Minimum PC requirements for effiecient/fast RAW post processing?

[baboymo]

I'm looking to buy a new PC but don't want to get anything that's overkill. I want one that will run Rawshooter Essentials and Photoshop CS2 efficiently with zero to almost zero lagtime. I want for a dual-monitor setup but the PC is my main concern.

Any suggestions? What PC are you guys using for your CS2?

I recently upgraded from 6.0 and CS2 and now Photoshop is soooo slow that it's almost unusable for RAW adjustments and Adobe Bridge. I have to continue using RSE (IMHO is the best RAW program out there) to change RAW to TIFF.

[JakeC]

Without 'overkill' you're unlikely to get zero lag time in CS2, as most tasks are both memory and processor intensive. However RSE would be virtually lag free on any P4 system with 512mb RAM. It's a brilliant program in that way.

An affordable system would be something like a 3.2/3.4E with at least 1GB of DDR RAM. Mine's the 3.2E and processes fast enough for my needs. I guess it gets a little slow if working on 100mb+ images like panoramas but it's not bad for your regular 35-50mb TIFF.

Be sure to run a second drive to keep PS and it's scratch disk apart, if you ever need the scratch then it'll be a lot quicker in this configuration.

The new AMD 64 systems could be worth looking into too, but I am happy with the way the Prescott deals with digital imaging. If you live in a warm climate just make sure it's in a thermally advantaged case with decent fans.

Anyway that's all I can offer, I'm no PC guru:p

[tim]

I have 1GB RAM, an Athlon 64 3500+, 2 7200RPM disks, CS2 is responsive but batch processes can still take some time to run. The thing that slows it down is the CPU, not the disk or lack of memory. RAW conversion is very heavy on CPU and RAM, and I suspect a P4 has the edge at the moment with hyperthreading and affording dual cores. The Athlon will regain the lead later this year, when their dual core processors come down in price.

[lancea]

Yeap. Nothing's going to run calculation-intensive applications in the blink of an eye. Just buy the fastest system you can afford. Gamer's machines are usually the most souped-up! Lots of RAM. 1GB minimum and 2GB wouldn't go astray. You want to avoid Windows swapping memory to disc.

One area often overlooked is the hard disks. No matter how fast the processor you're still going to be doing a lot of reading and writing images and temporary files. Make sure you buy big enough discs to ensure you never fill them up over 80% capacity. Make sure they're 7,200 rpm OR if you're really wealthy (and what photographer isn't :)?) you could go for the ultimate of a fast SCSI controller card and use 15,000 rpm SCSI discs.

[Jesper]

I agree with lancea, not only a fast processor and enough RAM are important, also a fast harddisk system is important. If I would be buying a new PC now, I'd buy a SATA RAID controller with it (not expensive) and two large and fast SATA disks. My dad just bought this, he's doing a lot of video editing on his PC.

[Mernya]

I'm only running a P4 2.0 at home, with 1 gig of ram. If you are too worried about the dual head monitor set up, use two cards instead of a single card with two outputs. That won't really do anything for lag or speed, though. I'm not using anything special for my hard disks, but if you want to be a speed freak, a performance RAID with SATA high speed drives is a good way to go, or like lancea said, go all the way to SCSI. My file server uses SCSI drives.

[BrandonSi]

I have to admit, I'm lagging sorely behind in this area. I currently do all my processing on my AMD Athlon 866 (yes, 866) with 1GB of RAM. It takes around a minute to process one RAW shot to TIFF after I make my adjustments.