My Photoshop Workstation Plan

Shay Stephens · June 11, 2005

Here I sit with a 1ghz Dell laptop with 512mb of ram and a 60gb hdd. I process RAW files and often times have to let it chew overnight on multiple nights. I have my workflow pretty well streamlined at this point, and the bottleneck is now clearly the computer. What I need is power, speed, and performance.

It has been a few years since I was in the IT field (when I knew everything) and now almost everything has changed from what I was familiar with. So I have been doing a lot of research into compatibility, performance, and data redundancy. I just finished my list of components for my workstation that should be able to tear through raw files like a hot knife through butter. By the way, I will be building this myself.

So for those who know more than I on the subject (and have stayed up to date) what do you think of this? Anything glare out at you as a problem?

Case: Antec Sonata II quiet super mini tower case http://www.antec.com/us/productDetails.php?ProdID=15139
I like the idea of a quite case, a big turbine engine sitting off to the side of me is a real drag. I will monitor temperature to see if I need more fans or not.

Motherboard: Asus P5WD2 Premium motherboard
http://www.infotechnow.com/shopping/shopexd.asp?id=3121
Reason behind this mobo is the support for Intel's matrix raid, native command queuing, and 775 cpu socket. I want to make a large raid 5 for data and a small but fast raid 0 for the photoshop scratch disk that spans 4 drives using matrix raid. From what I read, the ICH7R chipset supports this dual raid setup.

Processor: Intel LGA 775 Pentium 4 3.2ghz processor
http://www.infotechnow.com/shopping/shopexd.asp?id=2780
This is supposed to support hyper threading which allows two threads to be processed at the same time, kind of like having a dual processor.

Memory: PC-4200 1gb DDR2 533mhz 240 pin
http://www.infotechnow.com/shopping/shopexd.asp?id=3022
Going for two sticks of this for a total of 2 gigs of ram

Mirrored system drive: Seagate 40gb IDE 7200 rpm
http://www.infotechnow.com/shopping/shopexd.asp?id=1894
Going to go for two of these so I can mirror the system drive. Just windows and installed programs here. I am currently running about 10gb, so 40gb is more than enough for me here.

Data drive / scratch disk: Seagate 7200rpm 300gb SATA NCQ
http://www.infotechnow.com/shopping/shopexd.asp?id=2790
According to Intel, the SATA drive can be used with the matrix raid (5 and 0) and these drives also support NCQ for improved performance too. I plan on getting 4 of these drives, so the raid 5 drive will be about 880ish gb and the raid 0 scratch disk will be around 10gb.

DVD+/-RW: Sony 16x dual layer (black)
http://www.infotechnow.com/shopping/shopexd.asp?id=3030
I don't particularly have any special requirements for this, so I am choosing based on price and color (the case is black)

CF Card reader: Mitsumi 3.5" floppy w/ CF card reader (7 in 1)
http://www.infotechnow.com/shopping/shopexd.asp?id=2833
This is supposed to be USB2 speed, so I plan on getting two of them so I can download my cards within 15 minutes instead of the 2.5 hours it used to take. Boo Ya! Black color.

Video card: ATI all in wonder radeon X600 pro 256mb PCI express
http://www.infotechnow.com/shopping/shopexd.asp?id=2971
Looks like AGP is yesterdays news already. The motherboard does not have AGP that I can tell, so I needed a PCI-e card. I do play some games occasionally, and I used to have a TV card which I enjoyed. But this is an area I don't know much about. So I chose based on interface and cool features. I am open to suggestions here. Oh, I did buy a Dell LCD monitor with digital connector, so I want a digital connector on the video card and not just an analog vga connector.

So that is the system, and my thinking behind the components. The subtotal comes to $2153.79 without shipping and tax and tolls and tips :wink

David_S85 · June 11, 2005

2 card readers? I didn't think it was possible (or if it was, if it was even practical) to have 2 cards uploading to the drives concurrently. Is that the plan?

