Spec me an Imaging/Photo PC

Martin SH

Martin SH

Martin SH

Associate
Joined
16 Jan 2008
Posts
84
I was thinking of building the following for Photography (Photoshop/Lightroom) use, but one of the motherboard reviews says: This board -WILL NOT- boot with 4x 1gb memory sticks of the double-sided type (which is practically all memory around these days) much to my distress. The only other option is to try to find 4x single-sided sticks or stay with 2x double-sided.

Are there any other suggestions?
G.Skill 4GB DDR2 PQ PC2-8000C5 (2x2GB) CAS5 Dual Channel Kit (F2-8000CL5D-4GBPQ) £88.11

Gigabyte GA-P31-DS3L Intel P31 (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard £46.99

Intel Core 2 Quad Pro Q6600 "Energy Efficient SLACR 95W Edition" 2.40GHz (1066FSB)

Antec NSK 4480 Mini Tower Case (Silver) - 380W Earth Watts PSU £52.86

Samsung SpinPoint T 500GB SATA-II 16MB Cache - OEM (HD501LJ)
£57.66

HIS ATI Radeon HD 3450 Silence 256MB DDR2 TV-Out/DVI/HDMI (PCI-Express) - Retail £32.89

Samsung SH-S203PBEBN 20x DVD±RW SATA Dual Layer Lightscribe ReWriter (Black) - OEM 19.96

Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium 64-Bit Edition DVD - OEM - 1Pk (66I-01939) £70.49

Total: £486.45


Thanks

Martin
 
I would suggest making sure that you focus on backup as well. If you end up with loads of photos that last thing you want is a disk failure.

I would suggest thinking about a board with the Intel ICH9R chipset as it will support raid 1, 10 and raid 5 all of which will give you a degree of protection. Also off site backups, either using external USB hard disks or regular backups of newer stuff onto DVDs.

Sorry to bang on about backups but I recently had a disk failure and I was reminded how grateful I was that I had two other backups to fall back on !

Rest of the spec seems OK - lots of Ram - what monitor are you using ?
 
whatare thet main things the CS3 and other apps use. Aprt from RAM - does dual/quad core make any difference?
Is anything over 4GB a waste or would it be utilised.
 
33L said:
whatare thet main things the CS3 and other apps use. Aprt from RAM - does dual/quad core make any difference?
Is anything over 4GB a waste or would it be utilised.
Click to expand...


If the Operating system can handle more than 4gb then Photoshop will use it (as will lightroom) they'll gobble up any memory you throw their way!!

CS4 will take advantage of 64bit systems, CS3 doesn't (and will not)
 
33L said:
Is anything over 4GB a waste or would it be utilised.
Click to expand...
Photoshop is still a 32bit app, I managed to get it to use ~1.8Gb (as reported by task manager) before it resorted to it's own scratch disk.

It all depends on budget, if money is tight then anymore than 4Gb is a waste but if the cash is there then 8Gb will allow things like a bigger superfetch cache etc.
 
rpstewart said:
Photoshop is still a 32bit app, I managed to get it to use ~1.8Gb (as reported by task manager) before it resorted to it's own scratch disk.

It all depends on budget, if money is tight then anymore than 4Gb is a waste but if the cash is there then 8Gb will allow things like a bigger superfetch cache etc.
Click to expand...


my intentions are a dual core (intel) with 8GB (since the price of mem was low the last time i checked) and CS3.

can you resize the scratch disk? what is superfetch?
 
Last edited:
I'm not sure if you can specify the size of the scratch disk, all you do is specify drives in an order of preference and I assume that Photoshop just uses whatever space it can find on each one in turn.

Superfetch is a Vista feature which caches frequently used programs and data in unused RAM at system boot so that they're ready to go when you want them. The more spare RAM you have, the bigger the cache so the bigger the chance of what you want being in there.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom