Monday, May 19, 2008

Killer PC for Digital Photography?

Dear All

My old PC was state of the art in 2000, and has been a great workhorse. I upgraded it from a Pentium 4 (remember those) with 256MB RAM and 30GB hard disk, to a 2.0 GHz processor with 1024MB RAM and 60GB hard disk, but that's starting to creak too...

So the new machine has Intel Core Duo processor (2.83 GHz - I toyed with Quadcore, but that's for serious applications and multasking, which I won't need, and if I do, I'm sure I can upgrade in the future), 3GB RAM, 720GB hard disc, DVD/CD read/write drive with Blu-Ray read and a 24" widescreen monitor. It's also Bluetooth enabled. Can't wait for it to come...

Thoughts?

Ivan

1 comment:

Damian Lidgard said...

Well, sounds like you have a machine very similar to mine. It performs very well, except when my back-up software is running then everything slows to a halt.

In Tim Grey's Digital Darkroom Quarterly mag he discusses the dream machine for photographers. Perhaps a bit late but this is what he suggests:

Operating system-
1. Windows XP seems to perform faster than Windows Vista so the former is recommended
2. 64-bit support for XP to allow applications to access more memory and thus improve their performance.

Memory-
3. A minimum of 2GB RAM and 4GB as the maximum for 32-bit support systems. Beyond that, 32-bit support systems cannot put +4GB RAM to its full use
4. As for the type of RAM, the most preferred is Double-data (version2) synchronous dynamic random access memory, aka DDR2SDRAM.

Processor-
5. AMD and Intel are now very similar in performance
6. Multiple core processors are better than a single and multiple processors. However, relative to their cost, quad-core processors do not provide greater performance than dual-core. So the advice is to go for a single dual-core processor if one can afford it.
7. Get the fastest processor you can afford but it is advised to drop one or two levels below the fastest to save money but maintain good performance

Hard drives-
8. Get the largest hard drive affordable.
9. As for performance, it is recommended to look at drives with at least a 7200 RPM (going up to 15000 RPM).
10. Also look at the sustained data transfer rate in MBps, often difficult to find since you want the real-world typical rate rather than the theoretical rate.
11. Also look at the average seek time (time it takes for the drive to locate a random point on the drive). Good values are less than 10ms, with the best under 5ms.

Display adapter-
12. Best available is PCI Express (PCIe). 256MB is adequate video memory.