Shay Stephens wrote:

CF Card reader: Mitsumi 3.5" floppy w/ CF card reader (7 in 1)
http://www.infotechnow.com/shopping/shopexd.asp?id=2833
This is supposed to be USB2 speed, so I plan on getting two of them so I can download my cards within 15 minutes instead of the 2.5 hours it used to take. Boo Ya! Black color.

Shay Stephens · June 12, 2005

Yes, two readers downloading two cards at the same time into the raid 5 array. I hope there is no limitation disallowing that. It would cut the download time of 35 minutes with one reader in half if it works the way I hope. Or at least a fraction faster. The cards themselves can transfer at 10MB per second and the USB2 can handle 15MB/second. SO maybe only 1.5 times faster?

Right now, if I can shave 30 seconds here and 2 seconds there, I will do it if I can afford it ;-)

David_S85 wrote:

2 card readers? I didn't think it was possible (or if it was, if it was even practical) to have 2 cards uploading to the drives concurrently. Is that the plan?

rutt · June 12, 2005

This all sounds pretty cool and it sounds like you know what you are doing. But I have two questions about processors:

Why not a dual core processor? I think they are available now. Hyperthreading is only about a 15% differerence from single processing at best.
Why not Xeon? You might want to check this out: http://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/233604/0. The big cache on Xeon makes a big difference on PS benchmarks.

wxwax · June 12, 2005

A video card that supports dual monitors?

I think you'd enjoy working in a dual monitor set-up. Your main monitor is where you work on the images. Nice and uncluttered. All your tools etc. are on the secondary monitor, which can be far less expensive and smaller.

ian408 · June 12, 2005

I'd also ask why not Xeon or even Opteron or Dual Processor?

Not sure I'd recommend the dual cores yet. Good idea but I'm inclined to let
someone else test them out for a while.

Ian

Andy · June 12, 2005

shay, pm luke church, who's not always here but will definitely help you.
glad you're upgrading

Shay Stephens · June 12, 2005

Dual processors eh?!?! Sounds decadent, but I was doing some late night DVD creation last night and decided to look at the performance monitor. On the laptop the processor was running at 100% and I had plenty of ram free. So when it comes to video rendering, CPU power looks to be the primary thing.

I will check into the dual processors.

Andy · June 12, 2005

you forgot one important thing
customer designer case!

David_S85 · June 12, 2005

andy wrote:

customer designer case!

now... that's decadent! But delicious. While making a case look like that is possible, Shay's late night culinary urges would probably lead him to accidently eat his new computer.

Shay Stephens · June 12, 2005

This is a work computer Andy, I can't be staring and drooling at the case all day...sheesh

andy wrote:

customer designer case!

Ok, I did a quick search (for now anyway) and I don't find a dual xeon motherboard that supports the 955x chipset/ICH7R controller hub. I specifically need this for the raid array I want to put together. And it doesn't look like dual core chips are out yet?

The motherboard I am currently contemplating looks like it will support a dual core processor, so perhaps when they are released, I can simply pop it in for a performance boost for CPU intensive apps? Any thoughts?

Here is a graphic example of the hard drives and raid arrays as I am planning it:

This is based on my understanding of Intel's information here:
http://www.intel.com/design/chipsets/matrixstorage_sb.htm

Shay Stephens · June 12, 2005

My new candybar review would say something like this:

The texture has changed radically. Now there is a distinct metallic and plastic feel, and I no longer taste any cherry flavor. Cadbury has really dropped the ball this time. For shame Cadbury...for shame!

On the plus side, the bar is now gynormously huge. It probably weighed 25 pounds. It's now only about ten pounds. I should be done eating it in a week or so. I do wish it tasted better. For shame Cadbury, next time make it huge and tasty!

David_S85 wrote:

Shay's late night culinary urges would probably lead him to accidently eat his new computer.

rutt · June 12, 2005

You don't necessarily have to have raid support in the motherboard. You can buy Promise, e.g., cards to support this.

