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Also posted in the PC forum - but no takers there:

I am building a PC used primarily for PS. Most likely no gaming, but the distant possibility of 3D CAD. But for now, without the 3D cad, any suggestions on what I should put into this beast? Below are a few of my ideas:
Processor:

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800+ 2.40GHz / 2MB Cache / 2000MHz FSB / Socket AM2 / Dual-Core (Windsor)
Motherboard:

MSI K9NBPM2-FID NVIDIA Socket AM2 MicroATX Motherboard / Audio / Video / PCI Express / DVI / Gigabit LAN / USB 2.0 & Firewire / Serial ATA / RAID
or maybe the

Foxconn N570SM2AA-8EKRS2H NVIDIA Socket AM2 ATX Motherboard / Audio / PCI Express / Dual Gigabit LAN / S/PDIF / USB 2.0 & Firewire / Serial ATA / RAID
RAM:

Atleast 2 GB, if not 3GB, of DDR2 atleast 667 MHz

Hard Drive

Up in the air on size and speed. MAybe a WD Raptor (10K RPM) but they are pricey and then I can not afford as much space. I know two hard drives is the best option. So would one raptor and one regular 7500 RPM SATA drive due?
Vide Card:

Onboard - jsut kidding - I would like the ATI Radeon X1600 Pro

So where am I overkill? What do I lack? What would be better?
 
I'm defintiely not an AMD guy so I can't comment on performance/reliability on most of your system. But, the graphics card is way overkill if you're JUST going to PS. For 3D rendering (CAD) it would be good, but for PS all you'd need is something better than onboard. But with high specs throughout it would be hard to justify skimping out on anything...
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-Tim
'Be the change you wish to see in the world.' -Mahatma Gandhi
 
Well hay there.

Everything looks good form my stand point. On the RAM, its not just how much you can get now, but how much you can upgrade to in the future. I wouldn't get any motherboard that didn't at least upgrade to 4GB, 8-16 would be prime. and I know that this might seem like a lot, but it seems like every time i get a new camera, it has more mega pixel, and I always end up upgrading my memory to compensate. Video cards can always be upgraded, so what you listed looked fine to me. The processors looked good. On the Hard drive, I would recommend SATA drives. and a 200GB+ drive is a good size to start out with. I am a MAC person, but on the ram, i have 3GB, and I have 3 HD's (1@ 100GB, 1@160 GB, and 1@ 500GB)
hope this helps,
Jarrod
Olympus E-500 Lenses: 14-45, 40-150, 50mm
 
Lots of high grade parts listed for the box itself, but what about the part you interact with most --- the monitor?

On the HDs, I'd go for multiple drives in a RAID configuration (for reliability) over a single but high speed Raptor. Raptors in RAID if you got the cash. :-)
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E-One/E-Three-Hundred/DZ Fourteen-Fifty-Four/DZ Fifty-Two-Hundred/FL-Fifty
E-Ten/C-Twenty-One-Hundred-UZ/E-One-Hundred-RS/D-Four-Hundred-Z
Oldma-cdon-aldh-adaf-arm-EI-EI-O
 
I just upgraded to the x1600 Pro from a card that cost $80 two years ago, and I haven't noticed much difference. I only chose the x1600 because it was the fastest card available at the time for an AGP bus. There are better cards for the money available for a PCIe bus, which a brand-new motherboard would undoubtedly have. I would have gone for one of the new nVidias with SLI support had they been available for my motherboard—plugging in a second graphics card is a much cheaper way to upgrade later should you feel the need.

Also, while the AMD chips clearly had the advantage over the Pentiums for the past two or so years, the Core 2 Duos seem to be an equally good choice at the present. The review here is quite interesting: http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/showdoc.aspx?i=2795&p=1

2GB is plenty for now, but make sure you get a pair of 1GB DIMMs instead of quad 512s—otherwise you'll be kicking yourself down the road when it's time to upgrade. RAID 1 isn't a bad way to go if you're technically inclined, but if you're not feeling quite that geeky, you can do what I do: create a partition on your first hard drive just for pictures (you can even point your My Pictures folder directly at that partition with TweakUI), and create an identically-sized partition on your second hard drive for backup. Set up an automated task to backup the first partition to the second once a week or so, and you're golden. And while you're at it, don't forget to set up a small partition at the start of the second drive to use for your TEMP directory and paging file.
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http://www.flickr.com/photos/hicsuget/
 
10 years ago I always built my pc's - it made sense due to price...now I just buy a new emachine every 2 years & max out the ram. Most of your setup looks like overkill to me (it's all relative though) - however, if I had unlimited money...well, I like your choice of processor - I didnt even know they made anything w/the 2mb cache. Im not sure Im ready to drink the AMD kool-aid on their FSB speeds, but theres no question that the PCI Express model will be the future of computing - eliminating the need for the FSB.

