Photoshop CS2 Computer Hardware Upgrade Opinions

[morrie_farbman]

I am planning to upgrade my current PC system motherboard, CPU and

video card. I will keep some of the installed components, Raptor hard

drives RAID 0, 3gb ram and power supply. Here is what I am thinking

of purchasing.

 

ASUS A8N 32 SLI Deluxe motherboard,

AMD Athlon 64 X2 4800 CPU dual core chip,

Matrox Millennium P650 PCIe 128mb.

 

I use Windows XP Pro OS and my primary software is Photoshop CS2,

various plug-ins, DxO Pro, Nikon Scan.

 

Any know problems with this set up? Any ideas for an alternate

recommendation. Thanks

[Stock-Photos]

I had to get a patch from Adobe because CS2 would not run..kept getting activation problems. My RAID 0 drives caused the problems. Actually it was not my drives but Adobe's activation problem with RAID.

http://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/331422.html

The patch disables activation.

[Stock-Photos]

You must call Adobe to get the patch. The do not make it available publicly.

[Stock-Photos]

With all that hardware replacement, why not just buy a whole new system?

[andy a.]

That setup looks pretty terrific. Are you using the onboard raid, or do you have a card for that? A dedicated card is of course better, but my experience with the nforce-based raid is that it is very decent for single-user large-file type use typical of photo editing (it would not compare as well serving web pages or database queries).

 

Any reason for the matrox video card rather than a mainstream like ATI or nvidia? An nvidia 6600GT is similar price and will do 3d much better if you need it.

 

Finally, you pay quite a premium for the top end athlon x2. I have a 3800 x2 that easily clocks to the 4800 speed (2.4 Ghz) if you're not afraid to live on the edge and overclock. The price difference in those two chips is about $400.

 

You're going to love this setup. I have very similar specs, and while testing, I could smart sharpen a 16 bit 13 x 19in. file sized to printer native resolution (720 dpi, that's ~118 megapixel or over 700 MB!) in about 2 minutes flat. The original bicubic resize took significantly less time than that. That would have choked my old machine for days.

 

One bummer: many plugins such as noise ninja are not multithreaded, so they will only use one core.

 

Bottom line: This rig will crush the fastest dual G5 mac around, and I'll bet you're getting it for half the price.

[lostfx]

Hi, Morrie!

 

I've got Matrox P750 and I think the card is little bit too expensive for what it can do. I would rather get any similar card from let's say nVidia with 2 DVI outputs and S-video output and buy more RAM memory. Also I'm not a big fun of AMD processors. I read an article where guy did a research and found AMD are the best for graphics but in all tests the above AMD performed worse than Intel with HT technology. Also in terms of RAID, it is good to have RAID 0 for scratch disk but better RAID 1 for all important data. And get a good Power Supply. People are not paying too much attention to it, but it is one of the very important thing when it comes to stability.

[lostfx]

Andy you got it with that Video card. The Matrox is uselesly too pricey and I don't want to write here all my trouble stories that I had to go thru when I got it and start installing it. It was just nightmare.

[patricklavoie]

Apple G5 : )

[ben_kriete]

1) I wouldn't do RAID 0; no redundancy and you double your chance of drive failure.

2) I would probably go with the X2 4400, which is basically the first X2 that gives you the 1mb level 2 cache (I am building a new system also and got an Opteron 170, almost the same chip but a little slower clock speed). The newer AMD chips spank pretty much everything Intel offers at the moment in addition to running cooler and more efficiently.

3) The A8N 32 SLI Deluxe is definitely top-of-the-line right now, but availability on it isn't that great. There have been some incompatabilities between Antec HE power supplies and Asus motherboards (specifically the A8N SLI Premium), though hopefully that's been ironed out. Make sure you get a pretty heavy-duty power supply to run multiple hard-drives etc (like a Seasonic S12-600).

 

Hope this is helpful. Ben

[morrie_farbman]

Some additional information. I am upgrading rather than buying new because I currently have a Thermaltake case, 4 Raptor 10K RPM drives, DVD burner, additional firewire card and a 520W Vantec Stealth power supply, and 3 gig of corsair memory.

 

Apple G5 is out of the question since it would require that I purchase all new software.

 

Andy I don't know much about overclocking and would have to learn a bit, but I like the idea of saving some $$$$$$ and going with the 4400 chip. Also, the advise on the video card is helpful. Do you think I would benefit from a 256 mg instead of a 128?

[regis_helaine2]

if you have LCD monitors then drop matrox not really worth it...if you have CRT then matrox is the way to go.

 

why raid0 rapors? why not one for system one for scratch?

with 3Gb you can't have dual channel take one out or bump to 4Gb

 

the A8N SLI 32 is great but the only added feature over the premium the the 2 16x pciE link that are 1000% useless even with dual 7800GTX overclocked.....(not counting doom3 at 2048x1545 AA 16x where you win a marvelous 0.9 frame a second ...)

[scott_eaton]

<I>Do you think I would benefit from a 256 mg instead of a 128?</i><P>Matrox makes a card with 256meg of RAM on it? What for? Matrox cards have performed the same since they had 32meg so what's the point {smirk}.<P>If you want to play games you should have got a 6600GT or 6800 GS, anyways, and I think you know that. (somebody's been brainwashed that using Matrox video cards will improve your digital imaging, which is nothing but absoluet horse-sh_t)<P>Good choice on processor.<P>Given the performance problems that CS2 has you'll be waiting awhile to see your hardware make an improvement anyways. CS2 crawls on my dual Xeon servers with 4gig RAM and 15K SCSI's in Raid 5.

[chiswick_john]

Raid as a speed improver is very overrated - theoreticaly it should be way faster but the reality does not bear this out. Raid is only worthwhile if you mirror drives for data protection but not performance.

[EricM]

Morrie, I'm running this board (ASUS A8N 32 SLI Deluxe motherboard) on windows 64, 4 drives raid 0, 4 gigs of ram. email me if you wish but put something relevent in the subject box.

[alexdi]

Scott, you must have incredible standards for CS2 performance. My boring Athlon 2000 1.5GB rig runs it quite nicely.

 

It isn't anywhere near PS7, but Adobe insists they've improved the accuracy of most operations, so the penalty is perhaps worthwhile.

 

DI

[andy a.]

Those raptors are enterprise-class drives. I wouldn't worry about raid 0 and them failing. They should give warning at least. If you are concerned over having to rebuild an array when/if one fails, you'll need a dedicated raid card to hot swap and will probably want to go raid 5. Lots more money, and you probably would want a server class motherboard with 64bit pci slots. (although pci-express is an option)

 

Also re: above post: not sure of your memory configuration, but I have 2x1GB dimms and 2x512mb dimms in the 4 slots and it still runs dual channel.

 

Re: photoshop slow on xeons, is it a memory limit? Have you tried the /3GB switch in boot.ini?