Raid is nice, but if you have a good enough backup strategy, it may be unnecessary complexity and not as fast as a more simple configuration.

From what I've seen, Xeon is a big win of PS work. Non-Xeon X86 loses to G5 and Xeon wins, pretty much independent of clock speed. I think PS has locality problems and you need a certain amount of cache or you just have problems.

Shay Stephens · June 12, 2005

The proposed scratch disk should have a little over a gigabyte per second transfer speed since it is pulling from four disks simultaneously. There is no way to get that kind of scratch disk performance out of a single drive that I know of.

The other reason for going with the motherboard raid is to be able to have both raid 5 and raid 0 on the same 4 drives. If I use standard raid controllers, I have to have separate drives for raid 5 and for the raid 0. I would have to have 8 drives to do the same thing. At least that is how I understand it right now. I invite corrective smack downs

rutt wrote:

You don't necessarily have to have raid support in the motherboard. You can buy Promise, e.g., cards to support this.

Raid is nice, but if you have a good enough backup strategy, it may be unnecessary complexity and not as fast as a more simple configuration.

From what I've seen, Xeon is a big win of PS work. Non-Xeon X86 loses to G5 and Xeon wins, pretty much independent of clock speed. I think PS has locality problems and you need a certain amount of cache or you just have problems.

Shay Stephens · June 12, 2005

Update
It looks like the Intel dual core processors will be coming out around the end of June. There is a 2.8ghz dual core processor that should be a bit under $300. So I think I will change the processor from a single processor to the dual core 2.8ghz.

Anybody know anything about the differences between similar speed xeon dual processor and a single dual core setup?

Nikolai · June 12, 2005

Yep

wxwax wrote:

A video card that supports dual monitors?

I think you'd enjoy working in a dual monitor set-up. Your main monitor is where you work on the images. Nice and uncluttered. All your tools etc. are on the secondary monitor, which can be far less expensive and smaller.

Dual monitor setup is what I have at work.
At home I simply have one widescreen which allows for both full-open image and enough space for tools/layers. However I would still like to have a second monitor, and once $ gets better, I will probably do this..

rutt · June 13, 2005

It really is worth digging through this FM thread I posted:

http://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/233604

In particular, the fastest two systems are:

20 seconds
2x Opteron 250, 2GB ram, Photoshop CS2

and

Dual Xeon 3.2GHZ 4GB raw, raided Raptors 74gb, 2 GB swap assigned to a 2GB ramdisk.

16 seconds. Tried it 3 times, all ~16 seconds and I have had PSCS2 running up for 2 days with bridge.

I know this doesn't quite answer your question. No dual core results yet. It seems that the exact memory configuration can make a big difference. Look at this fastest single processor report:

26 seconds.
PSCS2
Dell 8400
WinXP sp2
P4 3.0 w/HT
2g DDR2 @533

Shay Stephens · June 13, 2005

I like the swap file on a ram disk idea. Thank you for posting the results, I am not a member of FM and can't access the link.

rutt wrote:

It really is worth digging through this FM thread I posted:

http://www.fredmiranda.com/forum/topic/233604

mercphoto · June 13, 2005

I agree with the other who said that hyper threading is not as good as two cores (whether two cores in one package, or two cores in two packages). All hyper threading does is rapidly switch between two execution paths faster than a non hyper threaded core. But its still not executing both paths simultaneously. Two cores truly can execute two paths simultaneously. Given an efficient memory architecture it becomes a big boost.

rutt · June 13, 2005

Shay Stephens wrote:

I like the swap file on a ram disk idea. Thank you for posting the results, I am not a member of FM and can't access the link.

It's no big deal to join FM; just takes a second. There is lots of really great stuff there besides this thread. I've gotten 0 unwanted email as a result. My advice, take the plunge.

