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I began my odyssey by googling for system recommendations for Photoshop-specific configurations. After a short time reading about others' computers, looking at advertisements and perusing forums - my head was spinning. Perhaps the hardest thing was weeding out the good information from the bad.
I had decided to avoid the Apple platform, purely on a cost/benefit. Apple makes fine systems, but they were just too expensive and not necessarily better for what I needed, so they were off the table. Similarly, I dismissed a Xeon based system. I did come across this useful link to Adobe's recommendations for hardware and system configuration - http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/404/kb404439.html
The common theme was that the graphics adapter was less important and that overall Photoshop performance was tied to hard drive I/O speed, multiple scratch disks RAM and CPU cache size and clock speed. The current version of Photoshop does utilize dual core CPUs in some operations, but in the interest of "future proofing" I opted for a quad core. Hyperthreading, an Intel technology, will make a noticeable improvement, which ruled out using AMD CPUs (their CPUs do not offer hyperthreading). So, I put together a theoretical system that had the following features:
- Windows 7 64bit OS.
- Intel quad core CPU - 3.3 ghz cpu speed that supports hyperthreading
- Support for 16 gb or more RAM
- Solid State Drive (SSD), SATA3 (currently the fastest drive interface that is widely available)
- RAID capability - for redundancy and performance, support for RAID 5
- Nvidia Graphics adapter with at least 1gb DDR5 memory and dual display support
- At least 4 SATA3 device support (boot drive and others)
- A big case with lots of ventilation
- And a power supply big enough to run all of this
I ended up selecting the following components based on a best-bang-for-the-buck criteria:
- Intel i5 2500K (the K designates a cpu whose clock is "unlocked" allowing overclocking, or running faster than the rated frequency for the cpu, presumably with additional cpu cooling)
- 16 gb of RAM from Corsair -Vengeance DDR3 1600
- Palit NVidia GeForce GTS 450 with 1024mb GDDR5 memory (intended for entry level gaming, but super duper performance for Photoshop)
- OCZ Vertex 3 - 60gb SATA3 solid state drive -
- Western Digital Caviar Black 1Tb SATA 3 hard drive with 64 mb cache
- OCZ Mod Stream Pro- 600 w power supply with one 25amp 12v rail each for motherboard, cooling and graphics card.
- ASUS P8Z68-V PRO/GEN3 Motherboard with support for all of the above, and 8 drive device ports - 4 SATA3 and 4 SATA2 and RAID support (SATA2) and overclocking capability
- Diablotek EVO Mid Tower Case - with 4-120mm fans.
My total cost for all of this was under $1000 after rebates. Purchased at my local MicroCenter.
Next I would like to share some of my decision processing. I have never been an advocate of acquriing cutting edge (more like bleeding edge) technology. It is important to know where the state of the art is, and what the sweet spot is for compromise between benefit and cost. This is why I decided in favor of an Intel i5 2500k cpu. I could save almost 1/2 the cost of the i7, and still have 90% of the performance. And for my purposes, if I really needed more performance, I could always purchase a higher capacity cpu fan and overclock the cpu a bit to gain another 25% or more in performance without sacrificing system reliablity.
The motherboard choice comes from having a series of positive experiences over the past 20 years with ASUS, and not so positive with the competition. It offered an easy to manage mouse driven BIOS interface, and a simple overclocking scenario, with all of the bells and whistles if I needed to really tweak it. Plus it supported the drives and devices I wanted to connect to it. One of the nicer features was support for the use of a SSD (solid state drive) to cache the boot drive. With this arrangement I can use my 60 gb drive to augment the performance of my 1 tb boot drive, with both devices on a 500mb/sec SATA3 interface. That's pretty darn fast - almost as fast as running a SSD as a boot drive. As I was intended to migrate my 1.5tb RAID5 array from my old computer to the new one, I selected this motherboard since it had built in RAID support.. Photoshop will readily utilize as many hard drives as possible as scratch disks to improve performance, and this motherboard can accept a total of 8 devices, with 4 of them being the faster SATA3 interface.
