photoshop supercomputer - PC

So. I did some searching. Came up with some ideas.

Vista 64
PC box
Loads of ram
ultra fast disk access

The PC tenets of fast crunching.

64 bit OS (for the ram)
Quad core CPU
8gb ram
Mobo to support 3+ SATA ports
Two Raptor 10,000 rpm drives for pagefiles.sys and CS3 scratch disk
OS/etc on 2 500GB Seagate 7500 drives on Raid 0
Fastest DVD-r known to man for decent backups
2 basic mainstream video cards (hurry up lightroom...)

What am I missing here for ultra CS3 crunching? Any get a mac posts will be viewed as piracy and are really not needed here. Even humour. I'm serious.

Why do you need two video cards? Just curious. Also, is CS3 Vista 64-bit aware?

I think 8GB is overkill, I have 2GB with no plans to upgrade. When my work box was increased from 2GB to 4GB the gain was minimal, and that's given we actually use 3GB of RAM (software development). With that much RAM I doubt you'd need much of a page file, if any.

RAID0 - half the reliability. DVD backups - slow - use external hard drive running E-SATA.

Disks i'd have:
- One for OS and software (reasonably fast)
- One for images (or RAID)
- One for PS swap.

Don't bother with RAID unless you have a dedicated hardware raid card. Software RAID (built into the motherboard) does much better in synthetic benchmarks than it actually does in practice.

RAID 0 really isn't a great idea anyway...double the potential failure rate. RAID5 or 0+1 makes a lot more sense. I still wouldn't run RAID on an OS disk, but a nice RAID5 or 0+1 storage array would be nice.

oh yeah...and with quad core and two vid cards (which is probably overkill), you'll need a powerful and reliable power supply

then there are always cooling and overclocking options...

Nortelbert wrote in post #4051710
Also, is CS3 Vista 64-bit aware?

Not sure, but you need Vista 64 for 8 gigs of ram, and if you do a lot of multi-tasking (who doesn't) it couldn't hurt!

I'm interested in future proofing and 8GB seems enough for me when processing 17mp RAW files.

This is running Lightroom and CS3 at the same time. And yes they work with Vista 64.

RAID is a nice thing to have, the data integrity means nothing to me. I back up a lot to external drives and dvd.

here is what I would do...
windows xp 32 bit.
q6600 with a Tuniq Tower 120 Cooler overclocked to 3Ghz.
GIGABYTE GA-P35-DS4 Rev. 2.0 motherboard
2GB ram
8600 series vid card.
The new perpendicular 7200rpm drives are as fast as the old 10k drives.

So OS on a 250GB drive
Scratch and temp image store on another 250GB drive
2x 500GB drives raid 1 for storage

Put it in a Antec P182 computer case with a Thermaltake toughpower 750W Power Supply

cosworth wrote in post #4051891
RAID is a nice thing to have, the data integrity means nothing to me. I back up a lot to external drives and dvd.

Well if that's the case, onboard RAID0 should work well for you. I'd never put and OS on a RAID0 array myself (I've seen too many drives die), but if you back up a lot...no harm I suppose!

I just use 1 - 150 gig Raptor for OS & apps then have the page file + scratch in separate partitions on a 2nd 74 gig Raptor then 2 - 250 gig SATA II drives for backup and storage. Lastly another 250 gig SATA II connected via eSATA for Acronis True Image to backup to.

Make sure you get a board that supports eSATA output.

strmrdr wrote in post #4051964
here is what I would do...
windows xp 32 bit.
q6600 with a Tuniq Tower 120 Cooler overclocked to 3Ghz.
GIGABYTE GA-P35-DS4 Rev. 2.0 motherboard
2GB ram
8600 series vid card.
The new perpendicular 7200rpm drives are as fast as the old 10k drives.

So OS on a 250GB drive
Scratch and temp image store on another 250GB drive
2x 500GB drives raid 1 for storage

Put it in a Antec P182 computer case with a Thermaltake toughpower 750W Power Supply

That looks like a fun system, pretty similar to what I plan on doing. Okay mine isn't super...but it's not expensive either.

I'm looking at purcahsing the following:

windows vista 64bit (maybe).
e6750 stock (maybe upgrade to a 45nm quad in the next year or two)
GIGABYTE GA-P35-DS4 Rev. 2.0 motherboard
2GB ram
8600 series vid card.
new perpendicular 7200rpm drive
a nice power supply
some drives
a case

OK
I DO use a Mac - who cares?
If budget isnt a concern, in my experience max out the RAM - it cant hurt.
Investigate dual processors as well as multi core processors.
Ive 10+ years experience with Asus motherboards and heartily recommend them.
John

PS can only use 3gb of ram...but more ram can allow the OS to page easier.

I would say 4 would be fine...unless you work on massive files, many apps or high res...put it this way i work on 2-300mb files regularly that chew up gb's of scratch space and 4 does me fine (for the moment)...it gets slow when i start going over 500mb files (saved size) and approach 3 figures of layers on 10k and above files, but then the mac is quite old now....the new dual quads rip. On rendering times we've worked out that a dual quad is at least 10x faster than our dual xeon 2.8's.

but ram is cheap.

i would think about a mirrored raid drive for security...perhaps an external...and yep, hardware raid is far better than software raid as software uses the processor to keep it going, and using PS you want all the processing speed you can get.

Robf wrote in post #4052082
On rendering times we've worked out that a dual quad is at least 10x faster than our dual xeon 2.8's.

Wha?? 10x? According to Tom's Hardware they aren't 10x faster than a Sempron 2800+. Link

Are the Xeon's that poorly optimized for rendering? I'd have to see it to believe it. Our dual Xeon 2.8 server at work is a dog though...of course it's running have a dozen sql db's.

I would say a q6600, 4gb of DDR2, 1 raptor 150GB and 2 Seagate/WD 500GB HD, and maybe a 8800GTS for a photoshop computer.....

strmrdr wrote in post #4051964
here is what I would do...
windows xp 32 bit.
q6600 with a Tuniq Tower 120 Cooler overclocked to 3Ghz.
GIGABYTE GA-P35-DS4 Rev. 2.0 motherboard
2GB ram
8600 series vid card.
The new perpendicular 7200rpm drives are as fast as the old 10k drives.

This is slower than my current setup.