How much memory is enough?

[CMar]

Originally posted by: ProviaFan

You probably aren't using it seriously with high res images if you think 1GB is enough.

I have an Athlon 64 X2 4400+ with 2GB of RAM, and Photoshop CS2 absolutely flies with my DSLR images and medium res 35mm scans (though I'm not heavy into the manipulation aspect with tons of layers and masks). If she's doing much layering and masking on medium or large format drum scans, then without question 4GB should be chosen.

With that said, running XP64 may be a problem if she prints from the same machine that she uses for PS, because 64 bit printer drivers are basically nonexistent at this point (and Epson in particular is being bad about giving ETAs and not keeping them).

XP32 can still handle 4GB of RAM, but an individual process can only have 2GB of that (except in special circumstances). Photoshop can have 2GB to work on images directly, and the rest can be used for your other programs and/or OS disk caching to store part of the scratch file (I do not mean a RAM disk - let the OS handle the caching of the scratch disk on its own).

That is about it,

xp64 is still a year or more away from being useful in the real world.
and what ProviaFan said about memory use is correct, more than 2G can be a +, even if only 2G is used by any single aplication.

As for the video card, for 2D like photoshop, a Matrox G450 with 16MB ram will work as good or better than an SLI setup, or any more expensive option.
If you are going to do anything 3D, get a card made for 3D, if you are doing 2D graphics, get a card made for that.

 

[keldysh]

As much as you system allow OR as much as YOU can afford!

 

[l Xes l]

2gb in my rough guess

 

[Miramonti]

Originally posted by: CMar
As for the video card, for 2D like photoshop, a Matrox G450 with 16MB ram will work as good or better than an SLI setup, or any more expensive option.
If you are going to do anything 3D, get a card made for 3D, if you are doing 2D graphics, get a card made for that.

Unfortunately that's no longer the case with photoshop cs2, and at this point (until cs2 rev1 comes out or vid cards modify their drivers for cs2) a vid card with atleast 128mb seems to be valuable. But like ProviaFan said, its also seems to be hit or miss with cards that even have more than that.

 

[3chordcharlie]

Originally posted by: redhatlinux
Please, keep the topic of Memory. Real memory, virtual memory, cache memory, general purpose register memory, special purpose register memory. Each entity in the list is some form of 'MEMORY'. Memory, or S-Unit architecture is extremely comlex and itself, pipelined. I only have 1/2 gig on this system, but the 80 gig SATA, screams as a pagefile, yep, thats virtual memory, real memory, see what I mean jelly bean

'Pagefile' and 'screams' do not belong in the same sentence, unless you mean 'so slow it makes you scream in frustration'.

 

[DanDaMan315]

I would say 2gb would be sufficient for pretty much anything. And if you use more than 2 ram slots you lose some preformance, so I would just stick with 2gb. Unless you can run 4 sticks at 1T command rate.

 

[ProviaFan]

Originally posted by: 3chordcharlie

Originally posted by: redhatlinux
Please, keep the topic of Memory. Real memory, virtual memory, cache memory, general purpose register memory, special purpose register memory. Each entity in the list is some form of 'MEMORY'. Memory, or S-Unit architecture is extremely comlex and itself, pipelined. I only have 1/2 gig on this system, but the 80 gig SATA, screams as a pagefile, yep, thats virtual memory, real memory, see what I mean jelly bean

'Pagefile' and 'screams' do not belong in the same sentence, unless you mean 'so slow it makes you scream in frustration'.

Ignore that idiot. He was owned in another thread by pm (Intel employee who work(ed/s) on Itanum) after spouting some similar BS on processor caches.

Originally posted by: DanDaMan315
I would say 2gb would be sufficient for pretty much anything. And if you use more than 2 ram slots you lose some preformance, so I would just stick with 2gb. Unless you can run 4 sticks at 1T command rate.

You only lose performance if you didn't need more than 2GB to begin with. If you have more data to work on at once than will fit along with your OS and programs in 2GB, then it would be very beneficial to have 4GB with 4 slots filled, despite the supposed performance loss that only gamers would notice in benchmarks. Hitting the swap file degrades performance much, much more than running at 2T would.

 

[Scitex]

Here's a link to the Microsoft info regarding the 3 Gb switch mentioned in the Adobe article. You can add the switch to her boot.ini file in 32 bit Windows so that she can access 3 Gb of memory for apps with 4 Gb of installed RAM.

 

[Miramonti]

Originally posted by: Scitex
Here's a link to the Microsoft info regarding the 3 Gb switch mentioned in the Adobe article. You can add the switch to her boot.ini file in 32 bit Windows so that she can access 3 Gb of memory for apps with 4 Gb of installed RAM.

Interesting, thanks.

 

[Sonikku]

One side is telling me Athlon 64 is faster then the G5 and the better way to go for heavy Graphic Design. Yet the other side is telling me That as great as Athon 64 and PC's are for gaming, video encoding and heavy multi-tasking isn't so hot. Strange.

 

[cy7878]

well, if your time is money, get the fastest stuff out there and load up on max ram. all components matter and not just RAM.

