Finally got a desktop pc for post processing

[Sheridan]

I've been shooting in RAW with my 30D for years and all my PP has been on my Gateway laptop with 1.8 mobile athlon processor, 512MB RAM, 100gig hard drive.

CS3 was a real pain to run on it, but now that I got CS4 it wasn't working.

I am on a pretty tight budget as photography is only a hobby for me, so I didn't get some state of the art equipment, but it is worlds better than what I had.

New computer:

Gateway tower $611
Intel Core 2 Quad processor at 2.4
1066 front side bus
6 gigs of dual channel RAM
640 gig hard drive
Running Vista 64 bit

Dell E228WFP 22" monitor $249

The monitor is what I was most concerned with. Like a lot of amatuers my budget doesn't allow an IPS or VA display, at least not for a few years. This Dell did really well in a lot of reviews pertaining to color accuracy after calibration for a TN panel.

Sometime this week I'll order one of the hardware color calibrators and see how it goes from there.

I'm just excited to have the new speed, and compared to a 15" laptop the 22" monitor seems HUGE :)

[Tony-S]

You should see a nice improvement on your performance. I have that cpu (q6600) and have oc'd it to 3.2 ghz. Works like a champ.

[tim]

Wow, that thing will fly compared with your old machine! Though actually the old machine could fly, the new one isn't so portable ;)

[Sheridan]

Thanks for the replies, I am very excited about this thing! Glad to hear the processor is good.

Tim- The old one almost flew...across the computer room many times when trying to use CS4 :)

[charleyclarke16]

hey sheridan not to burst your bubble but Photoshop does not accept more than 2gigs of RAM. I made the mistake when getting my Mac Book Pro. The extra RAM will definitely help run Vista better. I read in the paper the other day that Microsoft is going to be pushing Windows 7 in the next year or so. Good luck with the new machine. good choice with the 22" monitor

[Tony-S]

hey sheridan not to burst your bubble but Photoshop does not accept more than 2gigs of RAM.

Of course it does. Where did you hear that?

[charleyclarke16]

An adobe rep at my school...im not saying it wont run with more than 2...it just wont use more than that

[Tony-S]

Sure it will. It's 32 bit under OS X and 32 or 64 bit on Windows, depending on your OS install.

[charleyclarke16]

That allows plug-ins to use the extra ram. Photoshop will still only be using 2

[Littlefield]

So is PS different then LR because the RAM of 6 makes it run faster they say :)

[Sheridan]

No worry about bursting my bubble, just going from half a gig to using 2gigs would be great.

However this is from Adobe's website:
The primary advantage of using the 64-bit version is to access amounts of RAM beyond what Photoshop can access when the 32-bit version is run. You can take advantage of more than 4 GB of RAM only when you are on 64-bit Windows, using 64-bit Photoshop. If you use files large enough to need more than 4 GB of RAM, and you have enough RAM, all the processing you perform on your large images can be done in RAM, instead of swapping out to the hard disk.

This table lists the amount of RAM available to Photoshop with the different versions of Windows:

Photoshop Version 32 bit
Windows Version 32 bit
Maximum amount of RAM Photoshop can use - 1.7gig

Photoshop Version 32 bit
Windows Version 64 bit
Maximum amount of RAM Photoshop can use - 3.2 gig

Photoshop Version 64 bit
Windows Version 64 bit
Maximum amount of RAM Photoshop can use - as much RAM as you can fit into your computer
Here is a link to the page I got this on http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=kb404901

[Tony-S]

That allows plug-ins to use the extra ram. Photoshop will still only be using 2

I don't know about Windows, but on OS X it is 3 gb.

[René Damkot]

Yup: Click (http://blogs.adobe.com/scottbyer/2006/12/64_bitswhen.html)
Then again, if you have a Mac with more then 4Gb, you might want to have a read here: Click (http://www.adobe.com/support/downloads/detail.jsp?ftpID=3337).

[jetboy]

An adobe rep at my school...im not saying it wont run with more than 2...it just wont use more than that

I use Ramdisk Plus by Superspeed to allocate a ramdrive from the extra 4gb of ram that Vista x86 doesn't see. Then use that as a scratch disk. Presto, Photoshop using more than the max ram on a 32bit system. No hard disk trashing either as long as I don't edit my very LARGE scan files.

[HankScorpio]

Don't worry. CS4 64bit under Vista 64bit will happily steal all the RAM you can feed it.

http://www.techdystopia.com/stuff/cs4mem.jpg