photo computers: dual core, dual cpu, or single?

I'm looking at upgrading my computer system to handle my
digital photo work. I run photoshop cs2 plus other applications.
In looking at computers, I see a lot of dual cpu and dual core
(perhaps even two dual-core cpus). My question for digital
photo work is: is there a processing advantage in photoshop
with dual cpu systems (besides the obvious like running
another application with minimal speed loss)?

In general, I do large format photography (600 mbyte to 2 gbyte
image files), and am starting to do digital mosaicking
(I did about a 100 frame 8-mpixel/frame mosaic in Hawaii
last week). I'll be getting a system with minimum 2 gbytes
ram, expandable to at least 4, with drive slots for minimum
four 500-gbyte sata II drives.

Any experience with fast performing systems would be appreciated.
E.g. I'm looking at alienware computers at the moment.

Roger
Photos at: http://www.clarkvision.com

 

The truth is that right now there is not much significant difference between
running CS2 on a fast single core or fast dual core processor even though
some CS2 processes are said to be dual threaded. I base that on my personal
experience processing image files up to 100mbs in size on fast single core
AMD and Pentium systems and a very fast AMD dual core machine. The dual core
machine may be slightly faster but not overwhelmingly so.
However the future may bring more dual threaded programs, CS3?, so it makes
little sense to purchase a single core machine for high end work.
If you are getting 2 gbs of RAM motherboards of all ilk tend to run more
stably with two 1gb sticks rather than 4 512mb sticks.

 

In general, I do large format photography (600 mbyte to 2 gbyte

Definitely dual-core. Lots of areas of CS2 will take advantage of it. My
workstation has dual dual-cores (that's four cores), and I can often watch
CS2 max out all four cores on heavy operations.

Besides, with dual cores getting as cheap as they are (you can get into
one for as little as $130 now), you might as well. And they'll be more
responsive under load.

If your images are that large, consider getting a motherboard with LOTS of
memory slots. CS3 will reputedly be 64-bit, and will take advantage of all
the ram you can give it. If you're working with 2-gig images, then 4 gigs
of memory would be an absolute *minimum*, and 8 would not at all be too
much. After all, that's only what - two history states, after the other
various functions of photoshop?

steve

 

What are you running now? I'm asking since it might not be worth upgrading.
It's best to look at you I/O and see if that might give you the best bang
for your buck.

Yes, we use dual Xeons and they do show a good boost in performance.

Most performance hits and bottlenecks are with the disk I/O. Get yourself a
good RAID setup with some fast drives. SATA or SCSI will do fine. I'm
partial to SCSI since they have much better performance and reliability over
SATA.

You're better off building your own. If you want a motherboards or prebuilt
you might want to look at www.supermicro.com. Their systems and MBs are
rock solid and bulletproof.







Rita

 

If you are getting 2 gbs of RAM motherboards of all ilk tend to run more

Only if you're talking about cheaply-made motherboards. When you get into
motherboards of decent quality, it doesn't matter how many DIMMs you stick
in them, they still work just fine. Of course, they do cost more than the
$100 boards you see at the local computer shop. Wait until your motherboard
has 32 memory slots.

steve

 

I have a del 8200: 1.8 GHz Pentium 4 with 2 300 GByte ide drives
and 2 GBytes ram. The problem is it is usb 1 only, I also have firewire.

I need to run more than two disk drives, so I need a bigger
enclosure to hold more drives. I find usb 2 too slow for this to
use external drives. Sata II is 3 gbytes/second and has very good
performance, better than scsi (on paper--is this true in practice?).

I agree about scsi performance but 500 gbyte scsi drives do not
exist and the large capacity scsi disks are a scam price wise
(many times ide or sata).

I run raid systems at work (about 14 terabytes) and am considering it
for home. But raid must be backed up too. We had one raid
box failure: a fan stopped working and cooked 14 250-gbyte
drives over a weekend. All data were lost. Fortunately it
was backed up onto another raid array in another building.

My plan is 500 gbyte sata 2 drives backed up by 500 gbyte
usb 2/firewire drives (multiple drives that get rotated).
Currently I back up using 3 sets of usb disk drives that
I rotate. A seventh usb drive is also attached to the system
for real time backup. I believe offline backup is safer.

I find ide performance adequate for my needs (it has not been
an issue on my current system). Reading gbyte images is plenty
fast. My main issues are disk storage, a faster cpu that can
use more memory, and faster usb. I also want my current 1.8 GHz
system for a linux box.

