Whats more important CPU or RAM?

I have an AMD Turion 2ghz w/ 1gig ram. If I can only upgrade one of the two, either to a duo core processor or to 2 gigs of ram, which would give me the biggest benefit in photoshop? Thanks

RAM, RAM, RAM!!

crank up as much RAM as you can. It will help you a lot.

RAM no doubt

RAM.
Disk speed
Second drive
THEN CPU

Get vista and you get to use RAM from a thumb drive to cache to. frees up RAM AND disk cycles for quicker everything.

RAM lots of it. Then get a second 7200 rpm (or greater) for the swap file. Booyah.

get 4 gigs of ram to run memory hungry vista..and raid-0 some 150 raptors and WHAMMY..you got some real horsepower.

I'll disagree with the others - the Dual Cores will give you a LOT more grunt than your aging base CPU. The dual Cores (AMD 4200) that 2 other people are using in my household are at least 2.5x as fast as my AMD 3000+ CPU. You will NOT get that sort of speed increase from RAM. If you update, you're gonna have to trash the RAM anyways I'm pretty sure, since all the new boards only take DDR2 RAM (not DDR). Update the CPU (go an Intel dual core to be honest, they're way ahead of AMD at the moment in performance). Get a gb of DDR 2 RAM, you'll be happy

Dave

edit: My AMD 3000+ is probably 50-60% faster than your old AMD CPU. The Intel Dual cores are probably 10-15% faster than the AMD ones, so adding all of that up, you'll probably see a jump around 500% in performance imho.

Gotta disagree with Dave, I went from a single core AMD to a dual core AMD 3800+ and I saw little difference with photography related tasks. Another 1GB of RAM and it made a night and day difference!

It depends whether your RAW conversion software supports multicore.. I believe C1 doesn't currently
BibblePro got a serious boost generating prevs and whole processing when I switched from Athlon XP-2800 (2.1GHz) to Core2Duo E6300 (1.86GHz).

I got a huge speed boost during CS2 RAW conversion going from 3800+ to X2 4800+, bigger than from 1GB to 2GB of RAM, but it really depends what you do with your PC.

As stated. Unless the software you are using is optimised for multicore processors, RAM will make more of a difference.

Having the scratch disk in PS set to another drive will help to.

Its probably ram, however a nice dual core processor should go along with it.

If you dont have enough ram youll be constantly paging and slowing the system down by using the hard drive to store data that needs to be in the ram rather than being paged into it.

Yet you want a faster processor to process all your images that are held in the ram. An interesting note here - i heard the inventor of Java do a talk the otherday (James Gosling) and he said that by the time im 40 machines will be around the 500 core mark. 500 cores could process those big images well

If it were RAM Vs. higher clock speeds, (and the clock speed difference wasn't like 300MHz Vs. 1.3Ghz! ) I'd say RAM,.

But RAM Vs. Dual core is a harder call.. as Dual core will be a tremendous boost to overall system performance and stability.

Still, for post processing id' say get RAM, and its certainly an easier upgrade too (and dude 1GB of RAM is only like $100.00
But really .. do both!

The jump to 2GB or even 3GB of RAM is a no brainer, it's easy and fast. Unfortunately after 3GB unless you have a 64bit OS, you can go no farther. This is when the CPU upgrade becomes the best and only step.
So grab some RAM and then look towards a Dual Core soon.

Ephemeral wrote in post #2976317
As stated. Unless the software you are using is optimised for multicore processors, RAM will make more of a difference.

Having the scratch disk in PS set to another drive will help to.

PSCS is multi-core, as are most of the good RAW processors,. RSP, C1, Bibble, Lightroom, etc..

Breezebrowser is not, and I don't remember if Canon's own DPP is..

On top of that, one does NOT need to have multi core capable apps to take advantage of Dual core processors.
The OS is multi core capable and will be able to dole out CPU threads as needed,,. so even if you run an antiquated RAW processor that can only use one CPU, it will get 100% of that CPU while the OS kernal, and other peripheral stuff work on the other CPU.

I've got this great yet old laser printer,. it does all my text printing with aplomb. On any single core system it is installed on, when I print, the whole system locks up while it sends the print job to the laser.. I can only resume work when the printer driver lets me. Faster CPU and More ram have no effect on this other than to decrease the amount of downtime. Downtime of course is also dictated by the size of the job.

Printer spool grabs 100% CPU cycles,. period.

With Multicore, you don't even notice that you sent the 30 page print job,. I can keep on working with NO impact at all, however if I open task manager, I can clearly see that print spooling has taken 100% of ONE of the CPU cores to do the task, but left the other core/cores for me to keep working unhindered. this is just one example of how multicore works to your advantage even when (and in this case because) an app is only capable of working on a single core.

What's more important... your heart or your lungs? (sorry, couldn't resist)

I think you are going to be somewhat limited in what you can do. While your motherboard probably allows you to upgrade your memory, it most likely doesn't allow you to go to a DuoCore processor. Going from 1G to 2G of memory will definitely help your Photoshop performance... as will putting the scratch disk on a dedicated SATA drive. If you are consiering DuoCore, then I think thats a totally new everything since most of the DuoCore mobos require different memory from their predecessors.