Best CPU & Video Card for Photoshop

An excellent question! I'm planning pretty much the same thing- my 3+ year old Win2K box and 40gb hard drive is choking under the sheer volume of high-res images I've taken since I got the XT, and trying to Paintshop or Photoshop (I have both, but older copies) a full-size image takes whole minutes to render a new effect.

Simply put, if the board and card can render the umpty-jillion polygons at 60 frames per second for any of the high-end video games, rendering a single image in Photoshop will be childs' play.

Generally speaking figure 2+ Ghz with at least an 800mhz front side bus, at least a gig of RAM (more helps with working with big files or lots of them) and I'm leaning towards a relatively small primary hard drive (80gb or so) just for the OS and a few programs, with a monster drive (200 to 300 gb) as a secondary. No RAID for me, but I'll have an external 200+gb USB2.0 drive for backups. Being in a seperate enclosure, it can be left off to save wear and tear and/or electrical faults until needed.

Doc.

Dont forget to put in a couple of hard disks - 1x OS 1x Scratch (for Photoshop) 1x Data backup (optional)

Your photoshop days will appreciate the seperate harddisks (which work in parallel) when compared to a partitioned harddisk (which works effectively in series).

thanks, fellas. i was planing on a smallish 36 gig (we've come so far that 36 gigs is small!) WD raptor drive for the os and applications and a second 250 gig SATA drive for photoshop files. what i can find so far is pointing me to the Athlon64 4400 X2, with it's huge L2 cache and dual processor capability, as it seems to do fairly well in all benchmarks. however, since i'm designing this box around photoshop, i was wondering if there were any better options specificaly for that use.

All the RAM you can get, since you plan to work on large images this matters more than anything. I am editing 3000 x 11000 pixel images and even with 2gb RAM (1.6gb available to PS) the system slows down horribly when PS starts to cache to disc when it runs out of RAM. Disc caching is at least 100 times slower than RAM caching. I'd rather have a 500mhz processor with 4gb RAM, than a 3+ghz with 2gb.

About the disk caching, I've read recently something about using a USB flash drive as a disk cache. Reading and writing to these are apparently faster than to a regular hard drive. Anybody else know more about this?

cheers

gijs

Hi Scott --

I've been wondering the same thing about CPU's (Intel v. AMD and dual-core v. single v. 2 "real" CPU's). My general understanding about the new dual-core CPU's is that they can offer better performance with multithreaded apps (Photoshop is one), but the amount of improvement varies. In general, a "real" 2-CPU system offers better performance.

Here is a comparison, from a few months ago, that seems to favor some of AMD's newer chips for multithreaded apps over Intel's.

It's hard to say what all this means in the real world, where you wind up hitting various RAM, hard disk, and CPU bottlenecks depending on just what you're doing at the moment and the hardware in play. It's fairly cheap to install lots RAM (1 to 2 GB) -- your PSD files are going to be hundreds of megs I imagine. Of course you'll want to be careful about adding layers and keeping too many files open at once.

I would imagine that any video card with enough ram to cover your display with 24 bits of color (or more) is going to work fine. You're not doing work in Photoshop that taxes a video card like games do.

Have you tried asking Adobe? Maybe they have test results they're willing to share. There looks to be a ton of info (of varying quality, just like here ;-) on their photoshop support forums.

Some things to keep in mind:

1. Photoshop can make good use of multiple processors.
2. Lots of RAM is really important. Look for a motherboard that supports at least 4GB of RAM, and 8GB is even better.
3. A fast memory bus is important.
4. Fast disk access is the next most important thing.
5. The Intel/AMD choice is not too important.
6. Photoshop does not accelerate any of its computations using the video card. This may change in the future, but for the moment, the video card doesn't make much difference.

Spend your money on a high-quality motherboard from Asus or similar, should cost $150 to $250, that has SATA II and only use SATA II hard drives. I Bought the Asus P5WD2 Premium and have the three hard drives all running a "primary" thanks to two SATA controllers. Using TweakUI/TweakAll I move the "My Documents" directory along with all the other personal folders to the Data drive and the "pagefile" and all temp files to the scratch drive leaving the OS and apps on the third drive. Makes it easyt o reformat/reinstall every 6 months or so.

If you get a motherboard that supports AGP an older ATI or Nvidia would work fine, get DVI out if you want it and support for dual-monitors is always nice, but don't get one so old that new drivers are not being released. I prefer the ATI cards and the 9600 is a great deal right now. If your has PCI Express then the video card will be more expensive, but should be even faster (but keep in mind that the speed difference will not be a real factor to Photoshop.)

But good memory and lots of it. 2GB of DDR2 5200 or faster RAM can really make up for a couple hundred MHz less in the processor.

I personally prefer Intel processors but do not think it makes a really big difference. Dual-Core Pentium D 840 is what I chose, anything faster is/was a huge price jump.

Just for laughs I looked at the bleeding edge of technology. I went to newegg and added 4 2x2G memory sticks, 2 Opteron 275 dual core processors, a server board that supported 16G of physical memory, and a server case. $8000 for just these parts.

It would be interesting to see a benchmark comparing photoshop on a base level , a middle level, and a high level system configured with different disk and memory setups.

Suggested configurations (AMD):

A64 3200+, 2 disk systems, 2GB

A64 3200+, 3 disk systems, 2GB

A64 3200+, 2 disk systems, 4GB

A64 3200+, 3 disk systems, 4GB

A64 X2 4400+, 2 disk systems, 2GB

A64 X2 4400+, 3 disk systems, 4GB

A64 X2 4400+, 2 disk systems, 2GB

A64 X2 4400+, 3 disk systems, 4GB

2 Opteron 275, 3 disk systems, 8GB

2 Opteron 275, 3 disk systems, 16GB

My cost estimate (8/05) for building these yourself would be:

A64 3200+ $1000-1400

A64 X2 4400+ $1500-2200

Opteron 275 $6000-10000

The prices will go down on these systems. My personal though would be to get a A64 3200+ system with a x2 compatible motherboard, 4GB of memory, and 3 disk systems (OS, scratch, data). I would be very interested in a review of these systems along with Intel's offerings in these price ranges.

Has anyone done a review like this?