Mongrel · June 15, 2005

Well Shay,

Shay Stephens wrote:

So that is the system, and my thinking behind the components. The subtotal comes to $2153.79 without shipping and tax and tolls and tips

I can't help you with the RAID array or any of that stuff, but I may be able to save 'ya a few bucks...:D

I ran the numbers as you originally posted and I came up with: 1991.75 *including S&H* (they don't charge you taxes...). Now, this doesn't include any of the dual core processors you may be considering. But it gives you an idea of how your original rig priced out...

Try this place-Newegg.com

Here is *your* shopping cart:

http://secure.newegg.com/NewVersion/Shopping/ShoppingCart.asp

I'm not sure if that link will work or not, the shopping cart may expire. However, I can highly recommend Newegg.com for buying pc parts and supplies. The best I've found online-bar none in my experience. They have a sister company named 'ChiefValue.com' that sometimes can be a little cheaper depending on what your are looking at. BOTH of these companies are over 9.5 in the ratings at resellerratings.com.

Infotech Now! is 6.43 six month and 7.14 lifetime there. You may want to consider giving Newegg a try.

Sonata is a nice case, a bit expensive, but pretty well made. I just picked up an Antec Quiet Case model SLK 2650-BQE for around $80 at Comp USA (they are local, and I don't pay shipping). It is similar to the Sonata, same idea without the piano black finish. Very nice case-and they are quiet.

Good luck with your project...

Mongrel

rutt · June 15, 2005

Probably more than you want to spend, but...
... if you really want a quiet PC and are willing to pay as much for the case as you budgetted for the entire system, then check this out:

http://www.quietpcusa.com/acb/showdetl.cfm?&DID=8&Product_ID=192&CATID=9

I have a friend who has one. Jeez, for the price he could have built a closet to put a conventional case in. Still, talk about cool!

Shay Stephens · June 15, 2005

I used to live a few blocks away from Infotech and still hit their website when dreaming of what could be :-)

But I will check out newegg.com, thank you for the heads up on that.

The case looks good. I don't need the piano finish, I am really just after the quiet factor and the right amount of drive bays. So I will check out that case in depth.

Rutt, that is one wicked case. Wow. It actually has my imagination going double time here. Thank you for the link and the other stuff too!

The dual core chips don't come out until the end of June, so I have a little time to research more before deciding on a system and the technology behind it. I really appreciate everyones input on this. I have been out of the loop for about two years, and so much has changed in that time. Getting back up to speed has been interesting to say the least

Mongrel wrote:

Try this place-Newegg.com

Sonata is a nice case, a bit expensive, but pretty well made. I just picked up an Antec Quiet Case model SLK 2650-BQE for around $80 at Comp USA (they are local, and I don't pay shipping). It is similar to the Sonata, same idea without the piano black finish. Very nice case-and they are quiet.

Mongrel

Mongrel · June 15, 2005

Shay, re: case...
Antec has several cases in their 'BQE' (quiet) line. The case I mentioned was only for a reference and because I have personal experience with it. I believe for the amount of drives you intend to use you may want something larger. I could fit up to five drives *if* I used three of the upper 5 1/2" bays with hard drive adapters, and two drives in the normal mounting postition.

Take a look at some of the other cases in the line. They make a 3000? model that would work pretty well imho.

Mongrel

rutt · June 15, 2005

Mongrel wrote:

Antec has several cases in their 'BQE' (quiet) line. The case I mentioned was only for a reference and because I have personal experience with it. I believe for the amount of drives you intend to use you may want something larger. I could fit up to five drives *if* I used three of the upper 5 1/2" bays with hard drive adapters, and two drives in the normal mounting postition.

Take a look at some of the other cases in the line. They make a 3000? model that would work pretty well imho.

Mongrel

I also have some experience with Antec cases. They are nice, very easy to work with compared with the less expensive ones.

Shay Stephens · June 15, 2005

I am on the Antec site now...

luke_church · June 15, 2005

Hi Shay,

Sorry I haven't got to this earlier, I only just got the email advising me of this thread :-(

> What I need is power, speed, and performance.

How important is reliability? I bought a Dell Precision 360 a while back with a long warranty because I need 24x7x365 running. Bits of it have broken twice and been fixed the next day.

As a professional I would suggest that you *must* consider relibility and backup solutions.

>I just finished my list of components for my workstation that should be able to tear through raw files like a hot knife through butter. By the way, I will be building this myself.

Why did you choose to homebuild? See above comment. If things go wrong during homebuilds life can be tricky and time consuming. Remember to factor time and uptime into the equations. If it's out of interest that's fine.

I know one guy who is very competent who has had serious difficulty with a homebuilt system. Interaction difficulties can be tricky. It's this kind of problem that the likes of Dell beat out for you (hopefully). Just bear it in mind, but building a system is more fun :-)

I don't know very much about custom kit, as I tend to buy machines in rather than build them, but I'll offer what info I can.

BTW if you get a motherboard that supports it there's a temp monitor and stress tool called MBM + StressTest, you can use it to find out whether your CPU will burn up at max load. Drop me a message if you're interested.

[I've been having CPU issues swapping up CPUs in my primary workstation recently, fixed with the help of this tool]

> Processor: Intel LGA 775 Pentium 4 3.2ghz processor

http://www.infotechnow.com/shopping/shopexd.asp?id=2780

This is supposed to support hyper threading which allows two threads to be processed at the same time, kind of like having a dual processor.

Other people have mentioned this but I think it deserves clarification.

The difference between Hyper-thread, Dual Core and SMP and multi-machine is to do with how much of the CPUs/computers are duplicated. This is all from memory, so I might be getting a few bits wrong, if you're interested I have papers from Intel describing it.

[If I get a bit techy yell at me, I'm currently working on a project that requires serious CPU power (256 machines * 3.2Ghz Hyperthread), don't ask...]

HyperThread: The idea is that memory is slow. When a thread calls for memory there are many places it can come from (simplified a bit :-))

-Register (very fast, it's already there. Thread continues)

-Cache hit (fast, it's on the CPU)

-RAM Memory hit (slower, out of order execution will try to continue, but we're only talking a few billions of a second, whereas the memory hit is substantially slower. Traditional CPUs will wait for the memory)

-HD Scratch hit (Very slow typically a few hundread ms. Thread will block and the CPU will try to get on with other things).

With hyperthreading the idea is to hold two threads in memory, and swap to the other thread until the memory info is ready, so the CPU loading is higher. It uses the available SMP operating system support to 'fake' two processors.

It will give you the highest benefit on computationally constrained tasks written by someone who really understands multi-threading. (Adobe probably do, but not many other companies seem to). ~10-15% improvement is the best you can really hope for. Don't be fooled, it looks like 2 CPUs but in actuallity there's only one processing core.

- Dual Core

Here much more of the CPU is duplicated, there are 2 processing cores. However there are speed problems. You can't run 2 3.2Ghz cores in a current CPU, they'd burn out. However Intel already have speed stepping from their mobile CPUs, so the idea is first: turn off the stuff that isn't being used. Then when both cores on the CPU are being used, drop the speed fractionally to gain thermal capacity. So lets [hypothetically] say you have a 2.8Ghz branded CPU, it can't run at 2*2.8Ghz, it will frequently run at 1*2.8Ghz and then when the loading increases it will speedstep to 2.6Ghz and kick the second core in, so you have 5.2Ghz effective.

However the L2 cache is *not* duplicated on the die (die space is expensive). So Dual core is a good bit faster than Hyperthread (I've seen research statistics in the order of 60%), but is slower than SMP (usually).

Again, software must be written properly to take maximum advantage.

SMP (Symetric Multi Processing), duplicate the CPU. This has the advantage that you get two on die caches. That's a fair bit faster, but also a fair bit more expensive. See above comment on software.

Multi-Machine: Here you duplicate the machines, this is what I'm doing. Generally this is not easy to do. If you just prenteded that they were one big many CPU machine you'd find the whole thing ran at the speed of a slow pocket calculator. You end up with frightening information distribution problems of how do you get this number to the CPU that needs it (preferably before it needs it). If you have the software it can actually be cheap, but your software people have to be **Good** and you have to have a suitable task. Your software is the key problem here. Adobe will not to do this natively. However processing multiple RAW files is implicitly parrallel (smile, wide, it's rare you get to say that!), you might like to consider it. Get a second hand work-horse (I use Dell Outlet), build it, install the software and blast the RAW files onto a networked HD whilst you work. If you need to talk to the machine Remote Desktop Connection on XP Pro does the job nicely. Or Linux is even easier.

The problem is that it won't *appear* to run as fast as a single machine, and you'll need to buy two licences of Photoshop if that's what you're using.

Talk to me if you need more advise on this approach.

> Memory: PC-4200 1gb DDR2 533mhz 240 pin

http://www.infotechnow.com/shopping/shopexd.asp?id=3022

Going for two sticks of this for a total of 2 gigs of ram

At least. It depends on how you're using it. I use 2Gb RAM on my workstation and frequently come close to the edge. If you can make sure your motherboard could survive an upgrade to 4Gb.

>Data drive / scratch disk: Seagate 7200rpm 300gb SATA NCQ

http://www.infotechnow.com/shopping/shopexd.asp?id=2790

According to Intel, the SATA drive can be used with the matrix raid (5 and 0) and these drives also support NCQ for improved performance too. I plan on getting 4 of these drives, so the raid 5 drive will be about 880ish gb and the raid 0 scratch disk will be around 10gb.

Backups? Are you using DVD? I wouldn't trust RAID alone (it's a single physical location for a start!)

Oh BTW Raid doesn't gaurentee reliablity and uptime. I've seen a Database server blow its brains out (4*Xeon) becuase one of the disks in a RAID array half-died and the RAID array spend all it's time trying to rebuild it, meaning that the performance died.

It's OK, but it's not the be all and end all of data management.

>CF Card reader: Mitsumi 3.5" floppy w/ CF card reader (7 in 1)

http://www.infotechnow.com/shopping/shopexd.asp?id=2833

This is supposed to be USB2 speed, so I plan on getting two of them so I can download my cards within 15 minutes instead of the 2.5 hours it used to take. Boo Ya! Black color.

Really? Does the motherboard have the bus speed? I guess it'll be limited by the cards, so you should be OK...

>Video card: ATI all in wonder radeon X600 pro 256mb PCI express

http://www.infotechnow.com/shopping/shopexd.asp?id=2971

Looks like AGP is yesterdays news already. The motherboard does not have AGP that I can tell, so I needed a PCI-e card. I do play some games occasionally, and I used to have a TV card which I enjoyed. But this is an area I don't know much about. So I chose based on interface and cool features. I am open to suggestions here. Oh, I did buy a Dell LCD monitor with digital connector, so I want a digital connector on the video card and not just an analog vga connector.

You want something that can talk to 2 monitors, or at least a Dell widescreen monitor. Screen space is worth more than almost anything. (I use 4 screens for work and still occasionally run out of space. Software development adn cluster management uses a lot of screen space, but get at least 2 screens of photo editting)

Hope this helps for now, if you have any further questions please give me a yell.

Cheers,

Luke

mercphoto · June 15, 2005

luke_church wrote:

As a professional I would suggest that you *must* consider relibility and backup solutions.

>I just finished my list of components for my workstation that should be able to tear through raw files like a hot knife through butter. By the way, I will be building this myself.