On the motherboard issue - both boards you mentioned max out at 4gigs of RAM (most do nowadays) - you will probably remain cutting edge for 2-3 years, but in 5...well, who knows.

If you were jumping into 3D CAD right now I could see you kicking out for this pc...if you are planning on getting into it a couple of years down the road you might still be ok...if you are going to wait 3-5 years I would highly recommend you buy a cheap pc now & wait. Cray might come out w/a home version of the X1 in the meantime ;)
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Crack would have been cheaper as a hobby
 
Having a 64bit processor with less than 4gb of ram is overkill, an x86 would work just as well. It doesn't look like PS is going to be 64bit for at least 2 more years, but it will take advantage of dual processors.

A dual (or triple) monitor system would speed up the workflow. I have a Samsung 914t ordered, but don't know how well it's going to work for photo editing. It does have good specs.

A graphics tablet is missing.

Disable the NIC, so you don't have to run anti-virus software, which means PS will get more CPU cycles.

Get an 80gb 10,000rpm harddrive for PS, and a 400gb harddrive for storage. Determine your backup strategy. I think multiple hardrives are the safest long term solution as well as the most cost effective.

http://www.mysuperpc.com/processor.shtml

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http://www.efrench.members.winisp.net/
 
You need to concentrate on two main things – display and processor. All other variables are not so important. Do not spend your money on 10 RPM hard drives. It is better to buy larger display.

You display must use S-IPS LCD panel (or its NEC variant). 20” displays have too small pixels, so it is better to buy 21”. There are no or very little wide displays with S-IPS on the market. NEC on of the good brands to buy.

Intel Core2Duo processors faster than AMD and consumes less power. Also, they are highly overclockable ;)

Regards!
 
Most importantly, with the Core 2 Duo, Intel has regained back the performance crown for AMD in a major way . A 200$ Core 2 Duo performs just about as well as an AMD CPU four times its price. That's coming from someone who hadn't bought any Intel CPUs in 11 years before 2006. Look seriously into it.

DDR2 isn't much faster than older and much cheaper DDR-400, and in fact, below DDR2-667, it is slower . You need to go with DDR2-800 to see any real difference, or you can go with the older DDR-400 and save tons of money if you want 3Gb-4Gb.

The weak link in a modern computer is most often the hard drives, not in capacity, but in speed. There's two ways to get better HDD performance:

1) 10000 rpm HDDs, mostly the WD Raptor, will get you up to around 90Mb/s for the newest 150Gb model, compared to 60-70Mb/s for usual 7200 rpm SATA HDDs.

2) Use RAID, can be more complicated depending on your technical level, and there's a lots of choices depending of if you want much more speed or reliability and speed at the same time. I've recently built workstations with a RAID 5 hardware setup giving a real world bandwidth of 180Mb/s. Those machines fly . There's a lot of gotchas with RAID, but it's the only way to get a real increase in disk performance.

Hope this helps. I'm a computer guy first and foremost, photography is the hobby. ;)

--
Djof ~ 'Je me souviens'
 
Recently, I had to refresh my understanding on RAID (a discussion on these forums has prompted it - I realized that my knowledge was 10 years out-of-date). RAID does offer a way to increase disk performance and/or reliability, for a price.

For photoshop work, disk read/write speed is not as important as the amount of memory in your machine. So if I were you, I wouldn't look into faster hard drives until I had the memory maxed out.

If hard drive performance becomes an issue in the future, you can always add external SATA-based RAID solution. The longer you postpone it, the cheaper hard drive space and speed become.

