What computer specs are you using for editing, and what do you think is needed?

Squidgy Black

I'm really starting to get into photoshop and lightroom, and going through more and more shots to make them more useable.

I'm using my old fujitsu siemens with windows vista, 1gb ram, 1.86ghz intel celeron and 80gb harddrive, and it keeps crashing or freezing up after about 5 minutes of editing.

Since I figured it's time for a replacement, what kinda spec laptops/desktops/macs are you guys using, and what kind of specs are needed in your opinion?

I think I'll pick up a second hand macbook or a high spec laptop

Nforce

Laptop:
Alienware m9750 17" WUXGA 1920x1200 resolution
ntel Core 2 Duo T7600 (2.33GHz/ 667MHz FSB/ 4MB L2 cache)
2x Nvidia GeForce Go 7950GT video cards with 512MB DDR3 each (1024MB total) – SLI enabled
4GB DDR2-667mhz RAM
2x 500GB 7200rpm HDD
BluRay player/CD/DVD writer
Intel PRO/Wireless 4965AGN WLAN
Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate 32bit
Adobe Photoshop CS5 and plugins
Adobe Lightroom 3

Desktop:
Lian Li V1010 black pc case
Intel QX9770 3.2ghz Extreme processor (overclocked to 4.2ghz)
Tuniq Tower cooler
Evga 790i Ultra motherboard
8GB of OCZ 2000mhz DDR3 memory
2x Samsung 64GB SSD hard drives
2x Samsung F1 1tb hard drives
2x Hitachi 500GB hard drives
Thermaltake 1.2kw PSU
Nvidia 285GTX 1GB graphics
Microsoft Windows 7 Ultimate 64bit
Dell 3008WFP monitor

Squidgy Black

they're some machines Nforce :eek:

would you choose a good graphics card over a higher clock speed, or vice-versa?

Nforce

I'd recommend a decent cpu and as much (fast) memory as your system will allow.....very important when running photoshop filters.

Heebie

I use a several-year-old model Macbook Pro 15", with a dual-core 2.4Ghz CPU and 4G of RAM. It's reasonably fast with Lightroom & Photoshop CS5, but no monster.
It's quite acceptable, and certainly doesn't "freeze up"

If your computer is freezing up, it probably has crappy video drivers that Photoshop pushes hard against. (Do you find that games like to freeze too?)

The question of how much CPU horsepower and RAM you want to throw at Photoshop comes down to two things:

1.> How slow is acceptable to you.
2.> How much money do you have to spend.

If you're rich.. a serious PC-gaming rig with lots of fast CPU cores and tons of RAM, and fast SAS hard-disk space. Be prepared to spend thousands. You could also go with something in the Mac Pro desktop line, but I've heard that they don't offer one with a video card that cooperates well with the GPU-enabled features of Photoshop.

If you're like the rest of us, spec out a reasonable laptop, either a Macbook line, or something in the PC line running Windows 7 (I'd recommend "Ultimate Edition". it's more flexible with filesystems used for external drives and such., if you're going for a PC..and you will get more "bang for your buck" from a PC. Also, if you get a PC-, you should go for the 64-bit version of Windows 7, which may cause some games not to run right.. but it makes a HUGE difference when working with large image files and such.)

The more RAM you throw at the machine, the larger the images you'll be able to work with without noticeable slowdown due to the image size. The more CPU cycles you throw at it, the quicker transformational things will happen, and it is possible to shop around for the best GPU performance within Photoshop as well, which can further speed things up.
I know that with nVidia-based Mac hardware, Photoshop will offload a fair bit of the computing on the GPU, which is why my Macbook is pretty quick at running Photoshop. I have heard other say that similar hardware running on a PC with Windows will also benefit from this within Photoshop, but I have never seen evidence of this in any documentation from Apple, so I'm skeptical. Other have also said that pretty much any video card with a good OpenGL implementation should work, but again, I've never seen any documentation from Apple that suggests the hardware acceleration in Photoshop works through any abstraction layer such as OpenGL, but instead directly accesses the hardware..which would make it very specific to a hardware platform. Before basing a decision on which platform & hardware to use based on the GPU acceleration, be sure to research it, or you might find yourself greatly disappointed.

Another thing to think about if you're getting hardware, is some sort of color-control. Macbooks (and other Mac hardware) tend to have pretty tight tolerances for color in their manufacture.. I cannot say as much for most other laptop/notebook manufacturers. I have several Dell monitors at my disposal for work..and all of them have drastically different color from each other. If you can get something to at least color-profile your screen, I would. (I have a ColorMunki, which can do directly attached printers as well as the screen and even projectors. There are versions of the Spyder series that will do the same I think, and there are things like the i1 line which can color-profile monitors, scanners, printers, cameras etc.. The screen-only Spyder items tend to be the lowest-priced ones I'd trust, the ColorMunki is a little more, and the i1's are a lot more depending on what you get for licenses to be able to do.)

