Upgrade of WIndows machine – suggestions for new configuration

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Posted By
Freeagent
Jul 29, 2008
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265
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3
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Closed
A scratch file is created immediately upon opening an image, so the scratch disk is always in use when PS is open. New to PS CS3 memory management is that writing to scratch goes on as a continous background process from the very beginning – iow it’s not waiting for RAM saturation as it was previously. In my experience this is a much more flexible approach since it won’t stop dead as you hit the RAM ceiling. Most of the data will already be there.

So you should definitely put scratch on a fast drive. I would keep the Windows pagefile on C, at least for now.

At the moment Photoshop is not CPU bound to a great degree. Most of the real bottlenecks are elsewhere. You don’t mention your CPU speed, but anything in the 4000+ region should hold up well. But that may change soon.

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N
nospam
Jul 29, 2008
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F
Freeagent
Jul 29, 2008
One more thing: you might want to set a fixed size for your pagefile, to avoid fragmentation. I see differing opinions about whether this is really effective, but it’s worth a shot.

As for Bridge performance, go to Tools > Build and Export Cache. It might take a while, but it speeds things up afterwards.
BH
BILL_HUNT
Jul 29, 2008
I agree with Freeagent.

My system is configured with 1 smaller fast HDD for OS/programs/Windows Page File. Four fast large SATA IIs for Scratch Disk and the extension of the Windows Page File (static size). One very large ATA-100 for media storage. Reason that the media disk is ATA-100 is that is the only onboard connection, that I have, and the media disk is only read from/writen to on Open and Save.

I’ve tried configuring the Windows Page File in several ways: all on C:\, All on D:\ (SATA II), but Windows XP-SP2 did not like this at all, and split C:\ & D:\. Greatest performance came from the split static layout, but only by a little. (Note: other XP-SP2 setups would allow me to move Page File completely to D:\, but not on this workstation?)

Photoshop can use every TB of Scratch Disk that you can give it. You could give it 4x 200TB RAID 0 arrays, and it’d be happy. Whether you’ll ever use it, is dependent on what size files you work with and what you do to them. I/O is the biggest bottleneck in an otherwise current machine. CPU speed is nice, don’t get me wrong, but I/O is where the big bucks pay off most quickly.

I would max out RAM up to 4GB, and probably look for a MoBo, that allowed expansion beyond, for when CS4 and Vista-64 work together. I’ve been happily using 4GB (3GB switch on XP) for years, and will have to upgrade the MoBo, when I migrate over to 64bit someday. Still, I’ve gotten my $-worth out of this setup, so new processors and MoBo are not a big deal.

Hunt

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