Ram or Processor speed?

cunarder534

Hi everyone,

Need some help as I'm not a computer person. I'm buying a new notebook and I'm on a budget. I will only be using it for internet surfing and cs2 along with uploading to smugmug.

As the title asks, more ram or a faster processor? I'm looking a dell Vostro 1700. My price option are: intel core duo 2 t5470 1.6 and 3 gb of ram or
intel duo core 2 t7100 1.8 and 2 gb of ram.

Thanks for the help.

digismile

My personal experience with Photoshop over the years is that RAM made more of a difference over the long run than the processor speed. I was able to get a couple extra years out of an older machine simply by increasing the RAM. You can have a fast processor, but once you run out of RAM on a large PSD file, everything can drag to a halt!

With my new machine, I went 4GB of Ram and a midspeed Core 2 Duo, simply because I know that the photoshop files are getting bigger and bigger, and the more that can be resident in RAM the better.

my 2 cents,

jay

u arent going to notice any diff over the 1.6 to the 1.8mhz processor speed go with the cheaper core 2 duo and up the ram to the max itll scream then

wxwax

12% difference between processors, 50% difference between memory options.

Easy choice.

ChrisJ

Normally, I would agree with the above... but since this is a laptop, get the faster processor. You can upgrade the memory later (and pretty cheaply, too). You'll never be able to upgrade the processor.

Just my 2c.

cunarder534

Thanks all. I think I will go for RAM as I'm not keen about opening a laptop to install more ram. Thanks again!

Manfr3d

Thats what I recomment too. I just tried the CS3 demo and guess what ..
Bridge eats 700MB of Memory as I browse trough some dirs on my
disk. When I opened and closed a few images with PS to try out some basic
LAB editing PS already used additional 1.2 GB (!) of memory ... and I never had more
than two images open at the same time. The rest of the two gigs I have in
my MBP was used by the system and some other small apps. Needless to
say that everything was beginning to take really long with all the swapping
going on. There are probably some ways of how to optimize PS CS3 by
throwing out some unneeded modules and by reducing some cache sizes ...
but I'll be getting 4GB as soon as I decide to buy CS3. Otherwise I dont see
how one can efficiently work with this program. The 2.2 Ghz Processor
in the MBP is as fast as I could wish for PS as long as there is still free
memory available though.

SloYerRoll

Manfr3d wrote:

but I'll be getting 4GB as soon as I decide to buy CS3.

FYI Manfr3d. You can allocate as much RAM to PS3 as you like. It can only use 3GB though. This 4th GB will be nice for your other apps running. But will n ot speed up CS3 the slightest.

All the best,
-Jon

Manfr3d

Maybe I'm thinking wrong but if I can keep PS from swapping memory
to disk by upgradeing my memory it will run faster again, right? Even
if CS3 can only adress those 3Gb one can still trick PS into using more
memory by creating a RAM Disk and and assigning it to PS as the scratch disk.

cunarder534

I decided to downgrade my notebook a little to get a 2gig 7300 duo 2 core and 3 gigs of ram. I also decided on the 17 inch screen. Now I just have to wait for dell to ship it.

Pupator

cunarder534 wrote:

I decided to downgrade my notebook a little to get a 2gig 7300 duo 2 core and 3 gigs of ram. I also decided on the 17 inch screen. Now I just have to wait for dell to ship it.

With Vista 32 bit - 2GB is better than 4GB of RAM. I'd go with the faster processor for the reason given above - adding memory to a laptop involves removing one screw and not much money, upgrading a processor doesn't happen.