem.

 

[heyheybooboo]

Originally posted by: Markfw900
I second the Q6600 + 8 gig ram and a fast disk subsystem.

Hey, Mark ...

The problem with the Q6600 is that you get little if nothing from the extra cores. Adding more cores cannot speed up the operation of Photoshop.

Operations in Photoshop are performed sequentially. Each step of the process must be completed before moving to the next step (which is dependent upon the previous step). Threads in the operation of Photoshop do not run in parallel.

Photoshop operates sequentially on chunks of data (Read/Write-Read/Write-Read/Write) while doing a limited number of arithmetic operations on them. This is why RAM and disk I/O are so important in Photoshop.

The one advantage the Q6600 would have is in the size of the cache. Larger cache equals bigger chunks of data that can be moved back and forth.

But even with the larger cache and 60% more ""Total GHz"" than the X2 5400+, the "Q" only operates at best, 10-15% faster on really massive files - like 100mb.

And when you take the extra money - let's say $150 - and spend it on another 2Gb of RAM, a faster hard disk or a "Super Fetch" thumb drive for the paging file you substantially narrow that 10-15% difference.

The other disadvantage of the Q6600 is the fsb speed. Those ""big chunks of data"" are moving across the bus at 1066MHz.


Edit: I forgot - I'm not disputing the quality of Intel's cpu. It's just in this case the extra cores of the Q6600 add little if anything to the operation of Photoshop. An e6600 would perform in Photoshop as would the q6600.

A step up from the '6600s would be the e8xxx's - Note that the e8's have less cache and clock for clock perform better than the ""6600s.""

mmm ... could it be that 1333MHz fsb ? I don't know ...

 

[PolymerTim]

Just out of curiosity, what is the reason a fast disk I/O is so crucial in these types of applications? Is it just because, even with 8GB RAM, PS still needs a lot of access to the HD?

 

[Markfw]

heyheybooboo, I don't personally know photoshop or run it, but from reading (see above) it looks like CS3 does use all 4 cores, but with that much power, you then may be I/O limited.

And right now, I am running on 1660 FSB, and I have other quads that run even higher.

 

[aigomorla]

Originally posted by: PolymerTim
Just out of curiosity, what is the reason a fast disk I/O is so crucial in these types of applications? Is it just because, even with 8GB RAM, PS still needs a lot of access to the HD?

i heard a pro can go though as many as 500 layers on a single picture to retouch it.

 

[DerwenArtos12]

Originally posted by: aigomorla

Originally posted by: PolymerTim
Just out of curiosity, what is the reason a fast disk I/O is so crucial in these types of applications? Is it just because, even with 8GB RAM, PS still needs a lot of access to the HD?

i heard a pro can go though as many as 500 layers on a single picture to retouch it.

QFT, sister-in-law does photography and editing for a living and her record to date is 812 layers. One layer for each color and for each operation plus seperate layers beyond that for different sections of large photos. She works with roughly 10-12 megapixel images and it is easier for her to just keep making layers than to try and have to back-track if she needs to change something. If she doesn't like how one specific thing looks, just go wipe that layer or those layers and try over. Her record was for her college thesus where she took individual portraits and spliced them together to replicate A Stary Night by Van Gogh.

 

[wernehawen]

Thanks a great deal guys for your replies. I have a few questions.

1) Anyone know whether CS2 is optimized for multiple cores? wat about dual core then?

2) Can someone pls explain in more detail what is a memory subsystem? Is it a raid array or is it something else?

3) Well, as i said in my first post...im working on a mapping system and so throughout the development process, i will be working with a lot, and i do mean a lot of layers and paths and chances r my master file would bloat to the size of over 1GB depending on the resolution that i am going to use. At this moment i have set the file resolution to 72 dpi with a pixel count of over hundreds of thousand of pixel spanning the height and length of the master image. Thus can i safely say that a quad coupled with 8gb of ram is what i shud be looking at and just forget bout dual cores?

Hope you guys would be able to enlighten me. Thanks a million!

 

[Idontcare]

Originally posted by: wernehawen
Thanks a great deal guys for your replies. I have a few questions.

1) Anyone know whether CS2 is optimized for multiple cores? wat about dual core then?

