I'm starting to process more and more digital photos and want a faster throughput. I'm willing to spend a little to upgrade my rig for better photo editing performance. What would be the single best hardware upgrade for me?

I'm considering getting 10k Raptor drive(s), upgrading my video card, or getting 2GB more (DDR PC-4000 500 MHz) memory sticks now that Photoshop can utilize more than the 2GB max... I'm just not crazy about buying $200 more fast DDR mem, since I know my next puter build would be AM2 w/ DDR2 or DDR3 RAM...

I read a review of the NVIDIA 8800 GTS and GTX cards on Gamepyre. This review made mention of some new graphic engine technology which may move some "physics" CPU functions to the GPU- or SHARE them to increase performance! Sorry, loyal ATI fans (I know Adobe owns ATI now). Quote from Gamepyre <(http://www.gamepyre.com/reviewsd.html?aid=783&p=8)>:

"DirectX 10 hardware can also do Physics Shading. Physics is normally done on the CPU. With most CPUs, the number of onscreen objects bouncing around, the number of particles being displayed on the screen etc is limited by the CPU. The GeForce 8800 can do Physics Shading to alleviate the burden on the CPU and move it to the graphics card. The Havok Physics engine and the Physics Shader in DirectX 10 allow the physics to be done on the graphics card and the CPU together."

Can anybody tell me from experience or expertise whether the GeForce 8800 chipset improvements affect Photoshop performance? How much? I know most pixel shading, vertex shading, and physics (3D) is for gaming, 3D modeling, or animation. But I don't KNOW if it will benefit me AT ALL, so I'm asking for help here.

Granted, I'm running a pretty old card (see system specs below). But I'm NOT a gamer, so I know gpu isn't much of a deal for Photoshop- it's got 256MB, so it's the DEFINITE bottleneck for gaming, but my cpu prolly is for Photoshop. I know Photoshop doesn't require a bleeding edge graphics card to optimize performance, and I got it to xfer analog videos to digital.

I'm guessing I'll prolly just get one 150GB Raptor 10k hard drive, put it in my case and use it solely for pics and graphic work files. I'd format it NTFS prolly w/ 64 kb clusters. I got a third Caviar 250GB (7200 rpm), that I'm going to re-format NTFS w/ 32kb clusters and use for full back-up.

My rig:
cpu: AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ 2.0GHz Dual Core
ram: 2 x 1GB OCZ Platinum revision 2 500MHz (3-3-2-7)
hdd: RAID 1 (2 x 250GB WD Caviar HDD's, 7200 rpm, 16MB buffer, SATA II) gpu: ATi ALL-In-Wonder X600 Pro 256MB
app: Adobe CS 2 Premium
Macromedia Studio 8

other info: (I run at 2.68 GHz stable on air cooling when huge workload makes worth doing so). I'm running my RAID 1 with two partitions (on each of the two hard drives), 1st is boot drive (of course!- with required 4096 byte clusters for XP Pro SP2). 2nd partition is 32 kb clusters which helps TREMENDOUSLY on lowering fragmentation, and slightly on seek time/ performance. The RAID 1 also helps a bit on seek time/performance.

Overall, I might estimate RAID 1 plus 32 kb clusters improves Photoshop performance about 10-15%, but can't test w/o re-formatting my drives. Running my overclock at 2.68 GHz increases performance on more intensive tasks by about 20%, but many tasks it still doesn't matter.

Thanks for any input. Cheers.

david

prodesma

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Can GeForce 8800GTS increase Photoshop performance? Best hardware upgrade?