hardware advice

a few years ago i built machines for some photographers who were using photoshop-7

the machines were amd's in the 1 - 2 ghz range
and 1 gig of ram...

some of the folks were using very large images with many layers... and the file size was up in the 100 meg range or more.

in general , all was working well.

now they have upgraded to photoshop CS2
and have noticed occasional "freeze-ups" and even had a crash or two. this seems to be mostly when keeping the "thumb-nail" browser open while editing.

my first thought was to add even more ram...
but then i checked the system performance and noticed very heavy cpu usage...
40%..peaking to 98%

it looks like it may be time to phase these folks into newer machines... but i'm wondering if i should go with the pentium-4 or the AMD 64 bit cpu.

any ideas on what's best?

also...any tips on keeping their present machines running for another year or so?

philo wrote:

a few years ago i built machines for some photographers who were using photoshop-7

the machines were amd's in the 1 - 2 ghz range
and 1 gig of ram...

some of the folks were using very large images with many layers... and the file size was up in the 100 meg range or more.

in general , all was working well.

now they have upgraded to photoshop CS2
and have noticed occasional "freeze-ups" and even had a crash or two. this seems to be mostly when keeping the "thumb-nail" browser open while editing.

my first thought was to add even more ram...
but then i checked the system performance and noticed very heavy cpu usage...
40%..peaking to 98%

it looks like it may be time to phase these folks into newer machines... but i'm wondering if i should go with the pentium-4 or the AMD 64 bit cpu.
any ideas on what's best?

also...any tips on keeping their present machines running for another year or so?

The quick solution is to put another 1 GB of RAM in their current boxes. That will make a huge difference. Otherwise, it is time for new machines.

AMD 64 is generally considered the better deal now. They tend to run a bit faster, cooler, and for a bit less money. P4 still works fine though. (I have a P4 3.2 GHz.)

The hot thing now is Dual Core and Photoshop CS2 will make use of it. (CS will too.) It will do a fair bit for making Photoshop run faster. It will also make it run faster with anything else running. So, that iTunes, Excel, or all the crap that XP runs, will all run without slowing down Photoshop. Intel's HyperThread will do a bit of that, but it's not nearly what true Dual Core will do. BTW, Intel's Dual Core isn't nearly as good now.

Get 2 GB of memory. Photoshop loves that. It's probably the #1 key hardware requirement. Getting more may or may not help.

Fast hard drives can make a significant difference. We all save and load stuff in Photoshop much more than we think we do. Get a separate fast HD for swap space. I have one of WD's Raptor 10K drives (36 GB) that I just use for XP swap space and Photoshop's Scratch disk. In some processes, it makes a huge difference.

Of course, you will need a CD/DVD drive. Fast and big are good. Reliable is more important, but hard to nail down. Plextor has always had a very good reputation.

You don't need much in video cards. Usually the one built into the motherboard will work just fine. If they want to use 2 monitors, you'll need a AGP video card that will handle 2 monitors. You might find the newer mobo and video card that are PC Express. That's newer and for the future, but it isn't going to matter for Photoshop.

Get as big and high resolution monitor as you can afford. You won't regret it working with Photoshop. The high end LCD monitors will allow you to properly calibrate the colors. It you can find them, CRT monitors are still better for color calibration. This is important for good, accurate, fast editing in Photoshop.

In my experience of working with Photoshop and building computers, those seem to be the key issues for performance.

Clyde

There's not really a point in dumping more memory into the systems he's got now when his speed is being limited by the processor, is there? If you're only going to update a single piece of hardware in the old systems, it might as well be the processor since they've no doubt already reached the top speed for that processor type.

"Kinmotsu" wrote in message

There's not really a point in dumping more memory into the systems he's got

<snip>

thanks for the answers...
it looks like i'll be moving at least one of the people up to an AMD 64bit next year.
and very possibly the 64bit version of XP...

one of the present machines only supports 1 gig of ram (which it already has)
so it's pretty much new computer time

btw: with a little care and a few minor tweaks...they are getting by ok as-is...
but next year will have me building a few higher end machines !

Kinmotsu wrote:

There's not really a point in dumping more memory into the systems he's got now when his speed is being limited by the processor, is there? If you're only going to update a single piece of hardware in the old systems, it might as well be the processor since they've no doubt already reached the top speed for that processor type.

Good point, except it's not always true. I've seen and heard of slower machines significantly speeding up with that extra 1 GB.

Budget would be another reason.

If the new/future computer would use the same memory, it won't cost anything to try the upgrade. Well, if the specs will handle it.

Clyde