Best configuration for running photoshop?

  • Thread starter Thread starter King Vulture
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K

King Vulture

Looking into purchasing a new Athlon 64 based system within the next few
months. Primary use will be as an image editor running Photoshop, etc. Where
is my money best spent? Processor? Video card? RAM? In reading reviews, i've
noticed that many of the systems built for gaming aren't so good at image
editing and most reviews seem to be geared toward the gamer (not much info
on how good the syatem is at what i need it to do).

-W
 
Looking into purchasing a new Athlon 64 based system within the next few
months. Primary use will be as an image editor running Photoshop, etc. Where
is my money best spent? Processor? Video card? RAM? In reading reviews, i've
noticed that many of the systems built for gaming aren't so good at image
editing and most reviews seem to be geared toward the gamer (not much info
on how good the syatem is at what i need it to do).

-W
Click to expand...


A gamer's 3d video card gets you nothing in PS. Get a Matrox dual-head
video card even if you don't use a second monitor now. A 15 inch LCD
screen as a second monitor is cheap and doesn't have to be
color-critical since it's just used for toolbars, etc.

If you're just doing 8-bit images up to 8Mb then 1 GB of ram is
enough. IMO

disk I/O speed is very important. Go all-SATA disks. a 34GB 10krpm
SATA drive is "only" $145. (an amazing price to this old dog.)

I'd use one for the C drive, and one for the PS "working" disk. Then
I'd get a 200GB 7200rpm disk for the archives and to put image backups
of your data on the two 34GB disks.

If one of these disks is a bottleneck when running PS (as shown by
measurement with perfmon.exe) you could make that disk a raid0 pair,
or you could move the TMP folder and pagefile activity to another
spindle balance the IO workload, depending on what you are
bottlenecked on.)
 
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