Your perfect print/web design rig

K

Korialstrasza

Gawd
Joined
Jan 21, 2004
Messages
561
Hey guys, I'm getting closer to needing a rig upgrade and was curious as to what you guys prefer. I know the ins and outs of gaming rigs, but what would you really want for a production workstation doing large photoshop prints and web design? I realize the web design doesn't take much, but 24'x18' @ 300dpi prints can get pretty hefty. So, what kind of processor(s) and such? What makes this rig different from a gaming rig?

Thanks!
 
It is basically like this:

A good print/design rig = a good gaming rig - powerful video card - sound card

Get a machine with a nice, stable motherboard, a powerful processor, as much RAM as you can afford, and plenty of hard drive space. You don't care about a big beefy GPU or an X-Fi sound card. A x300 video card would be more than enough.
 
Personally I'd wait until the Core 2 Duo based Mac Pros come out and pick up one of those. You will get the best of both worlds - a lot of print houses are still mac based, and a lot of the programs in that field are optimized for use on Apple hardware. With an Intel Powermac you will be able to dual-boot into XP for any programs you need there, and with both OSes on one machine you will be able to check your websites for compatibility with both - you can have IE, Firefox, Opera, and Safari (which together make up 99.9% of web browsers in use) all on one box.

You'd probably also want a nice display to go with it, with plenty of desktop real estate. The ACD 30" is nice, but NEC is about to release a line of professional grade LCDs that cover 92% of the Adobe color gamut (while a CRT can typically do around 88%, and current LCDs for the most part even less). Supposedly, these will come in resolutions up to 2560x1600.
 
Should I consider a fat load of ram? 6-8gb? I was making a poster awhile ago that used up my 2gb easily and made a huge scratch file. Man it was slow to work with.

On the other hand, I'm Not a professional (yet :) ) and could have been doing something very wrong and inefficient.
 
NulloModo said:
Personally I'd wait until the Core 2 Duo based Mac Pros come out and pick up one of those. You will get the best of both worlds - a lot of print houses are still mac based, and a lot of the programs in that field are optimized for use on Apple hardware......
Click to expand...

um, apple now uses the same hardware as windows / linuix

also Adobe for example stopped optimizing it's code for Apple a few years ago.

ALSO, photoshop runs badly on the new intel mac's - it wont be until PS CS3 that it is properly coded for OS on intel.

what ever system you get, 2 things matter the most

ram - MIN 2G. - the more ram, the happier PS and other gfx apps will love you!! i have 2G and i give PS %80 of it and it is nice and smoooooooooth.

2nd - I/O speed - harddrive speed - you will want a fast working drive and a seperate physical drive for cache / scratch disks.


for me...

i would do 4G of ram
Single HD for O/S - program installation
Raid 0 raptors 36g's working drive
Raid 1 save drive for saving my work (2 320G or higher - prob get 2 x 500G seagates with perpendicular tech)
Conroe dual core CPU - unless your doing alot of filters and batch job's - CPU speed wont be so important, if you do plan to do alot of batch processing and filters - the more cpu power, the faster it will go.

Vid card does not matter.
 
Awesome, thanks for the advice.

By the way, as a side note, I just realized if apple is using a lot of pc hardware now, how come we can't run OSX on a pc?

Hmmm...

CS2 supports >2 cores correct? Should I maybe consider a dual opteron system? Having more than 4 ram slots on the mobo might be kind of nice, since I'll be buying 1gb sticks and not 2.

Killer advice by the way, thanks.

EDIT: Found out about OSX on pc on my own:
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1083965
 
MrGuvernment said:
um, apple now uses the same hardware as windows / linuix

also Adobe for example stopped optimizing it's code for Apple a few years ago.

ALSO, photoshop runs badly on the new intel mac's - it wont be until PS CS3 that it is properly coded for OS on intel.

what ever system you get, 2 things matter the most
Click to expand...
Adobe tends to be slow, but if you are doing any layout work Quark is designed with Macs first in mind. CS2 doesn't run badly, the new chips are fast enough that even with PPC emulation going it works well. I haven't seen when the release date is for CS3, but from talking to people in the Apple forum, it appears it isn't very difficult at all to take PPC code and turn it into a universal binary, the developers basically just need a new compiler, they don't have to rewrite everything. I was thinking the dual-boot option would be very good for web design though, if you are really going to be getting into that, you need to make sure your sites are as compatible as possible across the board. The people who design only for IE and have sites that either look sloppy or just don't plain work in other browsers are lazy and unprofessional in my opinion.

I'd go for 4 gigs of RAM if you are doing a lot of work with big files. As for Opterons, there are some effective solutions there, but personally I'd go for a dual socket Woodcrest (Xeon 5100 series) system, much faster than opterons clock for clock.
 
A seriously huge amount of memory, fast CPU(s) and fast (sequential transfer rate is the most important factor IIRC) storage subsystem.
 
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