Rob has hit the nail on the head here. The largest bottleneck in any system is the storage system (i.e. hard drive). Getting data on and off your hard drive will slow any system down. I run 7200 rpm Seagate Barracudas with 8mb buffers. These are about the fastest parallel IDE (ATA) drives around. Newer serial ATA drives will run quicker, but not significantly.
The upside of this is that your system will be strangled by the HDD read/write times no matter what you do. I run a 3 year old Athlon over-clocked to run at 1.63 GHz with 512mb RAM, with 2 HDD. The second HDD is used as a scratch disk for PS. It flies through PS without any dramas. I am using PS CS. HTH Cheers Shaun Dr. Shaun Canning Cultural Heritage Services 11 Lawrence Way Karratha, Western Australia, 6714 0414-967644 [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.heritageservices.com.au -----Original Message----- From: Rob Studdert [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, 21 November 2004 6:34 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Very OT: Upgrading computer for digital On 20 Nov 2004 at 16:12, Paul Stenquist wrote: > My point is that it's not extra cost with a Mac. All of the Mac desktop > G5s are 64 bit. Pity none of the mainstream applications are. In any case it's more a marketing tool than a real life performance issue. For some time most computer systems have had 64bit wide data busses and even though the processors only chomp away at 32bit data they are so much faster than the data busses that it makes little difference. For instance my system has a 64bit wide external memory bus manages a sustained 2.8GB/s across it's memory sub-systems but the speed between the CPU and it's intimate on-board cache RAM it manages 28GB/s. Then you have to consider NV storage speeds which are currently met by essentially magneto- mechanical devices, the fastest of which are many magnetudes slower than the slowest of modern data busses. Rob Studdert HURSTVILLE AUSTRALIA Tel +61-2-9554-4110 UTC(GMT) +10 Hours [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://members.ozemail.com.au/~distudio/publications/ Pentax user since 1986, PDMLer since 1998
