PC for Photoshop

[plastii]

Hi there.

I have a question for Photoshop/computer gurus. I'm going to replace my old PC within next few days, and I was thinking about buing this one:
CompUSA.com | RB-NC816AA | HP Pavilion Elite m9528c Refurbished Desktop PC
The price is right and and the question is...will it be powerfull enaugh for photoshop? (CS3/CS4)
My old PC was pretty slow and took forever to photomerge 10 photographs into panorama.
I was also thinking about i7, but it's too expensive for me.

Thanks
Marek.

 

[Big Mike]

Should be OK...and with 8GB of RAM, it should reduce your time on things like photomerge.

 

[Munky]

it should run pretty quick!; not bad at all!

 

[plastii]

Thanks for the info.

How about i7 with 8 GB of RAM (DDR3) - is there a big difference in performace with photoshop? I never had either of them but I'm not sure if spending more $$$ is worth it.

 

[JerryPH]

Not anything that you would notice on a day to day difference.

 

[plastii]

Thanks for the info guys. I think the quad should do for now.

 

[FrankLamont]

DDR3 is considerably (another channel) faster than DDR2 with other added bonuses, but definitely not necessary.

You never use 8GB unless you overclock, and that's hard to do. Save some money... get a 2.66 i7, 4-6gb memory and that's all you need.

 

[c.cloudwalker]

Get a Mac :lmao:

 

[plastii]

I was thinking about Mac but they kind of expensive.

 

[table1349]

That's because they are the L glass of computers. :mrgreen:

 

[musicaleCA]

Too true. They're sleek, sexy, and have heavy marketing. The benefits ARE there, but a little over-hyped, just like L glass.

One of the big things with Photoshop is to have two internal drives. Use one as the system drive, and another as Photoshop's scratch drive. Using a scratch drive that isn't your system drive will boost performance by a fair margin more often than not, in my experience, as long as it's internal or an external on a fast connection (IEEE 800 or eSATA, for example).

 

[table1349]

Too true. They're sleek, sexy, and have heavy marketing. The benefits ARE there, but a little over-hyped, just like L glass.

One of the big things with Photoshop is to have two internal drives. Use one as the system drive, and another as Photoshop's scratch drive. Using a scratch drive that isn't your system drive will boost performance by a fair margin more often than not, in my experience, as long as it's internal or an external on a fast connection (IEEE 800 or eSATA, for example).

Yep to both, however, like L glass they have nothing but the best in components.

 

[musicaleCA]

Except when Nvidia craps all over their manufacturing. I had one of their GPUs crack recently; my MBP needed a new logic board because of it. Not Apple's fault, since it was Nvidia that manufactured an entire run of defective chips, but still... (Note the problem isn't Mac-specific. The same GPUs had been put into HPs, Dells, <PC brand here>s.)

 

[blash]

Oh cripes is this another Mac-altar thread?

Save your money. Simple as that. You wanna know how to get the best for your money? Build your own machine. Get stuff that actually matters - like a solid state drive, to help alleviate the #1 bottleneck and cause of worse performance in any and every computer today. Get a 24" monitor so you can actually have a working space bigger than only being able to look at 10% of your image at one time.

Memory and processor speed is probably least important. Fact is, people were running Photoshop on dual-core processors just fine, and Photoshop doesn't take up 8 GB of RAM by far - more like 2 GB at most. Get 4 GB if you want to feel safe. So you'll take 5 mins to crunch something that would otherwise take you 3.5 mins - seriously, decide where your money is best spent.

The best way to spend a limited budget is to 1) save to expand it and 2) build your own machine. You don't need an Intel processor - AMD processors, while not nearly as fast at the high-end, really caught up and dominate the low-end market due to their low cost. You can get a 3-core AMD processor for $115, paired with an $80 mobo, $70 for 4 GB of fast DDR3 1333 RAM, maybe $50 or $60 on a video card, which brings us to.... $325. Add $230 for a SSD to store Photoshop on, $100 for 2 320 GB drives for RAID 1 to a) actually have room for your photos and b) make sure that they survive in case one of the disks crashes, $100 for a cheap case and decent power supply ($30 for a DVD burner if you really can't use the one from your old computer), use the keyboard and mouse, speakers, and printer from your old computer (pirate Windows and Photoshop but shhhhhh on that ) and we're talking about an approximately $700 computer with brand-new components and full (often lifetime) warranties that will absolutely, totally smoke the computer you linked.

