Photoshop Rig

[mjawhar]

Hi Guys,

Just wanted to get some thoughts on this rig I'm building for Photoshop. Its for a professional illustrator/concept artist (exclusively 2D). My sticking points are: how much power is needed and I'm a bit confused with Dual channel and triple channel ram. (I want 32G ram).

"ASUS P8H77-V LE LGA 1155 Intel H77 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard"
G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 32GB (4 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM 1333 (PC3 10666) Desktop Memory F3-10666CL9Q-32GBXL"
2 "Samsung 840 Series 2.5 inch 120GB SATA III internal Solid State Drive (SSD) MZ-7TD120BW"
"Intel Core i7-3770K Quad-Core Processor 3.5 GHz 8 MB Cache LGA 1155 - BX80637I73770K"
Corsair Builder Series CX 500 Watt ATX/EPS 80 PLUS (CX500)
"NVIDIA Quadro 600 by PNY 1GB DDR3 PCI Express Gen 2 x16 DVI-I DL and DisplayPort OpenGL, DirectX, CUDA, and OpenCL Profesional Graphics Board, VCQ600

Thanks,

 

[Guest]

Hi Guys,

Just wanted to get some thoughts on this rig I'm building for Photoshop. Its for a professional illustrator/concept artist (exclusively 2D). My sticking points are: how much power is needed and I'm a bit confused with Dual channel and triple channel ram. (I want 32G ram).

"ASUS P8H77-V LE LGA 1155 Intel H77 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s USB 3.0 ATX Intel Motherboard"
G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 32GB (4 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM 1333 (PC3 10666) Desktop Memory F3-10666CL9Q-32GBXL"
2 "Samsung 840 Series 2.5 inch 120GB SATA III internal Solid State Drive (SSD) MZ-7TD120BW"
"Intel Core i7-3770K Quad-Core Processor 3.5 GHz 8 MB Cache LGA 1155 - BX80637I73770K"
Corsair Builder Series CX 500 Watt ATX/EPS 80 PLUS (CX500)
"NVIDIA Quadro 600 by PNY 1GB DDR3 PCI Express Gen 2 x16 DVI-I DL and DisplayPort OpenGL, DirectX, CUDA, and OpenCL Profesional Graphics Board, VCQ600

Thanks,

Everything You Need to Know About the Dual-, Triple-, and Quad-Channel Memory Architectures
in short the difference with triple, quad and dual channel memory is the motherboard and cpu (platfrom) that needs it. the first generation of iCore 7 uses triple; the socket 1366. sandy bridge-E uses quad channel memory, socket 2011. anything else in the past 7+ years uses dual channel. core dous, AMD and sandy/ivy bridge; that is a ivy bridge platform you list so dual channel is what it uses. it can run in single channel mode, one stick of RAM with about 5% performance loss.

for the build i am not sure if a quadro is nesessary since you stated exclusively for 2D. most any consumer graphics card with good openGL support will work fine; its not like you are heavily rendering a massive 3D object, where quados and fire pros would be of a benefit.

ATM adobe had been talking about offloading workloads to openCL (not to be confused with openGL) with CS 6 but so far it is only being taken advantage of in premiere pro. until then an nidia card, which still does better openGL would be a fine choice. when adobe incorporates openCL in PS then an AMD card is better.


since PS uses a "scratch disk" i would like to suggest getting another disk for that; it will save wear on the SSD and actually speed things up by avoiding a read/write bottleneck. if you find yourself getting a less expensive consumer level graphics card and having a few dollars, get a smaller SSD for that now mind you the life expectancy will be decreased with all the writes but the overall performance will be phenomenal.

those are just my thoughts . . i am not a professional graphics editor but i play one on T.V.

(well sometimes i have been paid for it . . . )

 

[mjawhar]

Forgot to add to the initial list.
Western Digital 2 TB SATA II 64 MB Cache 3.5-Inch Retail Kit - WDBAAZ0020HNC-NRS

I'm doing the Quadro because, from what I read, CS6 can use it (smudging and ***). I was torn between a gaming/consumer oriented vcard or a workstation one. Because this rig will do zero gaming and I thought to leave my options open in terms of utility, I went with the Quadro.

Thanks for the article on the Ram. From my very rudimentary understanding and your explanation, I am fine. I'll have 2(?) dual channel. 4 * 8g.

I could still use some help with the PSU though. A friend of mine said 500 was not nearly enough for the ram and processor.

Thanks,

 

[Guest]

from what i see the quadro 600 doesn't even have a 6 pin power connection so it will stay under 75 watts.
the i7 can hit ~80 watts and ram uses 4 watts a stick . . even including fans and hard drive/SSD that won't go over 250 watts.

that CX 500 is enough.

 

[mjawhar]

Best answer selected by mjawhar.