PCs RAW, RAM and GIGiddies

[daniel_p]

Synopsis:<br/>

I thought a few years back, that if you buy a PC now it will last longer than before. The day to day use of

most people does not warrant replacing you system every 3 years anymore because the computer speed and memory

caught up to the applications. Aside from Vista bumping the minimum requirements, as long as you do what you need

on XP you're fine for most applications. I think this holds true still, and even though it's tempting to buy dual

quad cores and water cooled graphics cards, it is quite unnecessary. Yet I've found myself thinking I need to

upgrade soon.<br/>

I've got a 4+ year old modest system that does fine with most stuff still. It doesn't like too many

applications opining and closing, but it does fine with most things and can't think of many reasons to replace

it. Aside from being loud (like an airplane taking off) it is slow on the raw files. Although I can run lightroom

on it, it is quite slow, and seeing how I'm looking to upgrade and considering the raw beast called Alpha900, I

want a computer that's going to be able to burn through the 24MPs of raw data.<br/>

Other than lightroom and photoshop, my PC doesn't need to do any heavy lifting, but for those tasks, I don't

want to be slowed down. Waiting even 2-3 seconds for a picture to show up in LR is okay if you have 20 pics to

look through, but on when you're trying to look through hundreds of pictures this downtime really starts adding up.

I don't want to be chasing the best system all the time. I can get some really decent machines for under

$1400. But I'm wondering if a newer processor is worth the $400 difference. If the graphics cards are at all used

effectively by PS and LR.<br/><br/>

 

The Question:<br/>

Is anyone finding working with a 20+ MP raw file really slow?<br/>

Does the 8GB ram as opposed to 2GB or 4GB, make a huge difference?<br/>

How much of the workload is done by the graphics card?<br/>

but mostly, I am wondering what systems people use for their raw workflow and how happy they are with them?<br/>

<br/>

Daniel

[mark_sirota1]

I can answer the third question -- for Lightroom, almost no work is done by the graphics card. CS4 does take some advantage of it, however.

[daniel_p]

thanks,

I figured it was either none or little. In the case of PS CS2 I'm assuming it's minimal aswell.

[jay_hopkins]

While I can't comment on the file size, I can comment on the computer requirements.

 

First, more RAM is better once the file is open. XP has a 3G limit, you'd need Vista 64 to fully utilize the 8G. For Mac, it should access the 8G fine. This will help keep the OS/application from paging to disk. Back to the 'once the file is open' caveat. If you're slurping a big file off disk, you will need a fast disk to accomplish it. 7200 rpm minimum with a big cache, but ideally you should get a work disk that runs at 10,000 rpm. That will get the data off the disk faster. 10,000 rpm disks tend to be $$$ and not as big as the consumer disks, so when you're going to work on a set of images, move them to the work disk from wherever they are stored and then move them off again when done. It would be best to get SATA 3 disks, SCSI might be better but adds to the cost and I cannot quantify the boost. Graphics card, as stated above some boost in CS.

 

Regards,

Jay

[tomwatt]

Ditto. PS CS4 Extended takes advantage of the Graphics GPU. No place I've seen in Adobe's support material indicates that the standard PS CS4 does that. 15mp RAW files are a bit pokey on my older dual-Xeon workstation. A fast hard drive is a big help, and there's no way around that. 7200 rpm is a minimum. 10000 rpm (WD Raptor for instance) is much better, we use them in our workstations at the office, and it launches CS4 very quickly, accomplishes tasks, filters applied, etc. very quickly.

[daniel_p]

Thanks for pointing out the bottle neck<br/>

Have you considered using RAID to increase the HD speed?

[jay_hopkins]

<p>Haven't looked at that specifically but some gamers have. Tests indicate that two disks in RAID0 is about 2x faster than a single disk and four disks in RAID0 are about 4.5x faster.</p>

<p>Here's a link to the article:</p>

<p>

<a href="http://www.overclock.net/faqs/90757-opinion-raid-performance-comparison-should-i.html">

RAID Explanation</a>

</p>