High End Photo Editing Workstation

[D-Bone]

Hey guys, looking for some thoughts on the following...

I have friend who wants me to build them a workstation. It needs to be pretty high-end. He is a professional photographer. Multi-tasking is a must. He wants to be able to batch process 200+ 20MB image files in photoshop while burning 2 DVD's at the same time all while listening to music, surfing the web and printing.

Here's the questions.

Image quality in photoshop is probably the highest priority, he needs true color representation. I had heard that the Matrox cards are the only one that support 10-bit color. But, unless you have a 10-bit capable display, it doesn't matter. Thoughts?

Burning 2 DVD's at the same time. Any of you guys have experience with software that will do it? I haven't looked into Nero or the others yet to see if they support it.

I'm also thinking RAID 0 for speed and possibly RAID 5 for redundancy with SATAII drives. I heard photoshop works well if you can set its own swap file (i'm not sure if adobe calls it that exactly) to its own blank partition, any one know for sure?

Also thinking dual core Athlon's with 2GB's of RAM. Any other suggestions or things to consider?

P.S. Lets please keep this thread on topic with relevant information. All non-constructive posts will be deleted for this one. :)

[Stromgarde]

well, as far as the 10 bit display, yeah you would need one that supports it, and Im not sure what monitors do so.

personally I would go with a couple high end p4's... probably 3.4ghz with the 1066mhz fsb

find a motherboard that supports 4gb of ram, burning two discs at once is going to hold up a lot of memory.

if there is going to be a LOT of multi image processing you'll want a seperate "scratch" disk... that is the swap you were talking about... not a partition, a seperate disk instead. small will work just fine, 20gb or so.

assuming you mean making multiple discs with the same content nero does support such a task, as far as multiple contents to multiple discs not sure what software supports this.

definitely go with the striping and mirroring and really I wouldn't suggest HUGE drives... seems to me the bigger the drive gets the less reliable it does as well (this could just be my shitty luck though).

i would strongly suggest though, for color accuracy getting a device like the "Spyder" pro i think is what its called. it color matches a true printed image to the display on screen and works VERY accurately. it's a little pricey but for a professional it's absolutely necessary. Really, I'm not sure that just going 10-bit graphics would get you accuracy - its only going to give you more colors :D

---
Now, I have put up here an optimal setup... and yes going intel over amd will jump your price and going 4gb of ram over 2 will jump the price even more!

I think the most important piece is the spyder color correction device, absolutely do not go without it (at compusa, where I work, we sell it for $249 for the standard and 279 for the pro)!

Also note that I am biased against AMD so if AMD will do the job feel free to go that route.

I really would recommend the 4gb of ram if he wants to do anything in the background while burning 2 dvd's at the same time (making sure of course that its the highest speed ram you can get).

[Ghost]

Couple thoughts

Make sure he's really OK with only having one box. He's asking enough of one PC that it could be easily split among several machines. He also has all his eggs in one basket with a single PC. It might be worth getting a couple slightly less uber machines to have a machine he can still work with if one goes down.

If you put everthing in one box and he really is a high end photoshop person who is burning dvds at the same time, 4 Gb of RAM would be a good thing. You'll have to do some tweaking of some settings to let programs use more than 2 Gb of that memory. Once Windows XP 64 bit stabalizes a little more you can move to that and not have to worry about the memory.

I agree on the color calibration hardware. You can only do so much with software and hardware is the only way to make sure the colors are absolutely correct.

[D-Bone]

Thanks for the replies guys. Found out he already has a spyder2 so that is good. Also, I'm sure the budget will dictate how far he can go with this. Once he sees the price for a setup like this, he may have to sacrifice some things. May have to settle on 2GB of ram. We'll see. Any more info on the scratch disk that Photoshop can use? I've never done that large of work in photoshop so i dont know what kind of performance impact that scratch disk will have.

If anyone else has anything to add, feel free.

[Ghost]

I haven't done that much with Photoshop either, but I do know it can make a huge performance increase. You have to set a location for scratch to go to anyway, and putting it on another disk increases speed in the same way that high end server apps like SQL and Oracle benefit from putting logs and the database on different drives. In some cases you can almost get double the disk throughput.

[Stromgarde]

I haven't done that much with Photoshop either, but I do know it can make a huge performance increase. You have to set a location for scratch to go to anyway, and putting it on another disk increases speed in the same way that high end server apps like SQL and Oracle benefit from putting logs and the database on different drives. In some cases you can almost get double the disk throughput.

yep... basically the same idea.

Straight out of the photoshop CS2 help file for your eyes only:
---------------

Assigning scratch disks
When your system does not have enough RAM to perform an operation, Photoshop and ImageReady use a proprietary virtual memory technology, also called scratch disks. A scratch disk is any drive or drive partition with free memory. By default, Photoshop and ImageReady use the hard drive on which the operating system is installed as the primary scratch disk.
In the Plug‑ins & Scratch Disks preferences in Photoshop, you can change the primary scratch disk and designate a second, third, or fourth scratch disk to be used when the primary disk is full. Your primary scratch disk should be your fastest hard disk; make sure it has plenty of defragmented space available.
The following guidelines can help you assign scratch disks:
For best performance, scratch disks should be on a different drive than any large files you are editing.
Scratch disks should be on a different drive than the one used for virtual memory.
Scratch disks should be on a local drive. That is, they should not be accessed over a network.
Scratch disks should be conventional (nonremovable) media.
RAID disks/disk arrays are good choices for dedicated scratch disk volumes.
Drives with scratch disks should be defragmented regularly.