I will be using some other photographic software besides Photoshop, but I need a pc that can do a 40mb raw to tiff conversion in less time then it takes to boil an egg. I have an older asus p4g8x board with a 1.7 celeron and 1 gig of ram, ide hd, xp that I thought might do, but raw to tiff conversions are really, really slow. I'm not sure if a p4 would help or more ram or both or what. I will need to use a dvi connection for an lcd, and I have an ATI pci card, but I'm not sure how much memory it had. I need lan, usb and firewire. I don't need sound or onboard graphics, but I guess all boards come with that now. I'm kinda scared to go with a core 2 board right now. they and the memory they use seem ify atm. I've always bought Asus boards starting with a p2b-ds. I really haven't been able to keep up with all this stuff in the last few years, so, I'm pretty much clueless now. Any hardware suggestions for my situation?

Thanks

I have done lots of photoshop conversion, editing, masking ect. and one thing I notice expecially with large files is RAM is very important as well as multi tasking CPU otherwise you gota pretty much closed down all your apps in the background ie. internet security, anti-virus ect.

Not sure what your budget is but here is something the is relatively cheap.

I would go for:

-Gigabyte GA-965G-DS3 Socket T (LGA 775) Intel G965 Express ATX Intel Motherboard $159

- Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 Conroe 2.4GHz LGA 775 Processor Model BX80557E6600 $369

- CORSAIR XMS 2GB (2 x 1GB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200) Unbuffered Dual Channel Kit System Memory Model TWINX2048-3200 $200

- ASUS EN7600GT SILENT/2DHT/256M Geforce 7600GT 256MB GDDR3 PCI Express x16 Video Card $150

-ENERMAX Whisper II EG565P-VE FMA(24P) ATX12V 535W Power Supply - Retail $79

Total = $957

If u need it cheaper I would go with a Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 Conroe and maybe a cheaper v-card.

Matt

Heck, any Wallmart special will run faster than your Cleron.

I've got a 3.0Ghz P4, 2 GB RAM, SATA Raptor drives and can convert a file as you mentioned in just a few seconds. I keep my OS clean and pure (W2K) and have no need to upgrade at this point.

So what I'm saying is you COULD save a lot of money and still get a system that does high-end Photoshop work quickly. Drive speed and RAM and biggies. And like I said I have an older P4 now and it does a fine job. You could probably pick one of those up for $50. Or a similarly priced AMD for those fanboys out there.

Ever tought of getting a Mac? These thing can fly on PS, Illustrator and such..and right now you can get a system for not much over what you'd pay PC wise..Just my 2cents.

RAM is critical, as much as possible - Photoshop will use everything it can get hold of. 2 or 3GByte+ is good.

Split the system into several hard drives (not partitions on a single drive). Put the OS and software onto one, along with Window's swap file. Place the images on another physical drive. If you can afford a third drive, place the Photoshop swap file onto this drive. For best performance never have the OS swap file and Photoshop swap file on the same physical drive. The data drive and Photoshop swap file could be on a single RAID0 pair - I tried this on one of our studio's PCs, but didn't really notice any improvement. WD Raptors are fine for the OS/software drive albeit expensive, but a waste on the data drives, rather spend the money on bigger drives with bigger caches, or more RAM.

The graphics card need not be anything too special for Photoshop - I haven't heard of any plugins/tool/filters that use GPU power. Any decent entry level card (nVidia 6600/7300GT/6200 or ATI X1300 etc) would be fine as long as they're not Hypermemory/Turbocache models, mainy because they steal RAM from the system, not their speed. Unless your other software requires a better graphics card, spend the extra on RAM.

Dual core is beneficial, most tools/plugins/filters are written to use them. Also the faster the better. Believe it or not, the much maligned Pentium D processors make good image processing CPUs, mainly because much of the software is written an optimised for Intel. But if you can build using Core 2 Duo, do so, I just haven't been able to justify a new machine recently. Before any AMD fanbois take this a flame bait, half the machine I've built for our studio are AMD Athlon X2's.

Hope this all helps.
www.driverheaven.net and www.extremetech.com have some articles on Photoshop optimising IIRC.

Oh, if you have any budget left, buy more RAM (Are you getting the idea....)

You don’t need anything special. I can pump them out quickly on my AMD 62 X2 4400+ like nothing. Also, if you run Win XP then 2GB is the max memory it can use, so don’t bother buying anymore than you need.

Not really, if you buy a macbook pro or mac pro right now, then it's gonna be suck, because Adobe havent published any Universal version for intel macs yet. So the only way is to buy a Powerbook or Powermac, but I dont think it's wise to buy a machine that will be outdated very soon, since no one will make software for PowerPC mac any more.

Actually with Win XP 64 bit, then it can support nearly 4gb, win 32 bit then it will be like 3.2GB

Firstly, you need to understand what does and does **not** make photoshop fast.

1) DVI monitor and/or connector: makes absolutely no difference in performance. You **MAY** get increased visual accuity if **BOTH** your monitor AND graphics card **FULLY** comply with the DVI spec. It's unlikely however that you'll choose a card which actually complies with the spec - i.e. produces the right shape "eye" in atest with an oscilloscope. There's no way of knowing if a particular card will pass the test without testing it.

