a good PC Photoshop system

True, the card must still be reasonably fast and it would be only applicable in gaming.

uOpt wrote in post #11841069
i am sorry but this is bad advise.

The video card industry knows that some people are too lazy to read benchmarks and absolutely must judge things by one number only. In the case of video cards there would be useful numbers such as memory bandwidth. But those aren't on the box. So people buy by amount of video RAM. Then the gaming industry in their quest for easy to understand minimum hardware requirements started using amount of video RAM as a measure.

Subsequently the video card industry started pumping out cards that have huge amounts of RAM which is absolutely useless. Many of the lower performance, high-memory cards cannot even visit 1/8th of the memory they have for lack of memory bandwidth, and that doesn't even begin to look at doing something with the contents. This is nothing but a scam.

I recommend never telling people to buy video cards by amount of RAM. If they don't have much money you make them waste some of the precious money they have on useless junk with lots of memory.

Integrated video varies a lot in performance and capabilities. And you should have a lot of main system RAM anyway. As with video cards, there is no way around actually reading some benchmarks to find out which integrated graphics might get the job done and which don't. Finally, there have been cards that were standalone PCIe card with some amount of own memory which could still use system RAM in addition. Again, no research -> buy junk.

Advising someone to get a video card with 512MB of RAM isn't bad advice, it's just not good advice for the reason the advice was given. Of course the model makes a big difference, but photographers should get at least 512MB vRam, preferably, 1GB, especially since some photography apps are starting to use video ram.

Read this.

Dang, I go back to the old days!

tim wrote in post #11846003
Advising someone to get a video card with 512MB of RAM isn't bad advice, it's just not good advice for the reason the advice was given. Of course the model makes a big difference, but photographers should get at least 512MB vRam, preferably, 1GB, especially since some photography apps are starting to use video ram.

Read this.

But this is a picture viewer that has nothing to do with photoshop

I'm not gonna believe that Photoshop/Aperture will use any significant amount of video RAM, even if they use the GPU for some plugins.

uOpt wrote in post #11848836
But this is a picture viewer that has nothing to do with photoshop

Photoshop isn't the only app that photographers use. My point is more and more apps will use GPU features in the future. Buy cheap now if you want, it's easy to upgrade, but some apps do use vRam or faster graphics cards if the resources are there.

tim wrote in post #11852114
Photoshop isn't the only app that photographers use. My point is more and more apps will use GPU features in the future. Buy cheap now if you want, it's easy to upgrade, but some apps do use vRam or faster graphics cards if the resources are there.

That doesn't mean that suddenly scam video cards with too slow memory bandwidth but lots of memory are a good buy. People who buy video cards by amount of video RAM will never find an application that they optimized for. But lots of people do, and I don't like it when people voice recommendations just on amount of video RAM. It supports this insanity which is doing quite a bit of damage to e.g. the gaming experience of users.

There appears to be a decent deal on Woot tonight:

1 HP P6674Y Pavilion Quad Core Phenom II 2.8Ghz, 6GB DDR3, 1TB SATA3, 802.11n, Windows 7 Home Prem http://www.woot.com/
$445, refurbed.

From a spec standpoint is this machine missing much for image editing with PS and editing HD video?

Thanks.

I think we're getting close to being off topic here. Let's just say that the OP would be better off with a discrete graphics solution instead of an integrated one. On the basis that an integrated one will use a lot more system RAM than a discrete one will. I think you'd be hard pressed to find a discrete graphics card with less than 512mb GDDR3 these days anyway, so it's a moot point.

My advice would be:

Sandy Bridge i5-2500K (the "K" designation denotes an unlocked CPU multiplier, not a better integrated GPU)
P67 motherboard (the H67 boards don't allow overclocking)
Atleast 8Gb of fast RAM (1333mhz+)
SSD for OS and PS/LR (OCZ Vertex 2, Corsair C300, there are others)
SSD/fast HD (Samsung F3, WD Black) for ACR cache, windows page file
Large HD for storage
Virtually any contempory discrete graphics card
Windows 7 64bit (or XP 64 if you're clinging onto XP for some reason)

Amen!!! Finally someone is hitting the nail and understand what requirements are needed for a speedy PC PS optimized system.