That said, here's what I learned about RAID, in case you're interested:

http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1023&message=21798690
 
I've got a machine pretty similar to the one you propose building (same proc, video card, ram etc.) and the only thing I plan to do to it this summer is up my RAM past two gigs (because both PS and Vista are ram hogs - the more the better) to four, and dump the now-outdated ATI 1600 video card for a new next-gen graphics card that can handle DirectX 10 and HDCP (ATI doesn't offer one yet, but they will in a month or so). A new 10,000 RPM speed king hard drive would float my boat as well because that's really the only remaining choke point in the system.

PS and the video transcoding programs I use really take advantage of the dual core AMD 64 proc - it's a very nice speed boost over my old 2800MHz P4 that now pulls Media server duty on my network.

As always, it's the budget that drives your PC choices! A Falcon Northwest übber bling rig with custom Ferrari red paint and water cooling would be the bomb, but the dang kids insist on eating etc. etc. :-)

Best,
Oly
 
The AMD64 procs aren't usually used in a 64 bit operating environment - they run regular windows just fine. They are, however, MUCH faster than a single core Intel proc in many aps because the aps will take advantage of the dual cores, and that's the key here. Same goes for the Intel dual core procs of course, but at the bottom and mid range you usually get more performance for your buck with AMD chips whereas Intel has taken back the power crown at the very top end.

So in short - his choice of chip is likely a very good one on the value scale.

Oly
 
Djof said:
Djof said:
Djof said:
A 200$ Core 2 Duo performs just about as well as an AMD CPU four times its price. That's coming from someone who hadn't bought any Intel CPUs in 11 years before 2006. Look seriously into it.
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Click to expand...
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Has it gotten to that? I was aware that Intel had taken back the performance crown in a big way with the Core 2 Duo, but didn't AMD just drop their proc prices in the mid range in order to compete?

Oly
 
There is currently no reason to buy an AMD processor today. Core2Duos are better and cheaper than anything comperable from AMD. (As with all computer hardware, this will change depending how long you wait until you purchase something.) Check out this interactive processor comparison from Tom's Hardware before you buy anything:
http://tomshardware.co.uk/cpu/charts.html

I'll have to disagree with Boris, but photoshop is most certainly hard disk bound- i.e. - restrainned by hard disk performance. Most ps pro's will tell you that. That is why they use striping for the ps scratch disks, Raptor drives or if they really have the money, some kind of scsi setup with an add-on hard drive controller.

I would suggest something like this:

a Core2 Duo E6400(2mb cache) or E6600 (4mb cache) processor
Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3 mobo
CORSAIR XMS2 2GB (2 x 1GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 (PC2 6400)
ATI Radeon X1600 Pro

Just these items will cost you $774.98 at NewEgg.com with the e6600 processor, or $680.98 with the e6400 processor.

The hard drive part is the real complicated part, and depends on how much money you want to spend.

BTW, most places won't tell you this, nor do most people even know this about SATA2 3bg/s drives, but you only get 3gb/s when striping across 4 drives, otherwise, performance is similar to SATA 1 1.5 gb/s drives.

So, after buying the "core" system components, how much do you have for hard drives?

Todd.
 
Hot Toddy said:
I'll have to disagree with Boris, but photoshop is most certainly
hard disk bound- i.e. - restrainned by hard disk performance. Most
ps pro's will tell you that. That is why they use striping for the
ps scratch disks, Raptor drives or if they really have the money,
some kind of scsi setup with an add-on hard drive controller.
Click to expand...
Could be. I'm not a pro, so perhaps my use patterns are lighter - I see mostly "common sense" HD activity (use the scratch disk when the memory gets low, and when actually loading/saving files).

On the other hand, if you do any kind of batch processing of images, a faster HD setup will speed it up.

Boris
 
You are clear on the PS requirement, less clear is your archiving and cataloging needs. For me, most of time is in PP, cataloging. You probably want good, accurate color calibration for post-processing, and rock solid reliable archives. These have a major impact on productivity.

So for me the essentials would be --
  • HDD - at least four.: 1 fast system drive, a second pair configured as RAID 1 (mirroring) for maintaining a working library/archive, and 1 external drive for backups.
  • Monitor w/color calibration, 21" or better
  • at least 2GB ram, with room to grow to 4+GB.
  • really nice USB hub on the desktop to plug stuff into
  • graphics tablet would be nice
Any of the modern dual core processors will work fine, imho.

With regard to storage, you might invest $35 in the DAMbook (www.thedambook.com) for some excellent advice from a photographer's (as opposed to a computer builder) perspective.

Jeff
 
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