2) Can someone pls explain in more detail what is a memory subsystem? Is it a raid array or is it something else?

3) Well, as i said in my first post...im working on a mapping system and so throughout the development process, i will be working with a lot, and i do mean a lot of layers and paths and chances r my master file would bloat to the size of over 1GB depending on the resolution that i am going to use. At this moment i have set the file resolution to 72 dpi with a pixel count of over hundreds of thousand of pixel spanning the height and length of the master image. Thus can i safely say that a quad coupled with 8gb of ram is what i shud be looking at and just forget bout dual cores?

Hope you guys would be able to enlighten me. Thanks a million!

(1) Even if CS2 were purely single-threaded you will still benefit from a dual-core as windows need some CPU to perform the background IO tasks that CS2 will generate. You will, at a minimum, have multiple single-threads operating in parallel (a definition of multi-tasking), which multi-core CPU's will take advantage of.

(2) disk subsystem is where your windows pagefile resides, where your photoshop cache files reside, where your photoshop installation files resides, and where your image files reside.

You want all these things to reside on fast (low latency & high bandwidth) hard-drives or other. We generalize this as saying "disk subsystem" because you are not limited to just harddrives.

You could setup Gigabyte I-RAM for example (4GB per plug-in PCI card) and use DRAM as very low-latency cache space.

You could use a ramdisk (like superspeed.com, but you need vista compatible so goodle a bit) to make some of your installed ram accessible as a very fast (low latecny & high bandwidth) disk space.

And lastly you could buy and add-in RAID card which has a DIMM slot onboard to act as a buffer and allows you to create large disk arrays (say 6 raptors in Raid-0 or some such).

I use these examples (I-RAM, Ramdisk, and Raid-card) because I setup all three on my main computer which I use for photoshop, encoding, etc so I know they work. But it is spendy.

My Areca 1280ML card with 2GB/cache cost me ~$1.5k. But it does the job. Dual IRAM cards (put into raid-0 config) ran me ~$1k with 8GB of ram at the time, you could probably get this setup for maybe $500 now. Ramdisk is probably the cheapest and fastest solution, but it will also be the smallest total space as most motherboards are limited to 8GB total ram, of which you can only safely carve out maybe 2GB for a ramdisk in your case.

So you need to strike a balance between how much you value your time versus how much you want to spend to have fast (low latency & high bandwidth) disk subsystem feeding photoshop.

 

[zsdersw]

Originally posted by: heyheybooboo
Note that the e8's have less cache and clock for clock perform better than the ""6600s.""

The E8xxx's have 6MB L2 cache and the E6xxx's have, at most, 4MB. And only the cheapest Q9xxx's have less cache than the Q6xxx's.

 

[heyheybooboo]

Originally posted by: zsdersw

Originally posted by: heyheybooboo
Note that the e8's have less cache and clock for clock perform better than the ""6600s.""

The E8xxx's have 6MB L2 cache and the E6xxx's have, at most, 4MB. And only the cheapest Q9xxx's have less cache than the Q6xxx's.

Sorry for not being clear - I should have noted the Q6600 has 8mb of L2 cache.

And on a totally different tangent, would we be better off with the vector-based Illustrator, Corel Draw or a CAD program for this project ??

 

[heyheybooboo]

Originally posted by: wernehawen
Thanks a great deal guys for your replies. I have a few questions.

1) Anyone know whether CS2 is optimized for multiple cores? wat about dual core then?

2) Can someone pls explain in more detail what is a memory subsystem? Is it a raid array or is it something else?

3) Well, as i said in my first post...im working on a mapping system and so throughout the development process, i will be working with a lot, and i do mean a lot of layers and paths and chances r my master file would bloat to the size of over 1GB depending on the resolution that i am going to use. At this moment i have set the file resolution to 72 dpi with a pixel count of over hundreds of thousand of pixel spanning the height and length of the master image. Thus can i safely say that a quad coupled with 8gb of ram is what i shud be looking at and just forget bout dual cores?

Hope you guys would be able to enlighten me. Thanks a million!

Quad cores for Photoshop provide little benefit. And do you have any vector-based software?

Photoshop operation takes around 3gb (not 100% sure on that one). 8gb total looks pretty good ...