[Techtalk] digital photo editing hardware

[Rudy Zijlstra]

Carla Schroder wrote:
> Hey all,
>
> My main workstation has an AMD Sempron 3000 + I GB RAM, and I have been happy 
> with it. Until now, that is, since I started doing some heavy-duty digital 
> photo management and editing. The CPU redlines often, and the poor thing bogs 
> down when I'm editing 8 MB raw files. So I'm thinking of upgrading. It hardly 
> ever touches swap, so it seems main deal is a CPU upgrade, plus whatever goes 
> along with that.
>
> Any opinions? Advice? Dual-core? Exotic RAMs? 
>
> thanks!
> Carla
>   
Whether you go AMD or Intel, in both cases you will have to get a new 
MB, as i do not expect your current to have an AM2 slot.
I would take 2G of RAM, as memory does not seem the bottleneck, and this 
should give you space enough to play.

 From tests it seems that the current Core2Duo Extreme is slightly 
better then the AMD X2. On the other hand, the AMD is cheaper and seems 
to run on lower power as well. When you go to quad cores the AMD is 
clearly cheaper. I have not been following quad core reviews though....

All in all, whatever you choose you will find a significant improvement.

My main test machine is a AMD X2 4600 at the moment. Since i bought it a 
number of faster procs have come out :(

Its doing quit nicely what i got it for though, which was to have a good 
setup - though not totally high end - to be able to test h.264 realtime 
decoding :)

Cheers,


Rudy