Then add $100 for a Wacom Bamboo tablet so that, you know, Photoshop is actually usable, and $300 for a basic 24" display (or just use the monitor you already have... that's OK in a pinch) and for about $1100 you've got a kick-ass machine that'll do pretty much anything you could want and do anything related to Photoshop with kick-ass speed.

Or, you can either a) get a crappy machine that somebody returned (or worse... it is refurbished) with no warranty to save your ass if the hardware is a lemon and tough **** when your hard drive inevitably crashes, b) pay the Apple Tax so you can have the same status-symbol machine that stopped being cool when everyone and their grandmother got their hands on one, with inferior hardware for the price that doesn't even really meet your needs in the first place.

Or you can spend 20 minutes researching on Google and seeing that if you have the dexterity to put together a Lego set, you can put together your own computer in a fool-proof manner over the course of a few hours on the weekend, have fun while doing it, learn something about your computer, and save hundreds of dollars while doing it. Your call.

 

[Garbz]

Should be OK...and with 8GB of RAM, it should reduce your time on things like photomerge.

Just remember you need 64bit versions of your apps or they are again limited to a low memory range.

You never use 8GB unless you overclock, and that's hard to do. Save some money... get a 2.66 i7, 4-6gb memory and that's all you need.

Completely irrelevant. I used 8gb on my Core2Duo, I use 8gb on my Core2Quad now. I've maxed out every ram I ever had with various things (engineering calculations, panoramas, editing 200mpx images). Given the price of memory these days there's no excuse not to get the 8gb. You may not run out with 4-6, but if you do, you will know when your computer grinds to a halt.!

Save your money. Simple as that. You wanna know how to get the best for your money? Build your own machine.

Under the massive assumption that the OP can do that. Since they are shopping online for a complete system I doubt it is. The end result is there's no cost saving of a PC over a similarly speced mac. We're not all technically inclined enough to build one. It seems like childs play to me but my dad wouldn't know which part of the motherboard to plug a video card into let alone the difference between PCI express PCI, LGA995, or the rest of that.

Though agree if the OP has an 18 year old in the house get them to build the computer

Get stuff that actually matters - like a solid state drive, to help alleviate the #1 bottleneck and cause of worse performance in any and every computer today. Get a 24" monitor so you can actually have a working space bigger than only being able to look at 10% of your image at one time.

Memory and processor speed is probably least important. Fact is, people were running Photoshop on dual-core processors just fine, and Photoshop doesn't take up 8 GB of RAM by far - more like 2 GB at most. Get 4 GB if you want to feel safe. So you'll take 5 mins to crunch something that would otherwise take you 3.5 mins - seriously, decide where your money is best spent.

I'd agree with most of of the rest of your post but this?. For a photo editing machine? Photoshop easily fills up 2gb. Running lightroom along side another GB is gone, got Vista? There's another down, and you've just managed to fill up 4GB with 1 image open. Given that RAM costs next to nothing why not get 8gb. How can you penny pinch on this and then spend a boatload of money on an SSD.

What does that bring you anyway? Photoshop and windows loads a few seconds faster then it's stored in ram, an image opens half a second faster then it's stored in RAM. If you're paging to the SSD then after a few weeks it dramatically reduces speed. (Windows 7 I believe has/will have support for newer instructions to prevent this) The cost of SSDs is ludicrous, and completely unjustified for photoediting applications which will only ever page to the hdd when they run out of ram.

Running filters? Photoshop is fully threadded these days. Running high quality noise reduction is a painfully CPU intensive process on large images.