upgrading for photoprocessing. graphics and ram?

[speedychrissie]

hey all,

i currently have a basic dell:
dimension 3000
2.8Ghz pentium 4
512RAM
motherboard graphics

i have been getting into more professional photography recently and my computer has been having problems keeping up.

my questions are these:
is 512RAM likely to be enough to easily cope with normal photoprocessing?

i know that i need a graphics card, but which one, how powerful etc? (i dont play any advanced games cos i just dont have time, so i dont need any amazing frame rate, but i would love it if my cpu could cope with my pictures better)

thanks
chris

[bez_uk]

Are you editing more than about 3 pics at once? (like merging photos?) I'd say to slap 1Gb RAM it costs so little but will make the world of difference.

As for the graphics card. If you want it to help the pictures it probably wont. Graphics cards generally speed up the rendering aspect not just displaying a picture. However there will be some aspect that will be helped... not least you can watch HD movie trailers? Get ATI Radeon X1300/X1600 or something like that, it's rubbish for games as its not powerful enough but it can make pretty pictures and will definitely kick butt over onboard.

Everything together (2x512Mb RAM + a graphics card) will set you back about £100. www.misco.co.uk for ram and ring their pre-sales helpline and they'll tell you with product code for ram works with your machine. Very helpful as dell is specific in it's needs (usually).

edit: If you computer is struggling with pics maybe you have cheapo hard drive? If the computer takes a long time to load the pictures this maybe half the problem?

Edited by bez_uk on Thursday 28th September 23:26

[speedychrissie]

bez_uk said:

Are you editing more than about 3 pics at once? (like merging photos?) I'd say to slap 1Gb RAM it costs so little but will make the world of difference.

edit: If you computer is struggling with pics maybe you have cheapo hard drive? If the computer takes a long time to load the pictures this maybe half the problem?

Edited by bez_uk on Thursday 28th September 23:26

i have been getting into panoramics recently and a recent pic merging 13 6MP pictures was probably the most taxing thing that my computer has ever had to deal with.

it is very slow to show the thumbnails for pictures, but i dont think it is a slow hard drive as i have a 250Gb seagate external drive which should be quick, but it takes just as long to load them which would lead me to assume that something in my computer is limiting it, not the hard drive.

thanks for the help.

[road2ruin]

A 6mp picture at the highest resolution or even a RAW image will be quite a file size maybe up to 12MB for each image. The processor will certainly be the bottle neck when it comes to loading up the thumbnails as it has to do a lot of calculations to resize them to thumbnails. Still, saying that once they have been done if you have a large chunk of memory 1GB plus then it will store them until for a while in cache so will be quicker next time you look at them. As long as you havent turned your computer off that is.

[aldi]

Ram, deffo.

[bigdods]

speedychrissie said:

it is very slow to show the thumbnails for pictures, but i dont think it is a slow hard drive as i have a 250Gb seagate external drive which should be quick, but it takes just as long to load them which would lead me to assume that something in my computer is limiting it, not the hard drive.

thanks for the help.

External drive , is it on USB 1 ? To be honest even if its on USB 2 my experience of external drives is that they are much slower than internals and often not high speed 7200RPM either. Easy to check - put a few pics on your internal drive see if they are quicker to load.Get an internal drive about £60 for a decent size one nowadays

Oh and more ram, 1GB is the minimum nowadays. I have a P4 3Ghz , 1GB RAM and a decent graphics card and everything flies - and I do photo and video editing on it. 512MB is really the minimum for just running windows plus antivirus and stuff.

Edited by bigdods on Friday 29th September 09:12

Edited by bigdods on Friday 29th September 09:13

[wolves_wanderer]

In my job I tend to open 16-20 17mp images at the same time. It depends on how much money you want to spend as to what you should do.

In order of priority :-

Another gig of RAM (about £60) - this will make the biggest difference and is what you should do first.

New hard drive - An internal WD Raptor if your computer will work with SATA, just for photo use so the 74GB should do (about £90)

You will not need to touch the graphics card as even the most basic onboard system will be fine for 2d use.

Beyond these, you are into new motherboard/processor/memory territory for which you would be looking at about £4-500. The new Intel core duos are the best processors for photo processing work.

[bez_uk]

If you're running off an external harddrive that will (even if usb2) be the reason the thumbnails take a while.

The fact you have and external HD makes this job easy.... backup everything (ie system backup) buy new internal HD, the 10,000rpm raptors are almost overboard but hey your computer will turn on faster which is never bad!

Put new HD in and use backup software to simply transfer everything back. Then you'll find windows maybe kicking off that major hardware has changed to click ok a few times and ignore it

For me the whole process would take...
40 mins HD backup
10 mins installing new HD
?? mins restoring from backup (not needed to do that bit yet) guessing about the same time as making the backup