 

[SickBeast]

Originally posted by: jjsole

Originally posted by: SickBeast

Originally posted by: jjsole

Originally posted by: SickBeast

Originally posted by: jjsole

Originally posted by: SickBeast

Originally posted by: jjsole
A friend who is a professional photographer needs a new computer because her current one max's out at 1gig ram.

But how much memory does she need? She uses photoshop and edits a lot of high resolution photos, so is 'the more memory the better' the case? If she had 4gb, would it benefit her much more than 2gb or 3gb in general, or only in extreme situations?

She sounds like she could use an A64x2 4200+ with 4GB of RAM. Trust me. Read Scitex's post.

4GB of RAM is actually pretty paltry considering what alot of people are doing with digital images these days. What kind of manipulation does she do?

I know that I could easily do with 6-8GB, but I do 3D Studio Max work along with Photoshop.

Which benchmarks better with photoshop cs, intel dualcore or amd dualcore?

AMD. The A64 x2 is the fastest platform available for photoshop, even beating out a dual G5 mac.

Thx. If you have a review/benchmark link or remember which site, it may become useful to have at some point.

Article 1
Article 2

It's a shame that Apple chose Intel over AMD for their CPUs. It's going to make their laptops incredible, but their desktop line will suffer as a result.

The difference between the Opteron/A64 and the G5 is pretty minimal in Photoshop though; she may still be better off with a Mac just for the other benefits.

Unfortunately he hasn't added a pentium dualcore processor to those benchmarks, as well as compared CS or CS2 instead of ps7. Is he hiding something? (j/k ) The xeons look impressive too, dual xeons would be interesting (altho no doubt expensive.)

When you consider apple's bent on branding and image, they must have figured that their machines would be 'sexier' with intel inside. AMD has a great desktop line, altho are significantly further behind intel imo in branding to the general population. Hopefully this will continue to change tho.

I tend not to question what Steve Jobs does as he is a very smart man. I'm assuming that he knows what intel has coming down the pike for 2007, and I further assume that fuel cell technology will be employed in laptops by that point. He may be focussing Apple on their laptop line and just coming up with something incredible and iPod-ish...just a revolutionary dual-cored beast with an OS so efficient that it could...well...do some crazy advanced stuff.

Not only that, but once they've gone x86, there's not much stopping them from going with AMD. I'm still somewhat surprised though, especially considering intel's lackluster 64-bit implementation, combined with the lack of an onboard memory controller. Again, maybe in 2007 things will be different.

 

[SickBeast]

Originally posted by: Sonikku
One side is telling me Athlon 64 is faster then the G5 and the better way to go for heavy Graphic Design. Yet the other side is telling me That as great as Athon 64 and PC's are for gaming, video encoding and heavy multi-tasking isn't so hot. Strange.

SMP on Windows 2000 with a couple of Celerons overclocked to 550mhz on my old Abit BP-6 were total multitasking bliss, and I have a feeling they could have gone toe to toe with anything running on a Mac.

You should also keep in mind that the P4 is unmatched in video encoding performace...at least it always *was* unmatched; I'm not sure where things stand today.

In terms of heavy multitasking, MacOS seems better at it, but an SMP PC with a ton of memory runs things very, very smoothly.

 

[CMar]

Originally posted by: Sonikku
One side is telling me Athlon 64 is faster then the G5 and the better way to go for heavy Graphic Design. Yet the other side is telling me That as great as Athon 64 and PC's are for gaming, video encoding and heavy multi-tasking isn't so hot. Strange.

I use a G5 at school and a PC at home and work
Macs are great, and they have their place just as any other system does.
For someone without the time or knowledge to build a system, the G5 about as good as you get for many things, including graphic design software.

For the price of a G5 you could build a better pc and have money left over for lunch and a keg. If you are dedicated to a major task, such as video, animation, graphic design, cad, etc, you can build a pc that will work best for your needs.

Another reason Macs get the head up in the design world is because they decided to license adobe post script, they became there standard in the industry, and any designer who spends 10 hours a day on a Mac and then tries a pc for 5 minutes will hate the PC.

Today because of open type and the RIPS used by most printers, the only reason for a designer to use a Mac is fear.

 

[boggsie]

Who could possibly use more than 640k ?!?!!?

Originally posted by: KoolDrew

Originally posted by: cockeyed
Have her run her sytem normally doing the tasks she does, then press Cntr-Alt-Del to open Task manager. Check the Performance Tab - Commit Charge to see what the Peak memory used was. It is shown in K bytes. If it stays below 1mb, she has enough memory for what she is doing or if it hits 1mb, it would be best to upgrade. The Peak memory used should determine if more is needed, so if a new mobo is installed, I would start out low and keep adding until the Peak does not max out the installed memory.

1MB?

 

[sharkeeper]

We actually found PS performance was better with a 2-4GB computer with a highly available SAN running at 10Gbps speeds. Of course a 10-40 disk array with 8-80GB of cache is going to hit the purse a little less and be just as fast. (faster actually for single users)

The comparison was done with a system with 16GB RAM for reference. Neither option is cheap!

 

[Deceiver]