Future Proofing your Computer: one or two Quad cores on new mac pro?

The other considerations are buss speed and hard disk IO. Towers can support RAID and disks are now up to 10K in speed. One of the really cool CS developments is going to be greater reliance on the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). Paying extra for more memory on a grahics card is and getting the Nvidia Quadro 5600 with 1.5 GB GDDR3 will be key to working with images up to 2GB. Lots of RAM, fast internal disks w/RAID and a screaming graphics card is my new 4 year plan.

It will be cool, but damn there goes a decades worth of replies saying

Worse still, it's going to mean my current bargain basement Nvidia sub $100.00 card will actually be out of date..

that graphics card is a total rip, all it is is a relabled 9800GTX with a little more memory. If apple stayed current with graphics cards there would be no reason to pay that much for a card at all, unless you are some kind of rocket scientist. That said I got the 8800 GT, hoping they will write drivers for a better card this fall or winter.

As for the memory questions, yes the apple mac pro uses buffered ECC memory that much be used in matched pairs.

Moppie wrote in post #5996724
It has been proven that photoshop does use all 4 cores in a quad core machine, and performance numbers would indicate it uses all 8 in a dual quad core.
There is nothing to suggest it can't use as many as you throw at it, and the large render farms that utilise hundreds of CPUs at the same time would tend to back that idea up.

For an application to use more than 1 core, all it needs is to be running more than 1 thread of code.
When used in a good operating system, each thread will be given to a separate processor until you either run out of threads or processors.
This process is more more efficent by having dual sockets with dual bus controllers etc. It's why CDS's antiquated skynet will process the photoshop test file faster than my nice modern quadcore.

I'm not so sure it's as cut and dry as that. I was always led to believe from my super techie friend (we all have one of these, right? ) That not every set of processes can be successfully parallelised (split amongst different cores) as you'll often run into situations where one thread has to wait for the results of another thread to be passed to it, and if those threads are distributed over multiple processors where the results have to be passed through the memory subsytem, you can actually end up making things slower than if you had just queued all the processes up on the one core.

This does a much better job of saying what I'm trying to say, and also illustrates that a lot of Photoshop processes are exactly the sorts that suffer from parallelisation the way the code is currently implemented. Sure they can optimise for multiple processors, but it's not quite as simple as dividing all the threads up amonst the cores and watching everything fly.

Moppie wrote in post #5996724
CDS's antiquated skynet

God, I love thi-hi-hi-his!-hahaha!

Irreverent wrote in post #5997337
This does a much better job of saying what I'm trying to say, and also illustrates that a lot of Photoshop processes are exactly the sorts that suffer from parallelisation the way the code is currently implemented. Sure they can optimise for multiple processors, but it's not quite as simple as dividing all the threads up amonst the cores and watching everything fly.

Very good point.

I did some test last year where I turned off cores in my PC, some process to run on only 1 core, while others can take advantage of all 4. A lot of the filters for example run just as fast on a single core as they do a quad core, while anything to do with multiplying layers and changing image mode runs faster on more cores.

There are of course other things that can slow down your system.
Having only 1 hard drive will slow things down if you try and do a back up while surfing the net and working in CS3, as all that data has to come and go from only one place.

I run 4 internal SATA drives and 1 external eSATA drive, and with the quad core can happily be editing an image stored on one drive, while another drive is being indexed by Vista search, and another drive is backing up to the external drive, while a 4th drive is receiving a download from the internet.

Of course the restriction in performance then becomes the controllers and BUS. Which is where a dual chip board, with separate systems can have an advantage.
damn skynet.

I agree with the implied sentiment in this last post.

My translation of this would be - your system is only as good as your bottleneck. If you want a faster machine, establish what your bottleneck is and address it, whether it be hard drive subsystem, memory or processor. It might be something more obscure such as front side bus, but generally the bottleneck in modern systems is the drives.

For the fastest Photoshop system right now I'd look to improve on a system in this order, with the top priority first - more ram, dedicated scratch disk(s), more processors.

This thread is great at showing how apparently similar systems can perform quite differently: https://photography-on-the.net …?t=170063&highl​ight=Q6600

Same processor and RAM, but a faster scratch disk can sometimes make bigger difference than just more RAM, or faster processor.
Or sometimes twice the performance on paper, does not equal twice the processing speed, and of course as things get faster, the speed difference becomes less relevent.

When it takes 40 seconds to process an extremely over the top photoshop action that would never be used in real life, does it really matter if you can do it 5 seconds faster?
(Damn skynet,I bet it doesn't have an e-SATA connector, or a 1033mhz FSB though)

lol!

Yes hard drives are definitely important. Right now I am going to use the 320gb drive that the computer comes with as a boot disk, I ordered a 1TB drive for photo storage, and I have a 1tb drive for backup of that drive. I also am considering ordering a smaller 10k raptor drive for a scratch disk, and will probably get a second 1TB drive eventually for extra storage.

A 74gb Raptor would make a great scratch disk if you can justify the cost.

For those of you considering buying a faster processor , hard drive - sata , e-sata - whatever . Your computer buss speed is very important .
I have not kept up after firewire [I E- 4 or 8 core , sata , e-sata]
If you get a chance to hit a computer show , upgrade vendors can show you what they can do . They will also say - don't bother - get a newer used machine that will run faster .
By the way Apple sells refurbs and it will run about the same for a refurb with a 3 year warranty as a new machine with 1 year warranty .

IMHO raptors are overrated.

Re: Your system is only as fast as it's it's slowest part, AKA BOTTLENECK BLUES;

https://photography-on-the.net …php?p=5018150#p​ost5018150

In the above linked thread we established with some thorough testing that many of the so called tests that imply that an application can not use 4 cores, were in fact very flawed. The tests often show only the results of a system running into it's own built in bottle neck (usually the hard drive sub system which is dog slow compared to RAM and CPU )

So given my ordered setup. (2x 2.8 ghz cpu, 6gb ram, 320 boot/1tb storage disks, 512mb gpu) What do you think should be the first thing that would become a bottleneck?