New Pc for Photowork, stitching, hdr, cs4.....

[rob25]

1. What YOUR PC will be used for. - Large Photo files, stitching,hdr, Photoshop cs4

2. What YOUR budget is. - low as you can go, max 600?
3. What country - Spain

4. - does not matter

5. YOUR current parts, - an old 250gb , 8 mb buffer 3,5 Hard drive & a newer 160gb 8mb buffer, 2,5 toshiba .(If usefull for os??)

I currently have an acer 7720g laptop 3gb memory,cpu 5550 1,8gz dual core, 8600 gt 512 mb,vista premium 32,(will try to change to 64 bit.) which is a bit slow for this work, especialy rendering panos & editing them in cs4.(I also have an external screen & keeyboard to adapt to the tower.)

6.IF YOU have searched and/or read similar threads. - yes

7. IF YOU plan on overclocking or run the system at default speeds. - not realy considered it.

8. WHEN do you plan to build it? - asap.

----------------------------------------------------

Hello, after a lot of research I am still not quite sure of a few things & i would apreciate as much input as possible.

I have seen this offer on ebay & I think it meets more than my needs :

mobo-Asrock AliveXfire-eSata2

tower+ 650w,

AMD Phenom II x4 940 (4x3.0) 12 Ghz

4096MB (4GB) DDR2 800 KINGSTON

500GB SATA2 (3.0Gb/S) 7200rpm

DVDRW LG 22x SATA

Ports Max. 10 x USB 2.0, eSATA,

ATI Radeon HD4830 512MB DDR3 DVI y Tv-Out

PCI-Express 10/100/1000 Gb Lan

Otros Tarjeta de sonido 5.1 High Definition

Delivered - 529,24 EUROS.

I would add another 4gb ram =aprox 575? total

-----------------------------------------------------


Questions:

1- The mobo suports amd+ but it downgrades from HT3.0 (5200 MT/s) to HT1.0 (2000 MT/s), does anybody know if this would affect me significaly for my use ?

About Hard drives:

1_With so much ram do you know if it is realy nesessary to worry about putting cs4s scratch drive on a fast drive????

2_would it be more practical for my needs to drop in cpu,or gpu performance & invest more in a faster drive?

Any ideas will be apreciated.

 

[Soccerman06]

A cheap gtx 260 will be much better for CS4 since the main difference between CS3-4 is that CS4 can offload a large portion of work onto the gpu (situational again but it is very useful for me in photoshop). With that in mind, Adobe uses Nvidia products and the gtx 260 is the highest card CS4 supports that I know of.

As to your question with faster drives and CS4... I have a plain ol' vanilla 32mb 7200rpm WD drive and it takes roughly 11 seconds to load photoshop and another 5s-2m to load a file depending on file size. With Anand's benchmarks, photoshop loads in 2-3s and Id assume that same redux in load time carries over with file loading.

You dont need that 8gigs ram... but 8gigs is beneficial in CS4 in load and renders. I use 12gigs and I still see photoshop use all 12gigs when I am messing with multiple large files.

 

[rob25]

Thanks a lot for the input soccerman06

- My main concen is not only CS4, I get by with my current configuration on my laptop working on a few files from 12mp images. The primary reason I am adquiring a new pc is for the purpose of stitching panos & Hdr images. Therfore my main concern is to set my rig up right so I dont have to wait around for stitching,rendering & saving the huge files.

I use 12gigs and I still see photoshop use all 12gigs when I am messing with multiple large files.

... so I guess the 8 gigs might even be a bit short.:frown:

- From what I have read the use of the graphic card in cs4 is primarily to speed up the visual aspects of filters etc.My 8600gt is a bit slow, so I recon with a cpu about 4x faster & a graphic card about 3 x faster I will be flying, a gtx is out of my budget for now, maybe when they implement more functionality of the gpu in cs4 I will upgrade.( & I fix the hole in my poc:laugh:ket .)

Concerning the other questionns, any ideas:light:

 

[rob25]

I asked for another quote, seeing that the mobo was not amd+ it only supports it, so it reduces the hyperthreading from 5200 to 2000 mt/s. ( I still do not know how this affects my case )
The only thing is that the new mobo only accepts 8 gb ram, the old one accepted up to 16.

--------------------------------

In any case this would be my new rig, I had to downgrad graphic card to enter the budget.

MICRO AMD PHENOM II X4 940 3,00 GHZ
ASUS M3N78-VM
Memory DDR2 800-8Gb. Kingston
2 x 500GB sata II 3gbs/ 32 mb buffer
VGA ATI SAPPHIRE hd4670
LAN NVIDIA Force integrado Gigabit MAC con RTL8211CL-GR
VT1708B 8 Canales High Definition Audio CODEC

Caja semitorre ATX en formato mini servidor TQC 9001 + Fuente 700 Watios 120/Sata Alto Rendimiento

600? to my doorstep.

------------------------------------

Any Ideas :light: ????????
--------------------------------------------

 

[Soccerman06]

Actually the most noticeable impact you'll see in CS4 is in the zoom function, large files like I use 9000x9000 (81mp) take very long to zoom in and out, about 2 minutes from max to min zoom on the macs I use at work but on my system its almost instant.

 

[rob25]

Quote from Adobepress article.
"TIP

The new OpenGL support in Photoshop CS4 doesn't accelerate image processing or speed up image display. It makes image display smoother, and, through the new display features, more interactive and convenient. The good news? If you don't have an OpenGL video card, you aren't missing out in terms of performance.

Video Acceleration
For pure two-dimensional (2D) image editing, you probably won't benefit from spending more money on the kind of high-end three-dimensional (3D) video card that makes gamers happy. The bottleneck in redrawing Photoshop images is almost never the video system?it's getting the image data out of RAM (or even worse, from disk) to the video system. The one video card spec that affects 2D Photoshop performance the most is video RAM. Aim for a video card with lots of video RAM onboard?at least 256MB, and preferably 512MB. If you're running multiple large monitors, try starting at 512MB.

Photoshop CS4 is the first version of Photoshop that can take advantage of a video card's graphics processing unit (GPU) for some display operations (not image-processing operations, though). If your video card supports OpenGL, you may see new, smoother panning and zooming options in Photoshop CS4, such as free rotation of the canvas.

The 3D capabilities of a video card used to be irrelevant to Photoshop, but since the addition of 3D and video editing in Photoshop CS3 Extended, 3D graphics hardware now comes into play. But you may not have to upgrade your video card. If you have a 3D video card that's sufficient to run general CAD programs, it's good enough for Photoshop Extended. "

Where I most notice it on my current laptop, stated above, is maybe when you zoom in a large file like a 7 image stitch of 93mb file size/288mb open in ps.
It takes about 20 sec to zoom into a file like this when viewing in bridge, but in Photoshop itself I have no problem.Also I experience some lag when moving the brushtip around.

SO realy from what the article says & from my experience I dont think that I need such a high end graphics card, I think with a 4830 It should be fine, of course if I was making a lot of wonga I would spend the extra 100$ just for comfort.

Thanks for your input though,

 

[Blain]

Originally posted by: rob25
New Pc for Photowork, stitching, hdr, cs4

1. What YOUR PC will be used for. - LARGE Photo files, stitching,hdr, Photoshop cs4

Any ideas will be apreciated.

Q9550 or i7 920 :thumbsup:
Vista 64-bit :thumbsup:

 

[rob25]

Blain, from what ive read the phenom II 940 is slightly superior to the q9550 ( and suubstantialy cheaper here.), the i7 are out of budget.
Is that you are an INTEL boy, or is there something I dont know?