I'm open to doing this. Having never done it I am in the dark
as to what to choose. Is there some recommendations listed
somewhere that is current? I'm after good performance, but not
state of the art (you pay too much for state of the art that
just gets surpassed in a few months anyway).

Thanks for the help,

Roger

 

Anything as long is it isn't Apple and hasn't got an Intel chip in it.
For motion images, Hollywood studios use AMD machines now almost
exclusively.
See the May (I think) issue of P.C. Magazine.

 

Really. I figure one needs _four_ fast internal drives for heavy duty
Photoshopping.

0: OS + other software
1: OS swapping drive
2: Photoshop swapping drive
3: User data

I suppose 0 and 3 could be on the same drive, but on-demand loading of
binaries could interfere with user data reads and writes. (I prefer to keep
user data on a separate drive from the system for other reasons, so I need
(but don't have) all four.)

I have two internal 60GB Sata internal drives and just got a Maxtor 200GB
USB 2 drive.

Nbench gives 49 and 36 MB/sec (write/read) for the Sata and 20 and 23 for
the Maxtor. Althouth that is a nasty hit, it's still livable. (That's for
100 MB test files.)

You're a better man than I. (I backup to DVD+R and keep my photo archive on
the 200GB drive.)

I've looked into building my own, but ordering from Dell has always been
easier. However, getting off the beaten track (e.g. wanting four fast
internal drives) is usually not possible.

By the way, we've been stuck at 3Ghz for three years now, and there are some
pundits* who claim this is all we're getting for the foreseeable future, and
that multiple CPUs is the only way to go. Since I buy into that theory**,
IMHO, if you want something that will stay close to the bleeding edge for
the mid-term, you want at least dual CPUs. Of course, in the short term,
most current software probably doesn't make best use of dual CPUs so it may
be a wasted expense in the near term. (My PC is a 3GHz/2GB two-year old
antique.)

*: http://www.gotw.ca/publications/concurrency-ddj.htm

**: I even _like_ the theory. I really hate it when lazy software developers
claim that efficiency doesn't matter since computers are always getting
faster, and would like to see people spending more time thinking about
computing smarter rather than computing with more bells and whistles.

David J. Littleboy
Tokyo, Japan

 

Photoshop can use multiple CPUs for many tasks.

I don't know about Windows, but MacOS X and Linux will run much faster
with lots of RAM. I'd go with about 5 to 12 GB of RAM. Even if you
only have a 32 bit application (4GB limit), the OS can use the rest for
file caches. Photoshop could be swapping image chunks to its temp file
to avoid its 4GB limit but the OS will cache its temp file in the
remaining RAM.

 

Since M$ new OS (Vista) will be out within a year (supposedly) you might
want to check the recent info from M$ about minimum hardware requirements.

*** ***

 

Those were awful CPU's with limited memory bandwidth using the chipsets
available then. P4's are memory bandwidth hungry. And is that is an early
DDR ram system rather than a rambus one? Those early DDR system were
pathetic as far as performance.

SCSI drives are faster but are smaller unless you spend $$$$ Forget the
SATAII spec, that's just the interface, not the drive throughput which is
what really matters.

The 10,000RPM raptor drives might make sense as a scratch disk? I've been
tempted to try one.

That's what I did. I had a 2.4/533 single channel ram system and upgraded to
a 3.0/800 dual channel DDR system and use the old one running linux for
internet use. The difference in performance in the dual channel ram with
the faster bus was substantial with a P4 system.

 

I need to run more than two disk drives, so I need a bigger

No. Even if SATA II can theoretically get 3 gb/s over the bus, the disks
can't read or write anywhere near that much.

In a single-stream, sequential-read or sequential-write operation, it
might be a tossup between a good SATA drive and a SCSI. But when it comes
to things that count (like latency and number of I/Os per second), SCSI wins
hands-down. The WD Raptors come close, but don't take it.

However, when it comes to most desktop usage, the performance benefit
isn't worth the cost, especially not for a "data" drive, where you're simply
going to store a few hundred gigs of image files, and will occasionally read
one, then some time later, write it back out to disk. You could look at
using them for swap and Photoshop scratch disks, but unless you've hit
motherboard or OS limitations, your money will be better spent just adding
more RAM to keep from using swap or scratch.

