Spec me a PC for Photoshop

[tricky]

My colleague's machine is giving us grief at the moment. We are on the verge of rebuilding a new machine. The main use will be Photoshop, but with limited cad/max/vray work every now and again. The current machine has 32GB with an i7 CPU, but I think we are hitting the ram limits with multiple psd files well over 1GB in size needing to be worked on simultaneously. It isn't so rare to have a PSD over 2.5GB!

Am I right in thinking that the only way to move up to over 32GB is to move to XEON?

[Donald2B]

Nope. Xeon isn't going to give you any benefit in Photochop.

I've got iCore7 machines here with 64GB Ram. You limitation will be on the motherboard chipset and the amount of memory it will support. The motherboards we are using max out at 128GB of RAM.

We've got a couple photoshop machines that have only 24GB RAM and they work great. We too can see PSD files get over 4GB each. This machine works just fine with them.

You may need to see how much memory he is using and how much is getting put into the page file. Also may need to make sure that he is using the 64bit version of Photochop, as that will greatly determine it's ability to use all of that extra RAM. 32bit photoshop can't see more than 3GB anyways, so it doesn't matter how much memory you put into the computer, PS is the weakest link.

[tricky]

He's definately using the 64bit version.

[Neilg]

photoshop doesnt flush the ram out when you close psds. so when you reach the limit, you have to close photoshop and re-open it. It's annoying and i'm pretty sure it's a bug - you can close every image file so ps has nothing open and it'll still be using 15+gb of ram in the task manager. I have to close it multiple times per day to flush this out.

How many psd's is he having to open a day though? i've gone through 4+ 2gb files at once before and it stays under 16gb :/

[tricky]

photoshop doesnt flush the ram out when you close psds. so when you reach the limit, you have to close photoshop and re-open it. It's annoying and i'm pretty sure it's a bug -

I noticed this just today. Bloody stupid! Even when you use purge it doesn't seem to clear.

We will monitor things....

[AJ Jefferies]

The keeping files in RAM when you purge has been a long bugbear of mine with PS.

My second machine is an i7 with 24GB and it doesn't break a sweat with multiple monster PSD/PSB files, so it seems odd that your system would be struggling with 32GB.

[trixian]

Not only does it hog memory, but it will at random times litter those giant temp files on your disk, "forgetting" to clean them up after you close up.

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Heya

I use in PSD files that are 10gb size and around 7.5k+ in resolution. What you want is minimum 48gb ram + OC i7. You want as fast ram as possible and CPU single thread to be as fast as you can get. PS is badly multithreaded. Also I would hock up as many fastest raid ssd as I could afford

Only times when PS leave big tmp files is when you crash it

[Neilg]

Only times when PS leave big tmp files is when you crash it

That's not true at all. My PS devours disk space and has to be manually cleaned up every couple of weeks and i'm pretty sure it hasn't crashed once in the past few months.

[trixian]

Also the fact that your 7.5k files grow to a whopping 10gigs is testament to the ass-backwards way of handling images that Adobe uses.

(RantOn)For the love of god, will someone please make us a viable alternative soon?(RantOff)

This caught my attention recently. Could this evolve into our saviour Photoshop replacement?

Sorry for the thread hijack

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Well Adobe lost its part of PS source code so who knows what new software we can get