Help with large scale photo editing computer

[steven1110]

Ok, my parents are wanting help building a rig for large scale photo editing. We are talking pictures sizes that are something like 500mb each. They have an AMD 3200 Winchester now with 2g ram and are having trouble with photoshop freezing. I personally think they have something wrong with the computer but I don't have time to troubleshoot mainly because I'm 7 hrs away

But anyway, I'm just looking for ideas on what they should be looking for. I've been out of the loop for a little while so not really sure what's out there on the horizen that might be good to watch for. Any ideas/ help is appreciated. Thanks

 

[defakto]

Lots of ram, dual core couldn't hurt, and a small raid 0 for scratch file because dealing with images that large you're going to be hurt by harddrive transfer rates.

 

[engiNURD]

my 3200+ venice isn't fast with ps cs2 (w/ 2gb ram). its rather slow, actually. so... i don't think its the computer

Lots of ram, dual core couldn't hurt, and a small raid 0 for scratch file because dealing with images that large you're going to be hurt by harddrive transfer rates.

what he said ^^

I'm thinkin an E6600 w/ 4GB of DDR2-667, 4x 7K160's in RAID0, and a seagate 7200.10 320gb (or two) for storing those files.

 

[MrGuvernment]

RAM RAM RAM AND MORE RAM

PS loves ram!!! the more ram - the faster

the faster harddrives will help when opening the files ands saving, the fast scratch disk would be nice too

the CPU usage comes into play when adding filters or resizing alot.

using CS 2 on my dual core 840 (3.2 x 2) 2g of ram and a raptor i open 8 or 9 50mb tiff files and have no problems using PS, i set PS to use about 1,7G' of my total ram.