Why did you choose to homebuild? See above comment. If things go wrong during homebuilds life can be tricky and time consuming. Remember to factor time and uptime into the equations. If it's out of interest that's fine.

I know one guy who is very competent who has had serious difficulty with a homebuilt system. Interaction difficulties can be tricky. It's this kind of problem that the likes of Dell beat out for you (hopefully). Just bear it in mind, but building a system is more fun :-)

Shay, I agree. You really want to decide how important reliability and service is. I know people like to ditch Apple because of their high price and low number of options, but that is a big reason why Macs are more reliable and easier to upgrade.

This isn't a suggestion to buy a Mac. Its a suggestion to not home-build. Get something from a Tier 1 vendor that you know works together. My seven years at Texas Instruments as an application engineer in the PC biz put an awful taste in my mouth for the PC industry. There is a reason why there are interatction difficulties in the PC world.

The computer isn't your hobby, its your biz.

Shay Stephens · June 15, 2005

I used to build computers and service them for a living. So building it and servicing it is no problem for me. If the motherboard blows, I can swap it out and be back up and running within an hour

mercphoto wrote:

Shay, I agree. You really want to decide how important reliability and service is. I know people like to ditch Apple because of their high price and low number of options, but that is a big reason why Macs are more reliable and easier to upgrade.

Shay Stephens · June 15, 2005

- Dual Core
- SMP
- Dual machine

Ok, now this is an interesting idea. I could easily distribute the RAW processing amongst several computers. Computer #1 handles 1-100, computer #2 handles 101-200, etc. This would indeed be very easy. And this has given me something really concrete to go on. Thank you very much.

Now the other aspect is video creation. That has to be done on a single computer, and in this regard, I do not know if dual core or processor will be an advantage or not. I have to look at the rendering software to see if they can take advantage of one or the other. I do know that I am currently processor limited. While the video is rendering, the CPU is pegged at 100% utilization until it is done. So going from 1ghz to 3ghz should be a big boost right there.

> Memory: PC-4200 1gb DDR2 533mhz 240 pin

http://www.infotechnow.com/shopping/shopexd.asp?id=3022

Going for two sticks of this for a total of 2 gigs of ram

At least. It depends on how you're using it. I use 2Gb RAM on my workstation and frequently come close to the edge. If you can make sure your motherboard could survive an upgrade to 4Gb.

The motherboard can support 4gb, and over the last couple of days I have been thinking of going with 4gb.

>Data drive / scratch disk: Seagate 7200rpm 300gb SATA NCQ

Backups? Are you using DVD? I wouldn't trust RAID alone (it's a single physical location for a start!)
I am using DVD for backups. The RAID array is an added layer of convenience so I don't have to try and restore data from failed drives. I don't mind waiting for the raid 5 array to get back up to speed after swapping a bad drive.

>CF Card reader: Mitsumi 3.5" floppy w/ CF card reader (7 in 1)

http://www.infotechnow.com/shopping/shopexd.asp?id=2833

Really? Does the motherboard have the bus speed? I guess it'll be limited by the cards, so you should be OK...

I just ran some CF card tests and the total read speed is averaging 5mb per second. So with two cards being read at one time, the total should be 10mb per second which is slower than the max USB2 speed. So I am thinking I should be ok here.

>Video card: ATI all in wonder radeon X600 pro 256mb PCI express

http://www.infotechnow.com/shopping/shopexd.asp?id=2971

You want something that can talk to 2 monitors, or at least a Dell widescreen monitor. Screen space is worth more than almost anything. (I use 4 screens for work and still occasionally run out of space. Software development adn cluster management uses a lot of screen space, but get at least 2 screens of photo editting)

I do have 2 screens, I will double check for dual monitor support. Thank you.

Hope this helps for now, if you have any further questions please give me a yell.
Thank you very much!

DavidTO · June 15, 2005

Shay Stephens wrote:

I used to build computers and service them for a living.

I'm glad you switched careers.

My Photoshop Workstation Plan

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