It's really hard to advise you an further than that without at least knowing your budget etc.., but for something that's actually "good" at editing photos.. you're probably going to spend a couple of grand. You can get away with a lot less if you don't mind everything taking longer.. and you still have to think about the software.. neither Photoshop nor Lightroom is free or cheap.. but they are well worth paying for if you use them, as they are really fantastic tools. (There are similar free products to both.. but they're definitely not up to the same level of maturity or usability.. at least not yet.)

One more tip.. avoid machines that say they have celery.. uhm... I mean a Celeron in them. Celeron = half-crippled Intel CPU = slow as dirt. (This has mainly to do with how much on-die cache RAM there is in the CPU itself... the CPU doesn't deal directly with RAM in the machine.. it copies bits of RAM into the cache, then copies them back out to RAM when done.. there are actually several layers.. CPU <> Level 1 cache <> Level 2 cache <> RAM with bits moving in & out of all of those all the time.. the bigger the level 1 & level 2 caches are, the less time the CPU spends waiting for RAM to be swapped in & out of the CPU in order to do processing work on it. The "extreme" editions of CPU's tend to have double the normal cache on them.) so remember... no celery!

Squidgy Black

My budget's in and around 500 max, I'm broke after upgrading my camera and I'm quite unlucky on the employment front at the moment

I don't really mind a slight delay in things, like even 15-20 seconds for images or effects to load is great, just not 3-5 minutes like it is now, and then the program crashing.

I was looking at some older macbooks, the specs would be roughly 2gb RAM, 2ghz core duo, where as the pc equivalent would be 3gb and a 2.2ghz dual core for the same price.

Heebie

You should definitely end up buying any software you use regularly.

If you don't mind delay, then don't worry about that too much.
The specs sound good on both of those.. although I'd make sure the PC isn't a pair of celery stalks, and is instead a real core duo.

I would, if I were looking, be considering also what the maximum RAM you can upgrade the machine to.. as you will get sick & tired of having only 2G pretty quickly. I'd love to bump my Mac up to 8G of RAM.

drunkmonkey

Keep an eye on adverts and eBay, u might pick up mac book pro with some software not a million miles from your budget.

I'm using a 13'mbp and external 20inch cinema display, no complaints it's plenty quick for my needs.

Kbeg3

27" iMac 2.8Ghz Intel Core i7, 8Gb RAM and 1TB harddrive

Squidgy Black

http://www.currys.ie/Product/HP-G62b26SA-White/305008/148

That's the pc I've been considering.

I've been offered a macbook pro for under 500 euro, but it has no battery and there's some dead pixels on the screen which really renders it useless for me.

I'm constantly watching adverts like a hawk to see if something pops up :rolleyes:

gsxr1

i run photoshop quite well on a 1.6 core duo with 3g of ram. the vaio laptop is 5 years old now.

some filters take a few seconds to apply .

I cant see any reason to upgrade. tis grand.

Heebie

This is a good attitude. I don't have any plans to replace my Macbook even though it's nearly 3 years old now... it works grand.. so if you're not bugged by things not being "instant".. just get something with a good, supported graphics card, NOT a celery stalk (Celeron) and as much RAM as you can stand buying, and it'll work fantastic.

gsxr1 wrote: »

I cant see any reason to upgrade. tis grand.

ED E

Once you're at 2Ghz Dual or higher, 4GB you're fine really. A 5-10 second delay for filters is no big deal if its only amateur work your doing.

gsxr1

sure all ye need is a big cup of tea to sip on while your waiting:D
And maybe a biscuit.

melekalikimaka

macbook pro 13", 4gb ram, thought it was grand til I started using fcp, considering doubling ram now, cheap as chips these days

