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Choosing a Computer System for Digital Imaging
Reading the most recent comment I thought it was pertinent to touch base on the P4
debacle and RAM.
The Pentium 4 is fast in clock speed, but spins its wheels. It just doesn't have the
grunt power needed to truly chug through photoshop work. A 1.13 Ghz Pentium 3
will outpace it in most any imaging process. Also, RDRAM is a relatively lost
cause now. Its pricy and posts minimal speed gains for a considerable increase in
cost, even simple PC133 SDRAM will perform admirable. DDR RAM is probably
the best way to go, however it hasn't realized its full potential, and right now its
hard to say whether it ever will. They hardly stepped in the doorway of second
generation DDR ram, and if they had made it to the third generation as planned,
we'd all be weeping over our modest SDRAM and RDRAM. The third generation
would have been able to produce several times the performance over normal
SDRAM (depending on the system and who's designs you followed) but the overall
performance would have definately been higher.
I guess that's all dreaming right now because the second and third generation DDR
rams haven't yet come to be. Even with that though, an Athlon at approximately
1.2Ghz with 1gb DDR, a Pentium 3 1.13 Ghz with 1Gb PC133 SDRAM or a G4
with 1gb of ram will all perform well, and easily trample all over a Pentium 4
(sorry intel, you blew it).
Incidentally, a rumor in the computer industry that leaked from intel supposedly is
that the P4 will be remarketed as the Celeron. Food for thought.
-- Carl Smith, February 4, 2002
A word about Filesystems, Drives, and OSses
Some here have said many good things about SCSI drives ; it is true that SCSI is
faster, but this is mainly because the fastest drives (ie 15000rpm) are not available
in IDE, and the SCSI controller offloads the processor too. However, regarding the
Bang for Buck, an IDE raid wind hands down because SCSI drives that are faster
than IDE are also horrendously expensive.
Regarding processor load, this depends a lot on the OS too. Win95/98/Me is
incapable of asynchronous I/O, ie. the processor is used 100% during disk accesses.
This is the same for Network accesses. They are also not real multi-task OSses.
They are slow.
XP and 2000 will, on the other hand, work like you'd expect and let the processor
run your apps during disk accesses. An IDE drive will maybe use 5-10% of your
http://www.photo.net/photo/computers (17 of 33)7/3/2005 2:19:07 AM