Help me configure a Mac

[Jack Flesher]

I just ordered mine: I went with the 3.2's and basic 2G RAM and 500G drive, to which I'll add 8G aftermarket Apple-Qualified RAM purchased 3rd party ($400 for 4x2G paired sticks). For drives, I also went aftermarket, and got a 500G Seagate w/32MB buffer for scratch (had a little better I/O performance than the WD). Yes it's way overkill size for scratch, and I'm not even sure my machine will be hitting the scratch all that often with 10G RAM, but I'll partition off say 150G for scratch, then use the rest for data and back-up, maybe image the main OS drive to it. Next is one 500G WD for current or working images (WD a little better sustained read than the Seagate), and then the 4th slot will get an older 500G SATA I had laying around for Time Machine --- until I figure out how well TM works and what size disk I need for the depth of back-up I want, I'm not blowing money on a special drive for it. I then have two mirrored 1T WD green's in external E-Sata/FW800/400/USB2 boxes for image storage. I did not add the RAID card at this time because I don't like the increased vulnerability of RAID 0 in exchange for the performance gains, and I can use mirroring software to accomplish RAID 1.

Oh, I wanted the upgraded video card, but that involved a 4 WEEK delivery delay, so I went with the standard card for now. We'll see how it works and upgrade later if necessary. The machine should be in my hands next week.

Cheers,

[Hening Bettermann]

Hi!

I, too, need a stationary Mac to handle scans from 6x9 (420 MB), and I, too, could take some advice.
In accordance with Rider's post, I think I can get away with a quad core. However:
1-Need it be a 3.2 GHz processor? My MacBook Pro has 667 MHz, and 2.8 GHz would be quadrupling the processor speed, after all.
2-There is a choice of 2 graphic cards, ATI Radeon and NVIDIA G-Force, the latter having 512 MB of video RAM vs. 256 on the ATI. Is it worth the price difference of 110 EUR? Will I see any difference, or feel any difference in speed?
3- How much RAM would be good without being waisted?

Good light - Hening.

[Stephen Best]

Hi!

I, too, need a stationary Mac to handle scans from 6x9 (420 MB), and I, too, could take some advice.
In accordance with Rider's post, I think I can get away with a quad core. However:
1-Need it be a 3.2 GHz processor? My MacBook Pro has 667 MHz, and 2.8 GHz would be quadrupling the processor speed, after all.
2-There is a choice of 2 graphic cards, ATI Radeon and NVIDIA G-Force, the latter having 512 MB of video RAM vs. 256 on the ATI. Is it worth the price difference of 110 EUR? Will I see any difference, or feel any difference in speed?
3- How much RAM would be good without being waisted?

Good light - Hening.

I bought a Mac Pro 2.8GHz 8-core but in retrospect the 4-core would have done me just as well. The faster machines are slightly faster but not enough to justify the premium. The base ATI HD 2600 XT card is fine. 8GB should be plenty for 400MB files but more RAM never hurts. I'd also budget on adding 2 or 3 drives and striping them for Photoshop scratch and file storage (say 30GB on each allocated on the outer rim un-journalled for scratch and the remainder for files). File storage should be mirrored if you don't have continual backup.

So in order of decreasing Photoshop performance/dollar: RAM, disk, CPU, video.

[paulr]

macgurus.com has the best advice i've seen on configuring a fast photoshop machine (at different price points).

and ... i just learned a cool trick in cs3 for figuring out your scratch disk usage. open the "info" palette, and in the palette options turn on "efficiency" and "scratch size." watch these values when you work on your biggest files. if efficiency stays above 95% or so, you're barely using the scratch disk, so a faster one won't make any difference. If the number dips much below that, maximize your ram (i'm not sure what the maximum is that cs3 takes advantage of, but you can find out at the adobe site and at macgurus). if the number still dips low, then you can improve performance with a faster scratch.

the scratch size number just tells how much space on the scratch you're using. it will let you know if your scratch disk is big enough (it probably is).

[gflanslo]

I second or third or fourth the disk I/O bottleneck. If the quad core processors can't get the data to process what is the purpose. If you are running on Linux make sure to update your kernel to handle multiple CUPs...otherwise you should be covered. Sorry for the nerdy-ness.

[Hening Bettermann]

Thank you for your advice, which is very useful to me! - Hening.