new computer for photoshop

A lot has been said about Windows and RAM, not all necessarily true. (I wish that people who don't have the full knowledge would refrain from making statements).

Fact is that Windows XP is limited to 3 GByte of RAM. Any extra RAM would just sit there unused. Windows 7 does not have this limitation.

It is also a fact that I have 4 GByte RAM in my machine running Windows 7, and after starting Photoshop Elements 8 Organizer + loading a 7 MByte image file into the Editor, I have still nearly 2 GByte of free memory available.

So the most important statement from the discussion is to find what is good enough for you, and be satisfied with that. There is no point in spending lots of money on upgrades just to gain a few milliseconds in processing time. Keep cool

terje-1 wrote
Well, none of my main machines have that much RAM. In fact, all of them have only got just 1GB each (2.4ghz PC, 1.8ghz laptop, 450mhz Apple laptop, 400mhz Apple G4, and they all seem to cope with whatever I want to do.
Loading a Hi-quality .jpg into Photoshop 6 on the PC will leave me with around .5GB free - but then I could load that file before I upped the RAM by 50% to that whole 1GB (and never really noticed that it was slow).
Having said that, I am not into batch processing, I hardly ever have more than one .jpg or RAW open at once, and I spend more time thinking about what I am doing than actually doing it. The same goes for writing. The relevant expression seems to be "Your gas mileage may vary"
As a small digression:
Back when the computer comics (sorry, magazines) were telling their readers that the entry level machine was a 66mhz DX-2 486, over 60% of the machines in use in the USA were only 286s. The bulk of the US military did not change until Win98 made it neccessary.
Remember: If it works for you, then you have enough (that's why some airlines can still get by with 45 year old 747s).
Geoff

Hi!

After reading terje-l:s text, I decided to find out what is the reality as some experts see it. It seems that I made an error saying that 32 bit Windows can't use more than about 3,5 gig of RAM. Although Microsoft doesn't want us to do this, I read that by using some trick, it is indeed possible for Windows Vista and Seven to use more than 4 gigs of RAM link link. I don't recommend anybody to try this though, because there might be problems as a result and I don't want to be blamed for them. Also after reading some more I became more convinced that using more than 4 gigs of RAM is probably useful only in 'special' occasions, although my text may have been misleading in my previous post.

Still getting 8 gigs of RAM now is a good idea if money is no object or the intented PC has, like I said earlier, severe space limitations, which may make it harder to upgrade later, unless you take it to the dealer to handle, which might cost some money or not depending on the dealer. Or if you want to do also more taxing things than just photo editing. Also a dualcore is probably fast enough for Photoshop, though I haven't tried it as I use free programs for image editing. Of course, if one wants to things really fly and doesn't want to wait, faster is obviously better. Sorry for being bit too 'know it all'.

Regards
Tobio 'the know it all guy'

I had a glance at those two links but I don't see anything in there that explains how Photoshop can use more than 4GB on a 32bit machine. To be honest I don't see how it is possible, a 32 bit machine has an addressable range of 2^32 = 4,294,967,296, which is 4GB.

This first link is much better than the second, but it's still only describing a half-assed hack which will allow your system as a whole to use 8GB ram, but individual programs are still restricted to 4GB. Plus the comments in link 2 are full of people who have totally hosed their systems trying to apply this hack.

Marian

Here are a number of points that I would consider a must with a new Desktop Computer:-

Quad core processor.
Separate Grafics Card - nVidea GeForce.
4GB Ram.
At least 500GB Hard Drive.
A good specification Monitor.
At least a quantity of 6 USB2 Connections.
DVD Writer/Rewriter with Lightscribe Labelling.
Network Card.
At least 2 spare slots on the Motherboard for expansion/upgrade.
Room inside the computer to take an additional internal Hard Drive.

Now I regret that I wrote that previous text and I can't delete it. So I hope nobody tries that workaround and attempt to get more available memory to 32 bit systems as it might do unwanted things to Windows.

Regards
Tobio

The advice given about 32 bit Windows is still not completely accurate. It is not true that 32 bit XP is limited to 3GB RAM.

32 bit operating systems can only physically address a total maximum of 4GB of memory. That's total memory, so includes the system RAM you have put on the mother board, graphics cards and anything onboard the actual motherboard to get the system going etc.

In practice, most people see around 3GB total if they have 4GB installed, as the OS still has to address all the other memory in the system (don't forget this will include any and all types of memory including processor and hard drive caches as well).

My Alienware laptop as an example, with 4GB RAM shows only 2.8GB available, whereas the desktop machine in the shop currently shows 3.25GB available.

Back to the original question, personally I have always put system memory and storage space over and above the choice / speed of the processor, as you can never have enough, but as also mentioned your choice of monitor should probably be number 1 priority for critical photo work. As I always like to ask with questions like these 'what's your budget?', then we can give better more accurate advice.

If you wanted to have the option of 8GB RAM, then you would need to be looking at 64bit operating systems. If you are going to go this route, it may be wise to make sure that the machine you buy can actually take more memory than that in the future should you need it. 64 bit systems can address a heck of a lot more RAM (!), but if you are going to be using windows, be careful which version you buy, because they choose the maximum amount of memory you can use depending on which version of windows you pay for! Home premium can only go up to 16GB, whilst Enterprise and Ultimate can go to 192GB. Snow Leopard can support up to 16 Terabytes of RAM, but you may need the GDP of a small country to pay for it!

