In Building a Photoshop System…..

Questions:
1. Any recommended alterations to the above?

2. Is the 3 GIGS to RAMDISK for the PS scratch disk valuable move since editing large files?

3. What other motherboard, without PCI-X, could be substituted for the Thunder K8W? (Keeping in mind the amount of SATA drives (4), and the amount of ram (6 sticks).)

4. Would it be beneficial to use socket 939 chips instead of 940.

5. What advantages, if any, would there be if an ATI 9800 (XT/PRO/ETC) is substituted for the 9600XT in a PS environment?

Many thanks in advance for any thoughts,

2. Is the 3 GIGS to RAMDISK for the PS scratch disk valuable move
since editing large files?

Sure.

2. Is the 3 GIGS to RAMDISK for the PS scratch disk valuable move since editing large files?

Sure.

Why? Surely the memory management system inside Photoshop isn’t so dumb as to use the scratch disk when there’s gobs of free RAM going spare? Why not just hand the 3GB over to Photoshop for normal use?

(Ashley) wrote in news:bb93b931.0407142217.175705c5
@posting.google.com:

Questions:
1. Any recommended alterations to the above?

3 UltraSCSI 320 15K drives for the RAID 0. 3 is the sweet spot performance wise, plus mucho lower CPU utilization than SATA.

U320 PCI-X card, of course.

2. Is the 3 GIGS to RAMDISK for the PS scratch disk valuable move since editing large files?

Sure.

3. What other motherboard, without PCI-X, could be substituted for the Thunder K8W? (Keeping in mind the amount of SATA drives (4), and the amount of ram (6 sticks).)

There might be one out there, but I’m unaware of it.

4. Would it be beneficial to use socket 939 chips instead of 940.

Not much unless you can get this motherboard in 939.

5. What advantages, if any, would there be if an ATI 9800 (XT/PRO/ETC) is substituted for the 9600XT in a PS environment?

DOOM3 would work much better. Photoshop-wise, zip.

Many thanks in advance for any thoughts,

Something else – fill *all* the RAM slots with DDR-400.

http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content.asp?id=thunderk8w&am p;page=2
Done right, that’s one hell of a sweet system.

I’m preparing to put together a system geared towards editing large files in PS as well other graphic-based functions. I was hoping for some input on the potential build which includes:

Processors:
Dual AMD Opteron Model 146, 1MB L2 Cache 64-bit Processors
Motherboard:
TYAN "Thunder K8W

Memory:
6 GIGS of Crucial 400DDR.
Allocated as follows – 2 for Photoshop, 3 for RAMDISK for PS scratch disk, and 1 FOR OS.

Hard Drives:
2 Western Digital Raptor 74GB 10,000RPM SATA in RAID 0 and a Western Digital 200GB 7200rpm SATA for deep storage

I’m preparing to put together a system geared towards editing large files in PS as well other graphic-based functions. I was hoping for some input on the potential build which includes:

Processors:
Dual AMD Opteron Model 146, 1MB L2 Cache 64-bit Processors
Motherboard:
TYAN "Thunder K8W

Memory:
6 GIGS of Crucial 400DDR.
Allocated as follows – 2 for Photoshop, 3 for RAMDISK for PS scratch disk, and 1 FOR OS.

Hard Drives:
2 Western Digital Raptor 74GB 10,000RPM SATA in RAID 0 and a Western Digital 200GB 7200rpm SATA for deep storage

Scott,

Sounds like you get an excellent system as far as the hardware goes. It perhaps pays to give it some efforts in optimizing the operating system, assuming you will be getting Windows XP.

I would split the hard drives into several partitions. Then split the Windows paging file (over 6G) across several partitions on 2 separate drives. Disable features that you don’t need in Windows XP since there are a lot of programs running in the background. Too keep a system clean, install as few programs as possible.

One thing to be aware of is spyware. I have seen quite a few fast machines got hijacked by spyware lately. Those nasty programs can bring your machine to a halt regardless.

Hope this helps,

Terry

www.PhotoRevamp.com