new photoshop machine

[jfkriege]

I am looking to build a C2D machine to work with photoshop as i am a pro photographer. I was looking around and was going to do something like an overclocked 6400 machine, but my eye was caught by the e4300 before i bought. I am not on a super tight time frame and so could wait a little while as well.

My trains of thought are to either get the system up and running now with 4Gb RAM and a good MB with the 4300 and then upgrade to a quad in about 12 months, or to go with the 6400 and push upgrading out a little farther.

Right now I am on an x2 4600 machine and it is a little slow for some of the large file work that i am doing. I am also going to be throwing a pair of small hard drives into the machine to use as scratch disks.

One last question would be opinions on a motherboard that has onboard raid 5 and will provide a stable overclock.

edit: I have 7 internal harddrives currently, and cannot imagine being without the ability to connect 8 sata devices (4 ports raid, 4 ports normal)

joshua

 

[wee96]

You might want to look at the e6600, the extra L2 actually helps in PS.

 

[nray]

http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content.asp?id=x5355&page=9

"Photoshop CS3 actually can make use of eight-core systems, although it only truly shines on a scant few filters which really tax the processor. The majority of Photoshop operations will only use 1-2 cores. Our Photoshop CS3 filter test makes use of several of these filters, which showcases how well quad-core chips can run if these filters are utilized. We would say, however, that in most normal Photoshop situations, one would be hard pressed to tell the difference between a four and eight core system configuration.

"When processing a series of high-resolution RAW photographs with some noise reduction filters, Photoshop would not utilize more than a few cores at any given time. Thus, our quad-core Xeons perform about the same, clock for clock, with their dual-core equivalents."

 

[jfkriege]

http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content.asp?id=x5355&page=9

"When processing a series of high-resolution RAW photographs with some noise reduction filters, Photoshop would not utilize more than a few cores at any given time. Thus, our quad-core Xeons perform about the same, clock for clock, with their dual-core equivalents."

So, i have two questions:

1. this is four vs. eight cores and we are speaking here about 2 vs. 4. how is this going to really affect me? my gut is that the increase from two to four is going to be significant.

2. what will be the real world performance jump going from a core 2 duo to a xeon? i seem to remember that the xeon will do a little better because there is more bandwidth to the memory or something. i am not sure.

joshua

 

[nray]

So, i have two questions:

1. this is four vs. eight cores and we are speaking here about 2 vs. 4. how is this going to really affect me? my gut is that the increase from two to four is going to be significant.

2. what will be the real world performance jump going from a core 2 duo to a xeon? i seem to remember that the xeon will do a little better because there is more bandwidth to the memory or something. i am not sure.

joshua

1. I didn't just post a link, I posted a quote, and I guess I should have put part of it in bold or something to make it clear: "The majority of Photoshop operations will only use 1-2 cores." So there you go, you'll get some benefit, for a few operations, with four cores, even less benefit with 8 cores. So really I think that a quad core will only make sense for you if you are going to be running other CPU intensive apps at the same time as Photoshop (or if you do 3D rendering, which has always scaled well across a lot of cores).

2. Going from a Core 2 Duo to a Xeon (Clovertown/Woodcrest) won't net you that much of a gain except under three circumstances - applications that use lots of memory (8GB or more), applications that need a lot of memory bandwidth and error correction at the same time, and applications that can use 8 cores (two quad-core chips). If you need one of those three things, then Xeon Clovertown or Woodcrest is for you (keeping in mind that you'll have to get FB-DIMM memory which can get expensive and the terrible latency of FB-DIMM technology will offset it's other performance gains in the real-world, your motherboard will be expensive, and about the only positive thing I can say money-wise is that the entry-level quad core Xeon CPUs start at $360 for the 1.6Ghz models).

 

[jfkriege]

1. I didn't just post a link, I posted a quote, and I guess I should have put part of it in bold or something to make it clear: "The majority of Photoshop operations will only use 1-2 cores." So there you go, you'll get some benefit, for a few operations, with four cores, even less benefit with 8 cores. So really I think that a quad core will only make sense for you if you are going to be running other CPU intensive apps at the same time as Photoshop (or if you do 3D rendering, which has always scaled well across a lot of cores).

I am thinking eventually i would like to make it up to four cores just because sometimes i have a fair bit running in the background. I have also decided that the xeon route is not the one i want to take. I will stick with the c2d machine. My questions then goes back up to my original. What kind of a performance gain will i get from the 6400 as oposed to the 4300 when both are well overclocked? i could go with the 4300 and upgrade in 12 moths when quad is cheaper or i could keep the 6400 for longer. thanks for any help.

joshua

 

[CANiSLAYu]

I'm in the same boat myself debating if I should upgrade or not for Photoshop for photography work (x2 3800+) and I've been telling myself it isn't worth it right now with so many things on the horizon.

These might help you a bit though:

http://images.tomshardware.com/2006/08/31/four_cores_on_the_rampage/photoshop_image.png

http://images.tomshardware.com/2006/08/31/four_cores_on_the_rampage/photoshop.png

Edit: I figured it was worth pointing out that the Core 2 Duo at 2.66GHz was roughly equal to Quad Core at 2.33GHz in these two tests. The same can be said of 2.4GHz Dual vs 2.0GHz Quad. So you if you want to make a generalization based on these 2 tests you can say that the Dual Cores perform about the same as the Quad Cores with a 400MHz clock speed advantage in most Photoshop tasks. Granted this is only 2 tests and they have different strengths and weaknesses elsewhere. The 400MHz+ Dual Core would perform better in gaming where clock speed is more important than number of cores and the Quad Core would run better at rendering, etc. despite a lower frequency.

http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/09/10/four_cores_on_the_rampage/page8.html - Dual Core is nearly identical to Quad Core with both at 2.66GHz in gaming.

http://images.tomshardware.com/2006/08/31/four_cores_on_the_rampage/3dmax.png - Quad Core murders everything at rendering as nray pointed out.