Best for Photoshop?

[Rockyw]

OK there have been topics on dream machines to build for CS but really what is best. I have decided on a duel Xeon machine for a new video editing PC. It seems the leading video editing software is not the best on duel core or X2 platforms. But what about CS? is there a report written just for whats best for CS and graphic editing. If so I would love to read it. I did find out some of the bottlenecks with the new mainboards is from what chipset is used on the mainboard. The Intel chipsets are rated much better than others and transfer data faster. What has been the findings of others out there on what works best. I am thinking I will stay with a duel core intel for the CS machine but am wondering if a duel Xeon would also be better for CS than a single intel or AMD processer. Thanks for any replys and Happy Holidays.

[Swampy]

Just went through this one a month or so ago in the "More diffinitive answer on new hardware" thread.

I ended up building a few machines. Dual Core Intel 3.2ghz with 8gb Kingston PC4200 memory running XP64. XP64 keeps crashing and has general all around problems if you're trying to do more than just photoshop or a few specific programs that will actually run under XP64. Run the OS on a 250gb SATA II 7200rpm drive and a scratch/data drive on 3 stripped 250gb SATA II drives, all 8mb cache.

I then also built an AMD FX-57 system with 2gb Corsair twinx 3500LLPro memory (very low latency) and Regular WinXP Pro. Run the boot off of 2 SATA 10,000rpm drives stripped and a couple of single 500gb SATA II (16mb cache) drives for data and scratch. Scratch area is designated by where the data is opened up from, so if it's opened on drive 1, the scratch is drive 1.

The AMD system is like .5-1second faster than the dual core Intel. Attributed by many factors. One of them being the low latency memory, another, the 10k rpm stripped raptor drives, another the 16mb versus 8mb cache.

Photoshop didn't seem to care about multiple processors, at least with the Dual cores, seperate Xeons may be a different story, don't know, never tried it before.

Anyway, the AMD system is opening the 16mp RAW Canon files in about 4 seconds. The Intel, around 5 seconds as mentioned.

It's really a matter of data throughput. The faster you can push the data through, the better. So, fast CPU, low latency memory, fast drive system.

Just my experience so far.

[Rockyw]

Great info Swampy! Sounds like you indeed have built a couple good systems. I never seen the 16mb hard drives, I bet they are fast. I will probley use 250 gig WD SATA drives, I beleive they are 8mb cache. I am leaning at intel, not that they are better or faster than AMD but I havent built a Intel machine for a while and I think I want to go back that way. I will probley build the video machine first so I can try CS on that and see what duel Xeons do that way. thanks again for the info.