PC for Photo Editing

[ranmyaku]

Anyone have any recommendations for a PC that is geared mostly for photo editing? My current PC will not run LR2 and CS4 at the same time very efficiently..ie. it is slow and locks up/crashes sometimes. I have a budget of about 800 dollars.

 

[mrodgers]

Anything available off the shelf? I have an AMD 3500, 1 gig RAM, and an old ATI 1600 and the only thing I've found I can't do is fly Microsoft FS and work in Photoshop on 7 images at the same time. I've been trying and have been crashing my flight sim, LOL.

My PC is now almost 4 years old and was middle of the ground off the shelf Compaq at the time (2005). It works just fine.

I've had in the past LR, Photoshop, and about 30 tabs of The Photo Forum in Firefox open and the PC handled it just fine.

 

[Garbz]

Any computer made after 2005. Throw in 2gb of RAM. Spend the rest on a decent monitor.

 

[TwoRails]

Ever consider building your own???

 

[JustAnEngineer]

$800 will buy you an excellent computer.

Start with a gaming PC like this, drop the useless $90 sound card, downgrade the graphics card to a Radeon HD4670 (unless you still want to play games), double the RAM from 4 to 8 GiB and replace the Core 2 Duo with a Core 2 Quad processor. Install Windows Vista 64-bit Home Premium OEM as your operating system, and you're all set.

 

[Garbz]

Jesus man we're editing photos not curing cancer here. A 250megapixel 16bit photo with 3 layers in photoshop didn't even scratch 3gb of ram here, what could you possibly need 8 for

/EDIT: Nevermind vista will need the other 5 :lmao:

 

[Joves]

Jesus man we're editing photos not curing cancer here. A 250megapixel 16bit photo with 3 layers in photoshop didn't even scratch 3gb of ram here, what could you possibly need 8 for

/EDIT: Nevermind vista will need the other 5 :lmao:

Yeah which is why Im still on XP. If you build your own get XP over Vista/ME. Building isnt that hard at all, everything is basically plug and play.

 

[table1349]

Jesus man we're editing photos not curing cancer here. A 250megapixel 16bit photo with 3 layers in photoshop didn't even scratch 3gb of ram here, what could you possibly need 8 for

/EDIT: Nevermind vista will need the other 5 :lmao:

Oh Garbz, Dude I got to play with a Mac pro with 32 gigs of ram and duel Quad core processors. When I loaded Photoshop I never even saw the startup screen. It screamed through a multi batch process of 120 photos in like 2.5 seconds. I was drooling all over myself untill I saw the $28,000.00 price tag. It was totally awsome.

As for your assesment of Vista, True oh so true.:thumbup::thumbup::thumbup::mrgreen:

 

[doenoe]

if you're going to run the 32-bit windows, dont bother to put in more then 3gigs of RAM. Everything you put in more, wont be used......i found that out yesterday :er:

 

[TwoRails]

if you're going to run the 32-bit windows, dont bother to put in more then 3gigs of RAM. Everything you put in more, wont be used......i found that out yesterday :er:

That's a yes / no thing. Windows will only "report" about 3.25 GB RAM, however the rest is used for overhead. If you remember the days of DOS, then you'll remember the HIMEM system where overhead items, and certain items you could choose, were put into the memory over 640KB. 4GB with a 32 bit Win OS will give more to programs to use than the standard 2GB setup. It will also run more memory intensive programs, too, with less of a performance hit.

 

[Garbz]

That is only true to a point. Yeas the history is right, and the fact that it is used for overhead is also right, but don't for a moment think that you get any physical benefit from the extra memory.

Without Physical address extention windows and the kernel will only ever map 3.25GB or RAM for useful purposes regardless of what the system is doing. The extra overhead by the way is mostly minuscule. Maybe just maybe if you have a 512MB videocard and you are just loading the textures in a game for the first time at the start of the level you can by chance for a very short time possibly come close to using half of your wasted 0.8GB but the reality is that unless you are running Windows 2003 Server with SP1, or a Linux distro compiled with PAE in mind, the extra RAM is truly completely wasted in a 32bit distro.

"Reserved for overhead" is political sugarcoating for "of no use to the system"

 

[TwoRails]

Comparing a 2GB system to a 4GB system, I have to disagree. You will see a notable difference while multitasking, especially with memory intensive programs. The difference between a 3GB to a 4GB I can only guess at as I've never built a 3GB system since DDRx runs best in dual channel. Intel's new processor, however breaks this mold and runs best in tri-channel.

Naturally, if all one's doing is emailing or running only one program, then no, you won't notice any difference. Windows 32 bit maxes out at 2GB "per process," basically meaning per program in a practical sense. So with even with only 3.25 (Windows does use more, it's just not "reported") you get another 1.25 GB for program use. This saves a lot of time (read: performance) as now the systems doesn't need to constantly swap memory out to the swap file on your hard drive, which is very costly, time wise.

For example, assuming the system has enough HP to do so, you'll have terrible performance if you, say render a movie and play a game at the same time on a 2 GB system, but most likely won't notice a difference on a 4GB system.

And yes, overhead memory use in the 3.25 to 4GB range does free up memory in the lower part.

 

[JustAnEngineer]

Jesus man we're editing photos not curing cancer here. A 250megapixel 16bit photo with 3 layers in photoshop didn't even scratch 3gb of ram here, what could you possibly need 8 for

I find that editing RAW photos is one of the few things that I do that pushes my memory usage to 6+ GiB. Windows Vista will use extra available memory to pre-fetch stuff for you, which helps with disk access. DDR2 memory is so amazingly cheap right now that there's no good reason not to get 4 x 2 GiB = 8 GiB of DDR2-800 memory with a Core2Duo or Core2Quad system.

You want Windows Vista 64-bit as your operating system. It's 7 years better than XP, and it shows.


Incidentally, if you install folding @home, you can edit photos and cure cancer at the same time. :thumbsup:

 

[epp_b]

First of all, give us some specs on your PC. For all we know, you may just need a RAM upgrade.

 

[Garbz]

Incidentally, if you install folding @home, you can edit photos and cure cancer at the same time. :thumbsup:

Funny side note. I upgraded to a Quad core and since then I was suffering random lockups on my computer. Probably something incompatible since I never like upgrading just a single chip, but I noticed that the computer only locked when it was idle. F@H keeps my computer stable believe it or not. Haven't had a lockup since I started using it.