That sounds like a very good plan. Lately I've been using a few of these
drives at work:

http://www.newegg.com/product/product.asp?item=N82E16822144019

For rotated backups like you mention. They're fast-fast-fast. In fact,
unless you're using Firewire "B" (1394b), you're not using the full
capability of the drives, so pick up a 1394b card while you're at it. I got
some relatively cheap 64-bit PCI-X cards, and these drives will *write* at
up to 60 MB/sec for me. USB 2 doesn't even quite provide that much
theoretical bandwidth, and will fall far short in real-world bandwidth.

If you need LOTS of ram, consider a dual-CPU motherboard, with 8 or more
memory slots. =)

steve

 

You certainly need a faster processor, and I would recommend a board
with both the USB 2 and Firewire ports in order to maximize flexibility
on what can be attached. As for dual core processors, they are used by
only certain software, so don't expect great gains at this time, but
they should be a good investment in the future. While I bought a 64 bit
processor machine, and it certainly faster than my old machine, the
speed is only really obvious in certain applications, such as Photoshop
Elements. Everything does run faster (partly due to the faster SATA
drive), but it isn't dramatic.

 

A bit old and slow, but worth saving by getting a $10 USB2 card.

A basic rule:

SATA= Cheap storage

SCSI= High performance and reliability

For many budget minded home applications SATA will squeak by and offer a bit
of performance.

Was that a SATA array? Most arrays have redundant fans and warning systems
(alarm) for fan failure and thermal problems.

I backup to U320 SCSI drives.

If you find IDE performance adequate you probably will be disappointed with
any CPU/memory upgrades.

The key is to buy into something that doesn't have dead-ended technology in
sight. A couple extra dollars now will save loads for years down the road.
Any E7525 chipset board that Supermicro has will fill your needs. I like
the X6DA8-G since it covers all basic needs except SAS. Just pick out the
one that bests suites your needs.

http://www.supermicro.com/products/motherboard/Xeon800/?chp=E7525

Throw that in an SC742 case and you'll be set. I use the 742 and it is the
best case made for a performance workstation

http://www.supermicro.com/products/chassis/4U/742/SC742S-500.cfm

They make SATA and SCSI versions of this case.







Rita

 

I just rebuilt my computer with parts that should relate to your
situation.

I had a P4 3.2 GHz Prescott processor that started getting flaky on me.
OK, it might have been the motherboard, but both had to go anyway. This
is a computer I had built myself.

I got an AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ with an MSI K8N Neo4 Platinum
motherboard. Since you can't get AGP slots on motherboards any more (at
this level), I also got a new Asus/ATI X550 video card. That is more
than enough for Photoshop CS2, my one 3D game, and probably Vista too.
I used the same dual channel DDR400 memory in 512 MB chunks; 2 GB
total. I had to upgrade my power supply too, but kept my same hard
disks: a 7200 rpm, 120 GB Seagate and a WD Raptor 10K rpm with 37 GB. I
use the fast Raptor only for XP Pro's pagefile and for Photoshop's
scratch drive; it really does make a difference.

This computer is significantly faster than my old configuration in
everything, but particularly in Photoshop. I don't have any good
numbers for it, because the old setup was flaky and not good for
getting numbers. I have many CS2 actions where I used to spend many
long minutes twiddling my thumbs while I waited for it to finish. Now,
I have no time for multitasking on or off the computer. Tis a shame too
as this setup can really do multiple things at once great.

I see CS2 using both cores in my X2 a lot. I won't use both of them for
everything, but the stuff that can really use it, it does. Dual core is
very much a good idea for Photoshop work right now. It really flies
with it. It will only get better in future versions. The future in
high-end desktop computers is 64 bit and multiple processors. Don't buy
anything less today. Luckily some of that future is now and makes it
worth buying that now.

I keep reading that people think that Photoshop is bottlenecked by hard
disk speed. Frankly, I don't see it. In rebuilding my computer, my
memory and hard disks stayed the same. I changed the processor and mobo
and got a huge improvement real world speed. If HD and RAM were the
bottlenecks, this shouldn't have happened.

I could be wrong, but it seems like the most critical thing for CS2
speed is the processor. At least my experience seems to be pointing
that way. Now I may have picked up some added performance because my
memory is now managed on the processor instead of outside of it, but
that shouldn't have affected the HD speed at all. Besides, my memory is
running at the same speed as before.

