Video Cards for Photoshop CS4

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BAC4D00R SP1D0R

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 24, 2007
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Recently over the weekend, I talked to my Dad and his computers at his studio are aging (6 years old xeon desktops from Dell) are dying. So me and my friend Rory talked about what cards it would be suited for Photoshop CS4 and some people said the Quadro desktop cards are the best while others say that Geforce cards will do the job but much more cheaper to purchase.

1. Must run 24/7 no crashes (can't afford any downtime).
2. It will only be using Photoshop to edit photos thats it (his employee just works on design with photoshop all day long).

Some of the basic stuff I will build for him is that I will do for him is get i7, 6 gigs of RAM, Nvidia Geforce GTX 275 1.7 GB of VRAM. Or one of the Quadro cards that is based on the 8800 GT (forgot the model number but I know it cost around 800 bucks on newegg).

The total price of the system with Quadro card is around 2 grand.
The price for the GTX 275 build is around 1,600.

Help? Advice? This would be greatly appreciated.
 
We built some systems for two companies, one went with the quadros and one went with just basic cards, overall the people with the Quadros have been more pleased with the systems, I don't do the design work myself, but I do have the joy of hearing bitching when anything goes wrong.

Also ever think about doing a ramdisk? It will greatly improve performance in photoshop, and ram is cheap these days.


I would go with the quadros if the budget affords it, if they are doing professional design work get a professional tool.
 
Honestly, get a cheap GeForce w/ tons of memory.

Photoshop CS4 doesn't need GPU horse power (even an 8400GS has more than enough to suite it) nor memory bandwidth, but the memory itself.

I've done tons of photo editing with the 9500GT 1GB in my sig, and it ran w/ multiple HD photos open in CS4 very smoothly.

You can get a high end GeForce, but you'd be wasting money.

A Quadro would be worthless. Those are designed specifically for high-end 2D/3D development apps such as Rhino and AutoCAD, not Photoshop. They will work, but you'd be better off getting a high-end GeForce than a mid-range Quadro for the same price.
 
Easius said:
We built some systems for two companies, one went with the quadros and one went with just basic cards, overall the people with the Quadros have been more pleased with the systems, I don't do the design work myself, but I do have the joy of hearing bitching when anything goes wrong.

Also ever think about doing a ramdisk? It will greatly improve performance in photoshop, and ram is cheap these days.


I would go with the quadros if the budget affords it, if they are doing professional design work get a professional tool.
Click to expand...

By RAMdisk, do you mean something like this?

If so, it would be very fast, but unless these machines have a battery backup, all info will be lost w/ a power outage and I would highly not recommend these for mission critical systems. btw, this wouldn't even be necessary for Photoshop. MMO's, Premiere, or After Effects, I would say yes. But not Photoshop as it doesn't work the HDD's too badly. Any modern drive will do.

Getting a RAID-1 setup wouldn't hurt though for extra security of data.
 
hmm sounds like I will got with a midrage Geforce card. I'm thinking about the 9800 GT 1GB. What my dad does and his employees do is they just pull the photos from the server and work on the files on the computer then put the saved images back on the server so he has redundant backup. RAMdisk looks nice.. but I don't see much benefit out of that.
 
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