In depth look at a PC for photoshop

[John.Murray]

I too would recommend the 930, a killer deal at today's pricing.  All of the main-boards look fine, you might want to also look at intel's; my experience with driver / firmware updates from asus has been pretty disappointing ( a recent product they offered had no less than 13 firmware updates since release last fall -what are they doing???).

As far as drives:

system - raid-1 with fast 10k rpm drive, velociraptors are a nice fit here.  i like the 150gb drive's single platter design and simplicity

storage - stay away from raidi5, unless you absolutely need a single volume beyond 2TB.  i prefer raid-1 here with it's superior write and read performance.

scratch - no idea, actually!  i was preferring the SSD option, until I read Jeff Schewe's description of his system - I was suprised at the potential size requirements of a scratch volume......  obviously, the faster the better here....

[feppe]

So the oft-heard caveat about not using SSD's for write-heavy applications (like the scratch disk) as opposed to read-heavy situations like OS/apps is a canard that may safely be disregarded?  And you're saying you would go with SSD for the scratch drive before you would put one on OS/apps?

That oft-heard caveat is outdated FUD. OCZ Vertex writes well 250MB/sec while Raptors don't go over 200MB/sec, I think. Even if write speeds were similar, the practically instantaneous seek speed of SSD would favor them over HDDs.

As for scratch space, if one wants/needs ginormous scratch like Mr Schewe, it might make sense to go for HDDs. But for mortals with a limited budget an SSD gives best bang for buck.

Can't really say what would be the preference on OS vs scratch disk, as it depends on how much one needs scratch. With 12 gigs of memory I can't imagine anyone outside of e-peen measuring contests needing any scratch for non-stitched stills or non-video work. Of course if the OP is doing those then it's a whole different ballgame which I'm not familiar with at all.

[Nill Toulme]

Speaking of non-video work... now that our cameras come with interesting video capabilities included, many of us are starting to futz around with video a bit, innocent of having ever touched it before.  What considerations does that raise for spec'ing a new system, given that it might end up doing double duty as a light video editing system?

Nill

[Christopher]

SSDs for scratch is a total waste of money. Get 2-4 cheaper HDs in RAID 0 which will kill any single SSD drive and are even cheaper.

[wcwest]

To Adam z:

Your choices are very similar to system I just built. Agree i7-930 best bang for the buck but suggest you stay away from Asus if considering 12bg of ram. The Asus board would not recognize all 12gb of ram and nvida board may not fit properly. Gigabyte boards are great. For scratch disk consider 2 - 150gb WD black Caviars in Raid 0 (very easy to set up with Gigabyte board) and only cost $90. Make sure the nvida board you choose supports CUDA technology. Suggest you look at one of the GTX 260 boards. If you end up buying 12GB ram be sure to purchase the matched Corsair 12gb kit. Good luck with your build.

[Les Sparks]

Speaking of non-video work... now that our cameras come with interesting video capabilities included, many of us are starting to futz around with video a bit, innocent of having ever touched it before.  What considerations does that raise for spec'ing a new system, given that it might end up doing double duty as a light video editing system?

Nill

If you're concerned about video, I suggest you check HV20,HV30,&HV40 Users forum.. Go to the MAC or PC Computers section. You'll find lots of discussions for hardware and software requirements for editing HD Video in all the various flavors.
Les