2) Graphics card memory size. Has ZERO impact on photoshop performance. GFx memory is used only to store textures in 3D mode, and as such is never used by photoshop.

3) Graphics GPU speed: has essentially zero impact on Photoshop performance. In Photoshop, which is 2D only, the graphics card only displays a single image (The desktop) and that is incredibly easy to do. Any card can do it. Even built-in, crappy-ass, utterly poxy Intel onboard.

4) The only criteria for selecting a graphics card will be what the 2D performance is like. For this reason, you may want to consider a cheap dual-head card from Matrox, over a 3D card from nVidia or ATI - as you won't use 90% of those card's functionality.

5) Photoshop benefits greatly from lots of system RAM, very fast CPU and dedicated HDD for the Photoshop swap file (as mentioned above). However, don't for a second start thinking that a RAID array is a worthwhile investment, it most definitely would be a waste of your time and money. By far the best solution is to have 4GB of system memory, and 2 physical Hard Drives. It is NOT necessary to use 3 HDDs, as 4GB of RAM will prevent windows from utilising a swap file to any significant, performance decreasing degree. However, saying that, having a motherboard which supports NCQ (Native Command Queuing) and drives which also support NCQ, as well as SATA 3Gb/s will provide the best possible performance. Please note though, that as you ramp up system RAM, so does the importance of HDD speed decrease. So with 4GB of RAM, the HDDs almost factor out of the equation.

6) Multi Core CPU. Photoshop itself (The application) is NOT multithreaded, and hence it does not open faster, or load images faster with a multi-core CPU. HOWEVER, certain functions DO spawn multiple threads. Gaussian Blur for example. I don't know if this applies to your "Raw to Tiff" conversion. PS cuts an image into "tiles" and each processor core works on one tile at a time. Thus, multi-core CPUs will make that dreaded progress bar move much quicker for SOME functions, but not all.

Good luck!

I'm a graphic designer and avid gamer.. Been flamed for a prior post about being a possible AMD fanboy. lol. But as I said in my thread that if i was to buy a computer any time soon it would be a C2D. Apparently at work we're hiring someone new and I get a new pc. So I checked out online a few one being Dell and the other Gateway. If I could have it my way I'd build it but the company likes having someone else to blame if anything goes wrong.

Anyways we went with the Gateway (bleh)
Core 2 Duo E6700
2 gigs of ram (will upgrade later by ourselves)
with 250g hd (was thinking of dropping a raptor in for the programs hd)
19" mon

Went with the C2D cause it cuts almost a full minute off our current system in the benchmarks that tom has for photoshop

Not really, if you buy a macbook pro or mac pro right now, then it's gonna be suck, because Adobe havent published any Universal version for intel macs yet. So the only way is to buy a Powerbook or Powermac, but I dont think it's wise to buy a machine that will be outdated very soon, since no one will make software for PowerPC mac any more.

If you'd look a bit you would've known that there's something called Rosetta that exists exactly to circumvent that problem, also :

Again if you did some research you would know that theoretical limit is 16TB using VM but is limited to 128GB of physical memory as per M$ specs and Not 4GB.Link
But then again acquiring WinXP x64 would also introduce compatibility problems regarding the software used, since there's no x64 edition of PS CS2 at the moment. And even if you could get it to run on x64, you would get an emulated 32bit version running on a 64 bit OS hence eliminating any advantages you'd get from it in the first place.
Also since of late you can even run WinXP on an intel based Mac, and get equal performance compared to the same Mac running OS X compared to an equivalent PC...Link.
So i'll let you ponder a bit on this and if you have anything to had please feel free. Also i wanted to add that i suggested a Mac for the only reason that they are now priced to compete with PCs.

Without mentioning brands, a dual core processor is a must since Photoshop utilizes it to the max, and secondly 1GB or better of ram, and finally a 7200 RPM SATA II HDD with in excess of 8MB cache, hope that helps

Yes at the cost of performance. Power PC chips still perform photoshop tasks nearly twice as fast due to the Translation. Plus the new Mac Pros use FB-DIMM which is more expensive. Move to Mac ain't as great as everyone says.

Sorry for hijacking this thread, but i just wanted to know...If all things equal, wouldn't a Mac and Wintel/Winamd (whichever you choose) would perform almost the same esp. since Mac now use Intel's cpu?Alnd also from all that i know, Photoshop has always love as much ram as possible, have yourself (2cats) as much ram as possible/affordable.Ooh....did somebody mention FB-DIMM... what's the diff from normal DDR/DDR2?

The fastest hardware for running Photoshop is the Windows version on a Bootcamp'd Intel Mac, but that's due in part to what the guy said earlier about no universal Photoshop version available yet. Oh, and Rosetta does slow things down/mess things up a little IME - particularly MS Office 2K4!

And now that Macs are (in some cases) actually cheaper than their PC counterparts, that's definitely what I'd go for.