While I have no intimate knowledge of the issue you raise, I have some general knowledge about microprocessors.

It is likely that if there is a difference between the two processors, it's not going to be great, it probably won't be something that makes you want to say "gee, I wish I bought the other one".

My prejudice on the matter is, though, to choose the cheaper model. If the cheaper model also has more on-chip cache, hoorah.

As for Photoshop, I think you'll find that either CPU is good enough. You should think more about the amount of RAM you get. Apparently, people around here seem to think that 2 GB is a nice amount. My computer has a limit of 1.5 GB, so I can't test that.

Or perhaps you could consider a dual-core version (Athlon X2); Photoshop can take advantage of a dual CPU system, and the X2 seems to be a bargain in that regard.

Let's get to the chase. With Photoshop we need a 64 bit operating system and a 64 bit processor to maximise Photoshop's support of RAM. I've currently got 4GB of RAM, Win XP2 and a Pentium 4 3.0 GHz hyperthreading processor. Photoshop CS 2 will not support more than 2GB of DDR 400 RAM with my current setup.

Now if you had a Mac running Tiger (10.4) and PS CS2 you can run Photoshop with 3.5GB of ram.  :p  

Add another 1GB and make it a dual processor G5 and you've got a killer PS machine that flies along running PS plus all my normal web/email stuff in the background, iTunes, etc, etc. ...

Anyway, back to your normal PC viewing ...  :D

Another approach might be something like the Giga-Byte iRam device, which looks like a quite nice way to create a very high-speed scratch disk for photoshop.

http://www.cdrinfo.com/Sections/News/Detai...px?NewsId=14213

I believe high speed storage for photoshop was the original intent as well, it would be interesting to see how much it would help in real use.

This new Gigabyte technology might just be what I need. My self-assembled new system, on a Gigabyte motherboard, has 4Gb of DDR PC3200 RAM, only 2Gb of which can be accessed by PS CS2. Because of this limitation, I installed the O/S on a 10,000rpm Raptor SATA hard drive and intended to have the PS scratch disc on a second Raptor hard drive.

Unfortunately, installing the O/S on a SATA drive seems to preclude the recognition of any other hard drive connected to the other SATA port or IDE primary or secondary ports. I've messed around with various BIOS settings for ages, read and reread the MB manual, but to no avail.

Now this is perhaps no great problem, just another annoyance. I'm now using DVD for image storage so I can get by with my 76Gb Raptor. But apparently it's not ideal to have the primary PS scratch disc on the same drive as the O/S, even though I've partitioned the drive.

Of course I should send an email to Gigabyte. There might be a simple solution to this problem. But past experience tells me the employees who answer such queries are overworked and underqualified. I rarely get satisfactory answers.

The internet is full of queries about RAID and SATA configurations and non-recognition of hard drives. There seems to be a major confusion here which I can't believe is the fault of the poor user.

there is a thread on RobG's site http://www.robgalbraith.com/ubbthre....#UNREAD
about the very same subject in more details regarding the amount memory available. then again they also refer to MS directly to varify their statements

Henrik

Posted this over at DPreview.  Figured I'd ask here, too.

I'm going to buy an athlon 64 machine. I have narrowed it down to the Athlon 64 3700+ and the Athlon 64 3800+. The 3700+ has a slower clock speed but is the san diego core with 1mb of cache. The 3800+ (venice core) has 1/2 the cache but has a faster clock speed.

Which is better with photoshop? More cache or more pure Mhz?

Take a look at ExtremeTech Review and come to your own conclusions.

The 3800 series seems to be the better processor and faster overall but realistically you need to look at the overall system pricing differences. If it's small, the 3800 seems like a better choice.

If there's a big difference in price you have to ask yourself whether you'll ever actually notice the performance difference in real life. Get the cheaper one.

For most PS work the difference between such similar chips is really never going to be noticed - the difference between something taking 1 second and 2 seconds is trivial in real life. You'll probably get better workflow throughput investing in the fastest disk subsystem you can afford - that's where I spend the majority of time waiting for the machine. Put as much memory into the box as you can too. This really makes a significant difference up until you reach the 2GB level where things level off pretty much.

But even with that, Photoshop won't support as much as 4 GB of RAM.

What we need, is a Photoshop version with enhanced memory support.

Perhaps CS3, but that's usually two years ahead.

Maybe Adobe could be convinced to provide a free patch.

Well, that's not quite > 4 GB for Photoshop, and only a minor improvement over what the Windows version offers. I was extremely disappointed to learn that there would be an artificial limitation like this on 64-bit computers.

In fact, I'm disappointed that Adobe hasn't taken to segmenting their memory usage. ::


Actually, I'm hoping for a Linux version of Photoshop (I've come to the conclusion that I currently can't afford a G5 Mac if I want a better monitor and hardware calibration).

There have been rumors to that effect concerning CS2, but it certainly doesn't look like it's quite there yet.

The recent hubbub with Apple switching to Intel may well have killed off Photoshop for Linux (if it ever was a project), or made it easier, who knows ...

with about 4gb of ram on the system board, couldn't you just create a ramdisk(ramdrive) and place your scratch disk there or would that defeat the purpose?!Now I don;t know anymore

just a thought

Henrik

That's fascinating, a return of expanded RAM we had in the good ole' days. But 8-bit 4.77 MHz (yes, less than 5 MB/s) is not anywhere near as fast as the potential 133 MB/s of PCI.

This is pretty useful, although fairly expensive.


With support for 8 GB of memory, it's good enough that you can use that as your primary scratch disk for Photoshop and perhaps not need to use another scratch disk.

However, buying two of these may not be much of a performance enhancer, since they'll be sharing the PCI bus.


Yes, you could, and yes, it might help.

But with only 4 GB of RAM, you'd have to be satisfied with using a pretty small ramdisk, which wouldn't help a lot. It's better on a system board supporting 8 GB or more of RAM, then you can dedicate e.g. 4 GB to ramdisk and 4 GB to operating system and applications.

Also, the device from Gigabyte has battery backup, so you can actually store stuff there between reboots. That's very good.

The one thing that may partially defeat the performance of a ramdisk, though, is that Windows and other operating systems have built-in caching of disk data to RAM. But in general, it's faster anyway.

One thing to keep in mind is that Windows divides the 4Gb address space into 2G user memory and 2G kernel memory.  Nothing can use more than 2G.  You can change this by adding /3gb to the boot.ini file.  This changes things to 3G user/1G kernel.  Of course your application has to support this and I do not know if photoshop does.

Of course even with the way windows works having 4G in the system allows photoshop to have 2G, gives everything else plenty of memory and there should be plenty left over for a huge disk cache.

Just putting 2G in my current system (I expect to use this memory when I buy my athlon.) did wonders for photoshop.  It was even nicer with 3G but my old memory was unhappy working in the second set of memory sockets.  (Memtest86 is your friend.)

What I've determined about the athlon is that I'm going to buy a 3500 initially and then a dual core once they get a wee bit cheaper.

(I'm also holding off on buying the system for a bit in the hope that the nvidia 7800 forces ati to drop their prices.)