I was thinking Video card, Matrox just for the outstanding dualhead feature and they are pretty reasonable priced, I was also thinking of lots of ram, and decent speed hard drives. This machine would not be playing games at all, strickly workbased machine. This machine will be hooked to a network and will be running XP. Dont want to hear about mac's, this is out of the question! My good friends does photography and is looking for a luxury machine to work on! Every opinion welcome.
whats needed for a top line photoshop machine?
- Thread starter Dreadogg
- Start date
I've found running PS here at work that memory memory memory is what you'll need. 2 or more hard drives is also nice. Using a seperate hard disk for PS's scratch disk is highly recommended. A dualhead video card is a nice addition. You don't need a top of the line 3D card unless there's going to be 3D work done after using PS. A good fast processor 2Ghz+ would be very nice for those renderings that can take a while. Dual proc's not really necessary.
techfuzz
techfuzz
I would start with a copy of Photoshop 
but really, photoshop can usually benifit from dual CPUs or a P4 w/ HT. Fast HDs, but no RAID or anything, as you won't need that much, just lots of space. And minimum 1/2GB of RAM...thats my suggestion. Oh, and a VERY nice monitor/keyboard and maybe even a tablet? Only sanity and heft of the wallet will decide on that though
but really, photoshop can usually benifit from dual CPUs or a P4 w/ HT. Fast HDs, but no RAID or anything, as you won't need that much, just lots of space. And minimum 1/2GB of RAM...thats my suggestion. Oh, and a VERY nice monitor/keyboard and maybe even a tablet?
Only sanity and heft of the wallet will decide on that though well it used to be a mac
but now like everyone else says RAM! more the better dual hd's excellent 2d graphics card, VERY good monitor for displaying the correct colors and atleast 1 good processor 2ghz+
but now like everyone else says RAM! more the better dual hd's excellent 2d graphics card, VERY good monitor for displaying the correct colors and atleast 1 good processor 2ghz+
yea I know the ram is a big issue, but I really did not follow you all on "Using a seperate hard disk for PS's scratch disk is highly recommended" could you just use a seperate partiton for this, and what is scratch disk? I will search this now anyhow! OH yea they do have photoshop already. LOL thanks so far guys!
I would think that this would be the most important factor of all! but all in all you guys would suggest a good 2d graphics card instead of a 3d graphics card because photos would be 2d correct? Dual head would just be an option etc...
I pretty much agree with the others' posts.
The most important things for PS is a fast processor and fast memory, preferably RAM.
Photoshop's main resource drains are on on the CPU and access to the file and scratch space. You want to be able to hold the whole file and scratch in RAM. Typically you will need about 5 times the amount of the file. So if you are working in a 10mb file, PS should be able to access 50mb of physical RAM.
Other processes like the mode changes and filter adjustments will tax the CPU. The faster the CPU the less the wait times. PS on both Mac and PC is programmed to make use of multiple CPU's if available. This can make a major improvement if you have a multiple CPU system. I don't know how well it uses HyperThreading though.
A good, yet affordable setup would be something like:
P4 2.4ghz
Dual channel DDR board or1024 RDRAM with low latency RAM. 1GB or more RAM depending on how intensive your work is. Even 512mb may be ok.
Ample hard drives, (2) 80gb 7200rpm drives in a RAID 0 or 5 should be more then sufficient.
Video card's are actually not that important. Any good 2D card will work fine.
Now very high end would be:
Dual P4 Xeons or a 3.06ghz w/HT
Same RAM as above
SCSI RAID array -not all that necessary.
This all depends on how intensive your work is. If you are batch processing alot of large files or work in high resolution 300mb files, then you need alot more then editing a few 2mb pictures.
The most important things for PS is a fast processor and fast memory, preferably RAM.
Photoshop's main resource drains are on on the CPU and access to the file and scratch space. You want to be able to hold the whole file and scratch in RAM. Typically you will need about 5 times the amount of the file. So if you are working in a 10mb file, PS should be able to access 50mb of physical RAM.
Other processes like the mode changes and filter adjustments will tax the CPU. The faster the CPU the less the wait times. PS on both Mac and PC is programmed to make use of multiple CPU's if available. This can make a major improvement if you have a multiple CPU system. I don't know how well it uses HyperThreading though.
A good, yet affordable setup would be something like:
P4 2.4ghz
Dual channel DDR board or1024 RDRAM with low latency RAM. 1GB or more RAM depending on how intensive your work is. Even 512mb may be ok.
Ample hard drives, (2) 80gb 7200rpm drives in a RAID 0 or 5 should be more then sufficient.
Video card's are actually not that important. Any good 2D card will work fine.
Now very high end would be:
Dual P4 Xeons or a 3.06ghz w/HT
Same RAM as above
SCSI RAID array -not all that necessary.
This all depends on how intensive your work is. If you are batch processing alot of large files or work in high resolution 300mb files, then you need alot more then editing a few 2mb pictures.
yea biggest file they work with will be about 12 Mb's, now if they are chopping images and using multiple layers will they now be using 12MB (Image file size) x 10 (multiple images) = 120MB's
I get a Matrox card. Excellent 2D and excellent dual monitor support. I much prefer to use PS w/dual monitors.
Lethal
most video cards will suite you fine for PS. Most of the video cards now stress 3D speeds which are not important for PS. Anything like a R9700 is complete overkill. A $50 video card will hardly be different.
99% of the times PS's bottleneck doesn't come the video, it comes from the CPU , RAM and HD not being able to feed to the video fast enough and therefore you may get undrawn screens.
and..
Scratch space is mainly temporary work/swap space for the application to store extra versions of the file you are working on. When you press undo, that file is being quickly accessed from scratch sapce so it doesn't have to reprocess the changes again. If you notice that applying a filter may take 30 seconds, but hitting UNDO will only take a second. You can also command most graphical design programs to use a certain amount of scratch space or remember a certain amount of undo's. The older days when RAM was in small quantity, swap space was done on the hard drives where drive sped was very important. Now with machines with massive amounts of RAM, its really not as important how the scratch sapce is setup on a HD. All my machines running PS have 1gb of RAM yet they probably never take more then 200-300mb of usage with my 20-60mb files. But then I like to have other graphics programs like Quark and Illustrator on as well like most designers.
99% of the times PS's bottleneck doesn't come the video, it comes from the CPU , RAM and HD not being able to feed to the video fast enough and therefore you may get undrawn screens.
and..
Scratch space is mainly temporary work/swap space for the application to store extra versions of the file you are working on. When you press undo, that file is being quickly accessed from scratch sapce so it doesn't have to reprocess the changes again. If you notice that applying a filter may take 30 seconds, but hitting UNDO will only take a second. You can also command most graphical design programs to use a certain amount of scratch space or remember a certain amount of undo's. The older days when RAM was in small quantity, swap space was done on the hard drives where drive sped was very important. Now with machines with massive amounts of RAM, its really not as important how the scratch sapce is setup on a HD. All my machines running PS have 1gb of RAM yet they probably never take more then 200-300mb of usage with my 20-60mb files. But then I like to have other graphics programs like Quark and Illustrator on as well like most designers.
and p.s. color accuracy of a monitor should be as important as you need. Any decent CRT nowadays have decent color. Now if you really need a accurate monitor color to work with printed proofing or something, then a good monitor that supports hardware color calibration should be yuor move. I always have used LaCie Electron Blues for this task in the past. Anything less demanding should be taken care of by the user's manual calibrations.
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