In our own example we bought an 8 core machine (2x quad core Xeon processors) around 2 years ago. IIRC the jump in price from 2.8GHz to 3.2GHz at the time was around £1,000, which I believed then and now would be a complete waste of money for us, instead we spent £280 on another 8GB RAM (making 10GB total) and £360 on 4x 1TB hard drives. The rest of the 'saved' cash went towards the 30" monitor and on a Huey Pro.

Hopefully what we bought will be more than 'future proof' enough for our needs. As an example, CS3 is 32 bit only I think, so on it's own can only address 4GB RAM (as per the example above). The advantage with what we have is that should we ever need to give Photoshop 4GB RAM to itself, we can, whilst continuing to browse, watch video tutorials for Photoshop, and leave email, iTunes & Aperture all running and instantly available at the same time. Then, when we upgrade to a 64 bit version of photoshop in the future (CS5 will hopefully be fully 64 bit), if 10GB RAM isn't enough the machine can always be upgraded to 32GB RAM.

It's a lot to think about I know, and you can easily spend a lot of money (think we spent £4k including CS3 suite upgrade etc.), but depending on your needs and budget, it can be money well spent!

Thank you all, you very nice people!
you are all so very helpful. I should have said in my original note that I already have a keyboard,mouse and monitor. I will be using CS3. I have a Pentax K20D.
It would seem from what I read here and other places, that any more than 4GiG is a bit of a waste, and that Quad core is ideal and I.7 would be overkill? The jury seems to be out as regards whether to have 1.5 T/B of H'drive or 2x1 T/B; one being for the operating system only? Also there appears to be conflicting opinions as to graphics card size.
The more I read,the more confused I become!
Thank you to Glover but I live in Hertford, a bit too far from Bristol!

Take a look at this: October 2009 System Buyers guide

That should explain the main technologies and clarify the various trade-offs.

Yeah i7 is a bit of an overkill but when is that bad?
i5 750 would run it very nice for a nice price.

As for the harddrive, why not an SSD drive and 2 drives of 1TB.
SSD is great for your programs, it startup very quickly and 1TB drives are less prone to malfunctions it seems than the bigger drives.

This is a very good place to go, good job for leading her there.

With 2 big identical drives there is of course the possibility to build RAID configurations link. Automatic realtime backups with RAID 1, a good precaution in keeping all data safe.

Regards
Tobio

Some of the replies do seem a bit OTT for answers to a beginner's question.

Something more than satisfactory can be bought off the shelf at Comet, Currys or PC World without needing to know too much about what goes on "under the hood".

What simple package would be recommended that won't cause too much buying confusion?

To follow Johns comment, and the previous advice, could we see some specific recomendations for a decent monitor?

The problem is there is so much going on that there is not a simple answer what the best system is for someone.

If you need to buy a new PC now and want to keep that running for 4 years up to 6 years with a update.
Then you come close to something like this.
Processor: Intel i5 750 or on budget AMD Phenom II X4 Black Edition 955 or 965
RAM memory: 2x2GB RAM DDR3 1600 MHz with CL8 8-8-24 timing seems to be reasonable
Graphics: ATI 5770 or upcoming Nvidia fermi cards (GTX 4##) but you need to wait a few months, or a Nvidia GTX 260

Around the 600+ watt power-supply should be enough.

And windows 7 64bit for addressing the extra RAM memory, or other 64bit OS of course

(I think most of us will agree to this setup)

For the motherboard, I would check if you've SATA 3.0 and USB 3 or else you might be tempted to buy a new motherboard or extension cards for that over a year or two.
If you get a motherboard yourself make sure the processor fits!!!
And get a decent cooler for the CPU instead of the stock cooler from AMD or Intel.

For storage.
Depends on your budget if you want SSD for programs or not.
If you go for an SSD take a look at the Corsair SSD nova series, they look good on paper.
For storage of information/photos you want a normal disk, 1TB is fine and you can do all fancy kind of things with multiple disk but that's another matter.

Basicly want you want to know is.
RAID 1 = 2 disk both acting the same, so basicly two diaries you write the same things in as a backup. The thing is you've only space of one disk.
RAID 5 = 3+ disks, backup for 1 disk failure plus the advantage that you increase your read speed and you only lose 1 disk of space so 3 X 3TB would leave you with 2TB storage space.

If backup is important RAID 1 is nice to have or else work with a external harddisk and backup regularly that's also a bit saver option but not as convenient.

For monitor.
- don't get a TN type of screen, those have poor colour depth. Look for ISP or PVA types and variations.
- get one with a static contrast of 1:1000 or at least 1:800 (not dynamic contrast!)
- Decent resolution (Above 21 inch at least 1920x1080 till 24inch, you can find 2048x1152 panels at 23inch)

Nothing is absolute what I say so please feel free to not agree

If you're a bit patient and handy you could build it yourself, it's pretty Murphy prove.

Admittedly I haven't used it on Photoshop, but on the basis of my attempts to use either in Matlab/Oracle I couldn't find a way to utilise the ATi chip's capability at all, whereas NVidia dish out the necessary software for free.

If PS uses OpenCL it's probably more of an even playing field.

If I wanted to be sure of being able to use GPGPU acceleration though, I'd definitely buy an NVidia for now.

What I'd really like is to convince my supervisor that he needs to buy me an Nvidia Tesla based machine, but I can't see that happening somehow.