Thank You Carlos...Well said "loveingtheveiw"
Some on here forget that some are useing PSCS5 which needs a far better Graphics card than PSCS4.
No. it just needs shaders, which even current el-cheapo budget cards from Nvidia and ATI provide in large enough numbers.
Both CS5 and CS4 simply use OpenGL to use the videocards.
Therefore PSCS5 also does a few things like 3D rendering, therefore it needs a GC with 1GB of memory, so Carlos is correct.
Please provide evidence for this claim that you need a GPU with 1GB of memory for the sort of photoshop work that people in this forum do.
You also need to remind people that the number of photoshop functions that actually are accelerated is embarassingly small. About a dozen!!
And most of those functions I hardly use when editing photos, or don't cost a lot of time anyway, so I hardly benefit from them.
At this time, it is not a good idea to let people spend money on videocards for photoshop. There are far mor efficient things to spend your money on.
Adobe recommends 256MB videocards.
Since even budget cards have 512MB you could advice those. But advising 1GB videocards is simply wrong!
People who upgrade their videocard to 1GB hoping to gain a lot of performance will have wasted their money and will be VERY disappointed by this advice!
As for those very expencive HDD (whatever you call them) Loads of people can NOT afford them, well done Carlos for saying avoid them until price drops. Why slag him off because he said that..
If they don't waste money on a 1GB card it will be easier to afford a SSD.
(even though I wouldn't advice them in general either)
SSDs give great performance for very small files. But most people will be editing files that are several tens of MB large. (especially when you use layers)
So you need good sequential speed, which normal harddisks also have to load the images in memory.
You then apply the photoshop actions in memory, and don't touch the SSD during that time.
I pop into most of the forums as well as the PC Talk, but it is nice sometimes for someone like Carlos to post into their respective forums they haunt frequently in order to help others.
If the advice had been very good, then it would be nice yes.
Unfortunately he advices people to spend money on things that won't help much.
Also remember, Carlos has said 99% that is true, Why? Because lots of us have more than one program running at one time. So a Better CPU/PSU/RAM/ & GC with 1GB of mem will be needed.
The only programs that benefit from 1GB videocards are CAD and games.
Running multiple programs has ZERO impact on the memory on the videocards.
I'll end this post with my own advice:
First the advice that doesn't cost anything.
Other people have already mentioned this: Defrag your disks.
Unfortunately the defrag tool in windows sucks! It doesn't consolidate the free space, which means that you disk wil get fragmented again very fast.
Luckily there are free defrag tools that will consolidate free space: For exameple: defraggler.
Others have also mentioned registry cleaners. But be careful; a lot of them can hurt photoshop because of the dirty way photoshop writes settings in memory.
CCleaner is a good one that is safe to use and again totally free.
About the hardware:
Don't bother looking at the Mhz for CPU performance, because it doens't tell you anything usefull anymore. Nowadays you will need to look at the number of cores and the generation.
Luckily most programs for photo manipulation make very good use of multiple cores.
Even el-cheapo AMD quadcore and sixcore CPUs will give very good performance in photoshop, DPP and such.
If you don't have enough memory this is the most important piece of hardware to upgrade. Lucikly memory has become cheap.
2GB should be okay for most people. But since memory is so cheap it can't hurt to buy 3 or 4 GB.
More than that is usually overkill. If you consider that you should first investigate whether that is a bottleneck in your system, otherwise it will be completely wasted money.
About the PSU. You need a good quality PSU, but usually not a very powerfull one. (those are only needed for people with multiple very expensive gaming videocards)
If you don't have such gaming cards, or just one gaming cards a good quality 500W will be enough (even if you have a lot of harddisks) and quite affordable. The nice bonus is that good quality PSUs will usually be silent.
