Best photoshop workstation?

[ehasler]

My girlfriend and I are looking to get a new PC. It'll be mainly used to run Photoshop on, but we'll also use if for the usual things like email and web browsing, and a bit of web design (although I do have a laptop which runs Dreamweaver quite happily).

I need something pretty meaty, as I'm getting fed up with my existing machine grinding to a halt whenever I even mention the word Photoshop. I get 95MB TIFFs straight from my 1Ds II, and 200+ MB TIFFs from my XPAN, and that's before you include any layers/history in the Photoshop files, so 500MB+ .psd files are quite easy to achieve

My initial thoughts were for a PC with the following spec:

Pentium 4 3.6GHz +
2 x 1GB DDR2-533 RAM
2 x 76GB WD Raptor SATA drives in RAID 0
1 x 76GB WD Raptor SATA drive for backup + PS swap

Then I started to entertain thoughts of moving to the dark side

The Mac PowerPC G5 twin cpu models look very nice indeed although they are quite expensive, and RawShooter (which is my RAW converter app of choice at the moment) isn't available for the Mac

Does anyone have any real experience of these, and could you offer any comments on whether there would be much performance difference between a decent spec'd PC?

I notice that the Mac supports RAID in software, but as it doesn't have room for a 3rd drive for backup, I think that sticking with 2 separate drives would be the better option, as you wouldn't need to have the PS swap file on the main drive. With this in mind, I'd imagine that the PC would have the better hard drive performance (especially as the Mac drives won't be the 10,000 rpm WD Raptors), but would this be enough to make up for the rest of the system?

Also - something that's been puzzling me for a while... If you have the drive specification listed above for the PC (2 x drives in RAID 0, 1 x drive on it's own), what would the best configuration for Photoshop be?

RAID 0 drive - OS/apps/images/PS swap
single drive - backup

or

RAID 0 drive - OS/apps/images
single drive - backup/PS swap

i.e., would moving the PS swap onto a 2nd slower drive be better than having it all on the quicker drive?

TIA

[abenbow]

do you keep the files at 500 meg :yikes ??

if yes then 76 gig is going to fill up rather quickly!

I've got 2 300gig

Intel CPU everytime (cue big row about which is better )
Lots and lots of RAM
2 monitors (make sure to check that your graphics card has dual monitor out)

[_Dobbo_]

Like for like money spent, is a Mac really still faster than a PC for photoshop work? I've got no agenda to push, just geniuinely interested in whether Macs are still faster for this sort of stuff.

I understand they are industry standard but I wonder how much of that is because they are entrenched rather than because they are still actually better?

As I said, no agenda, nothing against macs just would love to know.

[ThatPhilBrettGuy]

I'd have 2 CPU's regardless of the platform (Mac or PC). With that size files >2GB RAM would be very handy too.

I've got a twin AMD Opteron system with 2GB RAM and a 600GB RAID 5 array over 4 200GB SATA's. The I/O rate is fine even with the overheads of RAID 5, but more memory on huge Photoshop files would help at times.

If you've got the desk space 2 monitors is very helpful too.

We can talk geek at the next Wapping drinks which must be up soon surely?

[GetCarter]

Hmmmm

Now I guess I should be in the frame to answer this.

I currently use a 3.6 ghz pc with 1 gb ram and 2 x 200 gb HD - which I use for internet/photoshop/dreamweaver etc

...and I use a Mac duel G4 - soon to upgrade to the G5 duel, which I use soley for music production.

To be honest - the Intel 4 and Mac G4 are much of a muchness, speed-wise. G5 is supposed to be very quick...

... but eventually, you have to decide whether you spend your money on 2 x software (unless you have no issue with finance). Then there is the issue of learning the damn stuff on two platforms (unless you have no issue with brains). Or just moving to Mac, which in many ways is a good thing, except 92% (last count) of the world will think you an alien.

Personally, I try to make life simple. I know so many shortcuts on PC's with Dreamweaver, PS etc - I dare not move to Mac... and vice versa with Digital Performer on Mac.

I DO however like keeping 'work' on the Mac and fun on the PC.

That was probably no help at all.. but what the hell.

e mail if you want further info.

Steve


>> Edited by GetCarter on Monday 4th April 17:00

[Phil S]

I would be looking to double the amount of RAM you have, for the small price increase it will make a big difference.

[te51cle]

I wish to add another vote to the "You need more than 2 Meg of RAM" crowd otherwise you'll spend a lot of time with your machine paging as it tries to keep track of your history. Even 3 GB of RAM won't give you much history with 200 MB files.

[ThatPhilBrettGuy]

te51cle said:

I wish to add another vote to the "You need more than 2 Meg of RAM" crowd otherwise you'll spend a lot of time with your machine paging as it tries to keep track of your history. Even 3 GB of RAM won't give you much history with 200 MB files.

Remember however, that under Windows 3GB is the maximum any one process can use, and that needs some boot switches set. Also, Windows XP only supports 4GB in total.

And before someone says, yes technically you could use more with PAE, but I don't thing Photoshop is PAE aware.

That said any left over RAM will of course be used as useful disk cache.

[ehasler]

Thanks for the info so far... been doing a bit more research, and it looks like dual Xeon may be the way to go...

www.robgalbraith.com/bins/multi_page.asp?cid=7-6451-6411

[Bodo]

GetCarter said:

... Or just moving to Mac, which in many ways is a good thing, except 92% (last count) of the world will think you an alien. ...

This is worth an entire extra thread