RAM is dead cheap nowadays so i wouldn't go for anything less than 12GB. PS and many other photographic orientated software will use that amount if available.

A slightly cheaper route would be using two "normal" hard disks in RAID 0 configuration instead of SSD's for OS but use a SSD as scratch disk. Well spent money for sure and your system will fly.

quickben wrote in post #11899160
I think we're getting close to being off topic here. Let's just say that the OP would be better off with a discrete graphics solution instead of an integrated one. On the basis that an integrated one will use a lot more system RAM than a discrete one will. I think you'd be hard pressed to find a discrete graphics card with less than 512mb GDDR3 these days anyway, so it's a moot point.

My advice would be:

Sandy Bridge i5-2500K (the "K" designation denotes an unlocked CPU multiplier, not a better integrated GPU)
P67 motherboard (the H67 boards don't allow overclocking)
Atleast 8Gb of fast RAM (1333mhz+)
SSD for OS and PS/LR (OCZ Vertex 2, Corsair C300, there are others)
SSD/fast HD (Samsung F3, WD Black) for ACR cache, windows page file
Large HD for storage
Virtually any contempory discrete graphics card
Windows 7 64bit (or XP 64 if you're clinging onto XP for some reason)

RAID0 is not a substitute for an SSD. SSD gives you a tiny seek time and great throughput. RAID doesn't really help seek time, but helps throughput a bit, which doesn't help LR/Bridge much.

tim wrote in post #11934658
RAID0 is not a substitute for an SSD. SSD gives you a tiny seek time and great throughput. RAID doesn't really help seek time, but helps throughput a bit, which doesn't help LR/Bridge much.

True, but I think he was referring to the cost effectiveness. SSD's are still very expensive on a Gb per £/$ basis. Two fast HD's (WD Caviar Black, Samsung F3 etc..) in RAID0 is still a good step up from one. You can get a 1Tb Samsung F3 for less than £40 in the UK at the minute.

However if you are prepared to spend a bit more, SSD's are definitely the way to go. In fact, before I even think of upgrading my CPU/m'bd/RAM, I'm going to get the following:

120Gb OCZ Vertex 2E for OS, LR+catalogue, PS
40Gb OCZ Vertex 2 for system pagefile, scratch disk, cache
x3 Samsung Spinpoint F3 in RAID0 for image storage
I already have x2 eSATA 1Tb LaCie Quadra external drives for backup duties.

All this for £165 + £85 + £120 + the cost of the Quadras (I forget how much I paid tbh). My PC will lose a bottleneck and it's good for when I upgrade to a Sandy Bridge based system.

Two thumbs up !

tim wrote in post #11934658
RAID0 is not a substitute for an SSD. SSD gives you a tiny seek time and great throughput. RAID doesn't really help seek time, but helps throughput a bit, which doesn't help LR/Bridge much.

A good raid1 implementation cuts seek times by a lot. Unfortunately what you find on typical motherboards is not a good implementation. raid5 is also fairly effective at reducing seek times and gives you most of the read throughput advantage of raid0. Write of course suffers but not much given today's fast CPUs and lame disks.

The question of a RAID versus some combo of RAID comes down to whether you are able to identify something small and decisive that you can put onto the SSD. Constantly shuffling data between a SSD and a large space will only lead to more disk waiting time and sooner or later you will fatfinger something.

How does RAID reduce seek time? You still have to move the read head on the disk.

tim wrote in post #11939722
How does RAID reduce seek time? You still have to move the read head on the disk.

A good raid1 system keeps track of where each head is and for new requests sends the one that a) isn't busy and b) is closer or c) if both are busy sends them both on paths that minimize seeks, that means each one gets assigned to one "cluster" of grouped sectors.

Think of one harddrive with two independent heads.

And keep in mind raid1 works with more than 2 disks.

Clever. I guess good is the operative word. I wonder if on mobo raid does that.