Follow along with the video below to see how to install our site as a web app on your home screen.
Note: This feature may not be available in some browsers.
Ive never had any problems with photoshop lagging or anything on my comp, i thought it was a pretty lightweight program to run?
Quad-core will help, but dual-core will be enough. For Photoshop work, I recommend mainly that you get tons of RAM. I recommend 8GB for a dual-channel system or 12GB for a 3-channel system. My roommate uses Photoshop with 4GB (3.5GB recognized) and he's always running low on memory.
The only things I'll use from my existing setup are the case and HD's. It will be used 99% for Photoshop. I don't game, so I can't see myself using this for any other purpose. When you say quad core, are you talking about 1 CPU split 4 ways, or 4 CPU's? I know I'll need tons of memory, but figured I needed to first settle on a MB and proc(s), then will figure out the memory. Maybe I'm going about this backwards??? Will all MB's hold up to 12GB RAM? My budget is $500 or so. Any suggestions I can start researching would be appreciated.
He draws a webcomic and stuff. I think he has a few pictures open at once.
These look pretty good. The Asus has a lot of 1 star reviews though, I believe from bad boards needing to be RMA'd.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131327
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813128364
These options are less than excellent because there aren't anywhere near as many 6 DIMM mobo's as there are 4 DIMM mobo's. You'll find a better selection at 8gb of memory.
So: 12gb -> 6 DIMM motherboard. 8gb -> 4 DIMM motherboard
DDR3 and DDR2 are not the same. Those two boards above have 2 DDR3 slots and 4 DDR2 slots and you can't mix and match DDR3 and DDR2.
Someone wanna proofread to see if it's good?
In other words, as I said, the cost of the devices + the cost of populating them becomes absolutely ridiculous. Grab two Velociraptors and have fun... or even a handful of SSD drives and RAID 'em together. The overall price-to-performance ratio will blow these iRAM devices clear off the planet surface...
Sad, really, because I've been a proponent of actual RAMdisks for decades now. Hell, I used to boot my Amiga 500 off a RAMdisk, so I've seen pretty much every attempt at making such devices as the iRAM that have appeared, and they all suck, period. They just can't do the job adequately and keep the price-to-performance ratio anywhere near a reasonable level.
I built a RAID 0 box for a small image studio 2 weeks ago, a new startup here in Vegas that is making waves. They wanted a "demo" workstation to see what's possible for processing as they don't want to create a massive server-type situation in the office, but 3-4 workstations that are equal in performance and then just using simple file sharing as required. Very simple setup in terms of the network, but the workstation I built used 2 300GB Velociraptors (tried to sell 'em on SSD but the amount of data they're dealing with wouldn't be practical - again, a price-to-performance and ROI issue).
The hard part was getting them to spring for 16GB of RAM because of the cost, but a few weeks ago I saw that sale for 4 4GB sticks of RAM for about $450 and made a few phone calls and snagged a similar deal.
I set up Photoshop CS3 for 'em (their legit retail copy) on Vista Business x64. They started messing around with it, loading some rather large TIFF files in excess of 150MB a pop, several at a time, performing some basic scripted actions on 'em, blurs, filters, etc. Using the Velociraptors in RAID 0 meant very snappy and consistent performance, as well as having 16GB of RAM too. Also, it's a Q6600 based machine running rock solid at 3 GHz.
They were very pleased with the performance at that point, but I had a surprise for 'em.
I asked if I could have 20 mins 'alone' with the workstation to "rewire it" as Tim Allen might say. That consisted of grabbing a trial version of SuperSpeed Software's RamDisk Plus 9 and installing it, doing the simple configuration, and then creating a 10GB RAMdisk and told Photoshop "Ok, you want a scratch disk? Here, try this on for size."
After I did some tests of my own using the same scripts they'd done earlier, boy... I tell ya. You haven't lived till you see 225MB TIFF files literally snap onscreen in the blink of an eye, multiple huge TIFFs with resolutions like 5000x5000 and even higher. That's what's possible with RAMdisks, because even Velociraptors in RAID 0 pumping out something like 280MB/s sustained pales to the close to 5GB a second in bandwidth of that RAMdisk.
I told 'em to come back in and rerun their test scripts.
Jaws hit the floor, folks. Well, not quite but figuratively speaking, at least.
They asked what I'd done, I told them I put the scratch disk in RAM where it should be if you have the RAM to make it happen, and they bought 4 licenses of RamDisk Plus 10 mins later, and I got a signed contract to construct 3 more workstations identical to that one top to bottom and also be their "geek" if any issues come up.
It was a very good week...
None of those links work.
Please answer the questions that Sansari linked to earlier. While an system built around the AMD Phenom II -- which has a few tri-core and even a couple of quad-core processors available for under $200 each -- and at least 8GB of RAM is feasible within the limits of the $500, we would like more details to work with.
So here's what I'm looking at so far. Please tell me if this combo is inadequate:
Mobo & CPU combo http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboDealDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.198627
RAM x2 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227298 or http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820227419
This would leave me plenty of $$ to get a new power supply and better HD. Thanks for all the suggestions so far. Greatly appreciated.
The Biostar P45 chipset mobo that bigwooly mentioned also supports only a max 8GB of DDR2 ram. Whereas, the the AMD boards that tiraides and I listed support up to 16GB.