Does anyone have a reliable benchmark or just knowledge for processors and vid-cards for using Photoshop cs2?
http://www.driverheaven.net/photoshop/
Results (disregard the idiot in the first place which submitted so obviously fake numbers):
http://www.driverheavendownloads.net/photoshop/results.php
I can confirm this result (ranked #7) as authentic because I know the person who submitted it:
http://www.driverheavendownloads.net/photoshop/view.php?id=197
What is the best combo CPU and GPU if price is not an issue?
I also do 3d graphics
- animations 2d/3d
If you want to work with large LCD displays nVidia is the way to go. If you need OpenGL for 3D graphics, then you should consider Quadro family depending on the software you use. Some 3D applications can benefit from professional OpenGL capabilities of modern video cards. Again nVidia is the way to go.
Dual, Quad or 8way Opteron with SLI and one or more 7900GT / GTX VGA on a Tyan S2895A2NRF.
Is that a dream machine over which you are wetting your pants, or a suggestion?!?
IMO, spending that much money that way is a nonsense.
Most important thing for Photoshop is the RAM amount and HDD speed. Larger CPU cache also helps.
I would advise you to get 975 based mainboard and 8 GB of DDR2-667 RAM, Pentium D 965 (
#1), (
#2) and best Quadro you can afford along with Windows XP x64 Edition because Windows XP with SP2 can see only 3GB of RAM.
Get 2x 150GB Raptor drives (WDC WD1500AHFD) and set them as RAID0 with two partitions -- first for swap/temp/scratch (32GB FAT32) and the second one for the system/apps and 2x 400GB RE2 (WDC WD4000YR) drives also set up as RAID0 for data.
At the moment that would be the best choice for the job you want to do.
Solid state drives could be used as a scratch disks for photoshop but not for much else due to their limited capacity unless you find one in which you could fit 16GB to hold the swap file on it.
Everyone who recommends you to turn off swap doesn't have a clue about virtual memory and the way OS works. Whatever amount of RAM you have swap should not be turned off because system is designed around paging (check
this if in doubt).
I agree with you on nVidia their workstation cards are very nice.
I'm not drooling over the S2895 because I actually have 3 AMD64s one of which is an Opty S940.
That was a perfectly legitimate suggestion for a high end graphics workstation.
An SLI capable Dual or Quad Opteron with 4+GB RAM would make sense.
A lot more sense than a P4 or a P4 Xeon or any other Intel CPU for that matter.