Alastair Robertson wrote:
thanks for the great info re a suitable monitor(s) for the workstation. Now, how about the CPU, RAM, graphics card etc? I am sure that bigger, faster etc is always better but what makes a sensible tradeoff between features and price?
For most of what you're doing with photographs, more and/or faster memory, and faster disk drives tend to help more than a couple of hundred MHz of CPU clock speed.
The more advanced tools, like Photoshop, /can/ make use of additional CPU cores. I don't know exactly how much leverage you actually get from this in real-world circumstances since I've never actually tested it. Since those operations on photos still have to process a lot of memory, and all of the cores share the same memory bus (and often caches, etc.), you're probably not going to see a linear increase in throughput with additional cores. Adding cores helps most when the algorithms in question operate on limited amounts of data so that memory (bus) contention doesn't come into play.
So, when I built my new machine about a year ago, I opted for a dual core rather than a quad core, but I got a motherboard that could handle the fastest memory that was economical at the time (PC2 8500), 4GB of that memory, and a RAID 0+1 disk subsystem (4 drives, stripes and mirrors). Saved a bunch of memory and lost relatively little performance for the money I saved.
The other thing to consider is that the makers of tools like Photoshop are adding in the ability to make use of the advanced features of 3D (gaming) video cards to speed up things like filters and unsharp mask. I saw a couple of articles this week about that sort of stuff being added to Photoshop for CS4. I don't know any more detail than that right now, but they claim it's fast enough on at least some hardware to do real-time, interactive zooming and filtering. So, even if you're not going to play games on the machine, it may make sense to spend a little more on the video card to get the photo tool acceleration.
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