Buy the fastest AMD 64 X2 processor you can afford. Get a good mobo to
put it on. Get at least 2 GB of memory. Windows XP can partially use 4
GB, but the apps can't use more than 2 GB of that. (Windows 64 can use
a lot more.) Get a WD Raptor for your pagefile and Photoshop scratch
disk. Then you will have a very fast Photoshop computer.

BTW, if you fill up all 4 memory slots in the motherboard, AMD 64
processors will cut the speed of your DDR400 memory down to 333 MHz.
They will also drop your timing down to T2, but that isn't very much of
a hit. This is all to AMD specs, but I don't really know the reasons.
It may be because these processors are so nice and easy to overclock.

I have overclocked my X2 to 2.4 GHz (from 2.0 GHz). It is 100% stable
and significantly faster. It now runs at the 4800+ level. Overclocking
to this level also raised the FSB speed to push my memory back to the
400 MHz speed. Still no noticable bottleneck on HD speed.

Another advantage to the AMD 64 series is that is uses way less power
and runs much cooler than my old P4. I have a much smaller heatsink/fan
on this X2 and it is running at 32 C for light use - like typing this.
That old Prescott is noted for high heat, as are most Intel chips
today, but it cruised in the mid 40s. Any kind of work at all would
send it in to the lower 50s. When my heatsink got dusty, I would
regularly hear the alarm at 57 C. When I pound both cores with Prime95
now, it sits at a nice comfortable 44 C with the alarm defaulting to 60
C.

Thanks,
Clyde

 

Apparently Vista will use a new mechanism for booting, instead of the
BIOS that has been around for nearly forever. The chances of any
motherboard you buy today booting Vista flawlessly are likely to be
small. So, if you want Vista compatibility for sure, wait a year.

Or buy a machine now, and realize that it will still be useful running
XP for at least a few years.

Dave

 

You mean EFI? I was under the impression that Vista wouldn't require
(or support) EFI, at least not initially. For EFI-based machines (the
Intel Macs, and I'm not sure what else), booting into Windows XP requires
a BIOS-emulation layer on top of the EFI layer, and booting into Vista
will probably be similar.

A quick Google found this:

http://www.apcmag.com/apc/v3.nsf/0/E666E4A0A303D9AACA25712C008166C4

"Speaking at Intel Developer Forum San Francisco, Microsoft development
manager, Andrew Ritz, also revealed that there will never be any support
for booting Windows via EFI on systems with 32-bit processors.

Although Microsoft has previously said EFI booting would be supported by
Vista, Ritz admitted that EFI support won't be seen in any version of
Windows until the release of Longhorn Server."

-dms

 

I believe you are confusing OS/X and Vista. There is no indication that
Vista will require any new boot mechanism, although Microsoft may have
tacked on support for the one used on the Mactels, which do use a different
boot mechanism from PCs.

Vista has run reasonably well on every machine on which I've tried it--not
perfectly, it _is_ beta after all, but there don't seem to have been any
hardware issues.

 

I have an HP xw6200 workstation with dual 3.6MHz Xeon CPUs and 5GB
RAM (2GBx2 + 2x512MB because in Canada - and only in Canada, I don't
know why - HP will not sell the XW6200 without the two 512's.) I
have hyper threading turned on. I run CS2. Maybe I've just gotten
used to the speed because sometimes I still think certain actions
happen too slowly in CS2. It's no problem having lots of
applications open at the same time, however. If you want a good
system, I think you ought to go with more than 2GB RAM. I also
suggest dual monitors. I have dual 23" HP L2335's and would never go
back to one; esp. when using PS.

 

I am working with big files in Photoshop CS1 every day. Files as large
as 600 MB with 16 layers.
I run Windows XP 64 bit Edition. 2 Xeon Supermicro Motherboard, 12 GB
RAM. 1X 73 GB SCSI
HD for the OS, 1 Raptor for the swap file, 8 Raptor 73GB connected to
PCI-X Broadcom card. One partition of 100GB in Raid 0, and one
partition of 340 GB in Raid 5 for the PS files.How it's work ?
I left 1 GB for the OS, i give 1,8 GB for PS, and 9,2 GB for a RAM
DISK. This one will be the first scratch disk in PS the second is the
partition of 100GB of 8 Raptor in Raid 0. In fact with really big
files, the more RAM you have and the more fast are your scratch disk is
the good way. With this system, 60% of my work is using only the scatch
disk made of RAM. Incredibly FAST !