A brief piece of wisdom I collected along the way on hard drives. There are many many options out there. It is not unusual for a company to offer a 2 TB hard drive a 1 TB hard drive and a 500 TB hard drive - and they will be priced similarly.Aside from performance, the big differnce among them is the duty cycle, orin layman's terms, how hard you can beat on them before they fail. In general the drives with the highest price per gb tend to be oriented towards read/write intensive environments such as file servers and engineering or 3D graphics workstations were there will be tons of reading and writing to the drive. The drives in this category are more robust and can tolerate such use much better than the consumer oriented products. Plus these drives tend to have longer warranties. The Western Digital Caviar Black series of drives are targeted at the advanced computer user, falling just short of what is known as "enterprise class" hardware. They come with an excellent 5 year warranty. Another good choice is the Samsung F3 1 TB drive which utilizes a 2 platter design compared to everyone elses 3 platter systems - the result is less wear and tear and faster throughput. Highly recommended for their reliabilty and performance, particularly in intensive read/write applications.
Graphics adapter was simple - I just looked for an Nvidia card that had the monitor connections I wanted, at least 1GB of DDR5 memory, and modest power supply requirements. The Palit GTS 450 fit the bill nicely. It is powerful enough to do video editing, but reasonable in cost. Certainly more than I need for Photoshop, but all in all a very nice, fast display adapter.
The power supply is a big deal. While many offer 600 plus watts of power, very few can do this under load. A motherboard will easily consume 25 amps @12 v when fully populated and running fan managenment, and a discrete graphics card will have similar power requirements. The power supply is the one place you do not want to skimp. An underpowered system is likely to fail due to voltage drops which result in higher current demand and heat generation. Better and safer to go overboard on the power supply.
Memory - select the fastest, motherboard-approved memory modules you can afford. Get them as a matched set. With Photoshop as the principal application, Putting in 16 gb of "overclockable" ram that cost only $100 was a no-brainer. The motherboard has four memory slots, and is designed to take up to 4 - 8 gb modules for a total of 32 gb, but currently they are prohibitive in price. In keeping with the bang for the buck theme, it made no sense to spend upwards of $350 for 32 gb of ram when 16 was more than sufficient.
The Diablotek is one of the best kept secrets in the industry - it is a roomy, airy case with cable management (most of the cabling is routed under the motherboard platform) with tons of airflow where it counts - around the CPU and the hard drives. It boasts a total of 4 120mm constant velocity fans, and can handle another 2 large fans.
On to the system build. Things went together quite easily - I would say that in less than 2 hours everything was completely assembled and ready to accept the operating system. There was a bit of confusion with the software and firmware listed on the ASUS website for this version of the motherboard, and some issues with Windows' deep sleep mode in the current version, but once I got the kinks worked out the system has certainly exceeded my expectations.
This is how it all came together:
One thing that I found to be indispensable was to create an image of the Windows 7 DVD and install it on a USB flash drive. Microsoft describes the process at http://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_7-windows_programs/burning-an-iso-image-onto-a-usb/3f656c95-ba75-4b85-8fca-68a12cf7f8a9
This will save you hours - you will be able to install Windows, start to finish in about 10 minutes.
So how does this thing perform you might ask? Well, once the power on self test is complete, it boots into Windows in about 12 seconds. Microsoft Excel, Word, Outlook pop up in under a sccond. Photoshop CS5 64 bit takes about a second to load the first time, and less if it is cached. Right clicking on a jpg image and selecting open with Photoshop will take less than 2 seconds. The Intel Smart Response SSD hard drive cacheing provides near-SSD peformance on a 1 TB drive without the expense. Gone are the dreaded "out of memory" messages in Photoshop, thanks to the 16 gb of RAM. And this is running at the stock CPU frequency of 3.3ghz. This CPU can safely clock up to 4.5ghz with the addition of a modest third party cooler like the ever popular CoolerMaster Hyper 212 Plus cooler which has a street price of $30.
"But I am not handy with tools" you might be thinking. Putting together a computer these days is neither difficult nor time consuming. If you can turn a screwdriver you can assemble a computer. Everything is color coded, and set up so that it is difficult to make a mistake. Besides, if you purchase from a store like MicroCenter, they are pretty good about helping you configure a system and responding to your questions when they come up - and they have an almost "no questions asked" guarantee. They don't hassle you if you need to return something, they only ask why you are returning it for tracking purposes.
I couldn't be happier with the system - it met my criteria for a sub-$1000 system, it is more than fast enough, can be upgraded with inexpensive components to improve performance, and I can say "I built it myself." What more can you ask for?
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