The Custom Photoshop Computer is Up and Running

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A few months ago I shared some specs. here regarding a PC designed to run Adobe Photoshop perfectly. Today I would like to announce that computer is up and running. It’s very fast!

Before readers begin to berate me for building a PC instead of a MAC let me say that you can still get a lot more computer for your money with a PC. The computer I build is not available at any price from MAC but a Power MAC G5 with 12 gigs of ram and a 1tb hard drive is just under $4000. I built my system which includes a Core i7 quad core processor, two 1tb hard drives, a 500gb hard drive and 16gigs of ram for under $1400. I chose Windows 7 as my OS since I really don’t like Windows 8 at all. Who wants their desktop computer to act like their phone?

Originally I had planned on using an MSI motherboard but several consultants and numerous forum posts convinced me to choose an Intel DZ77GA-70K board instead. That was a great choice even though it was more than twice the cost of the MSI board. Installation instructions couldn’t have been any easier to follow. That was a good thing since I had never built a computer from the ground up before. I had  added some drives and expansion cards but that was the extent of my computer-building experience.

I chose to load Windows on a separate hard disk from my Adobe Photoshop program so the computer could read from both places at the same time. I have also chosen to place all the data on another separate drive for faster access. That being said, my current workflow involves keeping all my photos on external Raid hard drives so access to the images is slowed through the Firewire 800 ports. For larger files I can easily copy them to the internal data drive and work more quickly from there. Once I completely abandon my old PC I’ll take one of its drives and install it as a dedicated “Scratch” disk for Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop doesn’t like to share its scratch disk with programs or data from what I’ve read. Even though it should never get used, I’ll have 320 gigs of scratch disk available if I need it. The new drives are all Western Digital Black drives because I appreciate the 3 year warranty and they make no sound at all.

I also chose two 8 gigabite sticks of Crucial Ballistix RAM. These will function as dual-channel fast memory leaving me room to double that number in the future if I choose. If I become  even more concerned about speed, all the components will handle “Overclocking” of the processor but I doubt I’ll never feel that need.

I’m still tweaking stuff so I haven’t put this computer to a stress test yet. Once all the programs are loaded (brutal!) and the network settings are correct I’ll see how my new tool handles some heavy-duty bit-crunching. If you want to see the rest of the components they’re listed on my June blog post below.

So, you’re probably wondering what the photo above has to do with this blog post. Absolutely nothing. But check back soon for more thoughts on the images.

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