woody_2000

You could, if possible, try putting some extra RAM into your current computer to see how it might work with the Adobe software you're trying to run... Next, L2 cache memory on a Celeron might not be the best for the task - as sufficient cache is always important for any kind of use beyond a more basic computing level. L2 cache, from my experience, is also quite good for multitasking and such - as is hyperthreading (which makes spare CPU capacity available to run a second thread - a virtual CPU core)... The latest Intel Core i3 dual core processors, for example, might be worth considering if considering a new laptop as they have hyperthreading and also an integrated memory controller (which replaces the mainboard's northbridge chip for more direct and efficient communication between the CPU and main memory. This is quite new for Intel, and AMD have been doing it for years). So the next consideration would possibly be your overall CPU specification - i.e. L2 cache, CPU clock speed (in Ghz), number of cores/threads, integrated memory controller, and such... Photoshop, I believe, can use multiple threads - but I'm not sure how many... Following this you then have one of the latest buzzes in personal computing, including Photoshop - namely GPGPU computing (General-Purpose computing on Graphics Processing Units)... GPGPU computing essentially leverages the extra, and very powerful, floating point resources already available on a computer's GPU, as general floating point performance is already very important for the latest 3D games and applications... This should, effectively, greatly extend the usual floating point computing capability of your average CPU. The two main graphics companies, nVidia and ATI/AMD, already have their own GPGPU platforms publicly available - i.e. nVidia CUDA and ATI Stream... The latest versions of Photoshop apparently already utilises CUDA to some extent, but I'm not sure about Stream... There is also OpenCL (Open Computing Language) which is an open cross platform standard which applies to GPGPU computing also. So, the next thing to do is to check the compatibility of a particular GPU with GPGPU functionality... Once it's one of the more recent nVidia or ATI offerings, for example, then GPGPU functionality should possibly be a given...

So, my guess would be, depending on your particular usage and budget, your hardware priorities might be in the following order:

1. RAM
2. L2 cache
3. CPU clock speed
4. Other CPU specs such as number of cores/threads, hyperthreading, integrated memory controller, etc...
5. GPGPU capability/compatibility

Then you have other considerations such as screen size and resolution, etc... For something like Photoshop or Lightroom, a higher resolution might be preferable - such as that available by default with your typical 17" laptop... Nowadays, a budget of approx. €500, or so, I imagine, is not an unrealistic budget to get something quite usable for reasonable general purpose image processing usage... Where time and accumulated seconds/minutes might count for professional usage, within relatively limited time constraints, then the extra cost of a more powerful machine might obviously be more justifiable - but there shouldn't be any need to worry about breaking the bank if this is clearly not the case... And again, nowadays, digital photography on a budget is not necessarily a bad thing - and there are a lot of relatively good quality and viable options available at the lower price points... Cheaper options can give you more options, and allow you to get more of what you really need

Squidgy Black

Woaaaaaah woody, that just sounded like somebody was speaking mandarin :eek:

So would a Dual-core AMD Athlon™ II X2 P340 (2.2 GHz) and 3gb RAM with 64bit windows and an ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 4250 Graphics Card be good enough?

woody_2000

stetyrrell wrote: »

Woaaaaaah woody, that just sounded like somebody was speaking mandarin :eek:

So would a Dual-core AMD Athlon™ II X2 P340 (2.2 GHz) and 3gb RAM with 64bit windows and an ATI Mobility Radeon™ HD 4250 Graphics Card be good enough?

I was just trying to give some sort of an understandable/tangible perspective on the matter...:)

I think the spec. looks fine, and should run Photoshop ok. You've got two cores/threads, a reasonable CPU clock speed / L2 cache with an integrated memory controller (I think the memory controller is referenced with Hypertransport in this case - what Intel calls DMI, I think). The integrated memory controller could also possibly reduce the dependency on L2 cache, as there is a faster and more efficient connection with main memory. 3GB of RAM should be ok. The ATI GPU might allow for the GPGPU computing I mentioned with Photoshop at some stage, if it is not already currently the case - I'm not sure... Even without GPGPU compatibility with Photoshop, it should be fine.

The only thing I would look at, or consider, is the screen resolution. Is the approx. 1MP (1366 x 768) resolution of the laptop you linked to sufficient for your Photoshop usage - or would you need a higher resolution or screen size? That's the only thing I would think about, depending on what you usage requirements might be...

Heebie

My Macbook Pro maxes out at 4G

melekalikimaka wrote: »

macbook pro 13", 4gb ram, thought it was grand til I started using fcp, considering doubling ram now, cheap as chips these days

Squidgy Black

I'll only be using it for amateur use, just for my personal edits for my portfolio I'm working on, and the odd gig shoot or whatever, so mediocre screen resolution and small loading delays are absolutely fine with me, once it's stable, relatively fast (15-20 second delay compared to 3-4 minutes at the moment :O ) and can handle loading multiple RAW files with ease, and runs Photoshop and lightroom simultaneously with ease. I was offered a MacBook pro with a few dead pixels on the screen near the bottom, dead battery, with 2gb RAM and 2.2ghz CPU speed, but I think I'll go with the Hp as the MacBooks in bad nick and won't last long I reckon. Now to start saving :rolleyes:

woody_2000

The basic hardware platform of the HP should be fairly solid for your purposes, and if the screen resolution is acceptable then it should be ok. Be sure to check out compatibility with ATI's GPGPU functionality - as this could mean a further performance boost. Stream/OpenCL should already be included with the latest ATI Catalyst driver software... Best of Luck!