"John Francis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: >> >> Yep. I'm using a 1GHz machine now. I don't fell the need for any more >> speed, really. Even for working on 90 megabyte images in Photoshop. >> >> -- >> Mark Roberts > >Most of the time Photoshop is not cpu limited. The most important >factors are: > > o Memory size. 3x - 5x overall image size is a good yardstick. > A 256Mb machine would be marginal for working with 90Mb files. > > o Disk speed. You need to read and save those images, and that > is critically dependent on how fast the disk transfers data. > Waiting for image I/O is non-productive time, too, so it has > a significant psychological impact. > > o Memory speed. Your image data won't fit in the data cache, > so memory bandwidth becomes extremely important. > >Once you've got all those taken care of is time to start thinking >of cpu speed. You'll notice this most when running complex filters >(although you will see some difference even on simple filters such >as smoothing, sharpening or resizing). For some of the most cpu- >intensive tasks Photoshop is supposedly able to make use of more >than one CPU in a multi-cpu configuration, although I haven't tried >that myself.
I'm using 512 meg of RAM and just upgraded to a faster #2 hard disk (my #1 hard disk has only the operating system - Win2k - on it; hard disk #1 has all my applications and data files). I noticed a big speed improvement with Photoshop after the upgrade. I'm going to upgrade the other hard disk soon. Interestingly, my motherboard only supports ATA 66 and my hard disks are ATA 100 and ATA 133. I may do the motherboard upgrade next. -- Mark Roberts Photography and writing www.robertstech.com
