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2.93 Quad vs. 2.26 Octad - for Photography

R

rmpstudio

macrumors member
Original poster
Mar 15, 2009
81
0
So,.. i'm not hip on all of this single and multi core stuff and threading or whatever. All i know is i want the fastest MAC for processing and editing photos for my PHotography business. I use PS and Lightroom at the same time and i need to be able to switch between them quickly and of course go through my photos quickly. So what i think i need is lots of ram and processing power. But my question is do i need extra processors and cores?

according to https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/7255676/ it looks like the 2.93 quad has a better overall performance rating but the 2.26 has a better multicore speedup (whatever that is).

SO,.. should i go with 2.93 quad or 2.26 octad?

thanks for the input.
 
SnowLeopard2008 said:
2.26GHz Octrad of course. 4 people working for you or 8 people? I'd choose 8 people. Gives me room to grow since the octrad MP can go beyond 8GB of ram.
Click to expand...

Four fast workers or eight relatively slow?
You can't just expect things to scale linearly, you have to consider the overhead (management, in this analogy).
 
huh?

rylin said:
Four fast workers or eight relatively slow?
You can't just expect things to scale linearly, you have to consider the overhead (management, in this analogy).
Click to expand...

i'm not sure how to read this report though.. it seems they have it ranked in the wrong spot IMO. the 2.26 Octad has the 4th fastest rating on multi core render and the #1 highest percentage for multicore speedup (again, whatever that means).

https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/7255676/

so i'm not sure how that equates to "eight relatively slow workers".
 
rmpstudio said:
i'm not sure how to read this report though.. it seems they have it ranked in the wrong spot IMO. the 2.26 Octad has the 4th fastest rating on multi core render and the #1 highest percentage for multicore speedup (again, whatever that means).

https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/7255676/

so i'm not sure how that equates to "eight relatively slow workers".
Click to expand...

Multicore speedup is basically ( (single thread performance * number of cores) - overhead).

Neither PS nor Lightroom will use all cores to the max, so the multicore speedup is largely irrelevant for that purpose.
Roughly 75-90% of what you'll be doing will be using one core, so it'd make more sense increasing single core performance.

Of course, the big snafu with the Quad is the relatively few DIMM slots and current limit of 8GB.
With that said, I have a feeling the Quad 2.66 or 2.93 with 6 or 8GB of RAM and two raptors in RAID-1 would let you work without being annoyed by slowdowns etc.

As to the benchmarks, I doubt the figures for the 2.66 Quad.
It's not logical that the quad gets more done per core under full load than a single core would normally.

As far as I can tell, these benchmarks aren't controlled benchmarks (i.e., start off from a known state), but they're probably within ±10% of each other.
 
I'm a photographer and just ordered the 2.93 octo, by heck that was a lot of money.

I do about 80 weddings a year shooting in raw on 1ds mk3's so I can justify it. Still stings a bit though :)

I use aperture if that matters.
 
sejanus said:
I'm a photographer and just ordered the 2.93 octo, by heck that was a lot of money.

I do about 80 weddings a year shooting in raw on 1ds mk3's so I can justify it. Still stings a bit though :)

I use aperture if that matters.
Click to expand...

How much memory did you decide to get? I work with 1Ds3 files as well.
 
sejanus said:
I'm a photographer and just ordered the 2.93 octo, by heck that was a lot of money.

I do about 80 weddings a year shooting in raw on 1ds mk3's so I can justify it. Still stings a bit though :)

I use aperture if that matters.
Click to expand...


After 6 weddings, it would have paid for itself!? ;)
 
JimGoshorn said:
How much memory did you decide to get? I work with 1Ds3 files as well.
Click to expand...

my current macpro has 16 but I am going 12 with the new box due to the whole triple ram stick thing, when 4gb chips are a bit better priced down the track I'll go 24.

After 6 weddings, it would have paid for itself!?
Click to expand...

6? that'd be a hard slog for a computer. more like 2-3.
 
Raid0 for now?

sejanus said:
I'm a photographer and just ordered the 2.93 octo, by heck that was a lot of money.

I do about 80 weddings a year shooting in raw on 1ds mk3's so I can justify it. Still stings a bit though :)

I use aperture if that matters.
Click to expand...

I shoot 5dmkII with 23mb files and medium format film with scans that are easily 100mb each. It takes me forever to scan and to save.

NEW THOUGHT:
I am thinking of getting the 2.26 octad mainly because of 1) the 16gb of memory and 2) future software - PS EVEN - taking advantage of the Octad architecture. But what i'm going to do to make it faster until then is get two velociraptor 300gb hard drives and use a RAID0. Do i need the raid card for that??????????????
 
sejanus said:
my current macpro has 16 but I am going 12 with the new box due to the whole triple ram stick thing, when 4gb chips are a bit better priced down the track I'll go 24.
Click to expand...

Have you seen any photoshop benchmarks yet? My G5 Quad has 8gb and that isn't enough. I wasn't quite sure if 12 would be enough with Photoshop and Lightroom open at the same time working on 21mp images. If I had to guess an average file size it would be around 600-700mb per image and 12 sounded like it would be cutting things a bit close.

Do you figure with 12, you are going to have RAM to spare?
 
JimGoshorn said:
Have you seen any photoshop benchmarks yet? My G5 Quad has 8gb and that isn't enough. I wasn't quite sure if 12 would be enough with Photoshop and Lightroom open at the same time working on 21mp images. If I had to guess an average file size it would be around 600-700mb per image and 12 sounded like it would be cutting things a bit close.

Do you figure with 12, you are going to have RAM to spare?
Click to expand...

My current box is ok ram wise with 16 so if the new one with 12 isn't, then I'll pop in some more ram sticks to go back to 16. But I think it'll be ok.

To be honest I don't really use photoshop that much. I can pretty much edit an entire wedding using aperture, I only use photoshop a bit when I design a wedding album.
 
rmpstudio said:
So,.. i'm not hip on all of this single and multi core stuff and threading or whatever. All i know is i want the fastest MAC for processing and editing photos for my PHotography business.
Click to expand...

Look at the green bar: https://forums.macrumors.com/posts/7270035/ The highest green bar value will be your best machine unless you're batch processing thousands of images at once.

And for pro photography you won't need more than 6 or 8 gigs of RAM so I wouldn't consider that a limitation whichever you choose.

If the HDs you're getting fit the MacPro then you do not need a RAID card. In a 2 drive RAID at level 0 (RAID 0) there will be no noticeable advantage to using a raid card and no disadvantages to using MP's software/firmware RAID 0. So just put them in the MP and use "Disk Utility" to set up the RAID. ;)

.
 
For pro photography, the ram is more important than 8 cores.

In the current photoshop, an 8 core is like have 8 people, 2 of them working for you and 6 just sitting around. Most of photoshop filters aren't optimized for multi-core computers.

The 8 cores are nice for batch processing, but if you are working on just one file, ram and disk access are more of a factor than 4 or 8 cores.
 
spacepower7 said:
For pro photography, the ram is more important than 8 cores.

In the current photoshop, an 8 core is like have 8 people, 2 of them working for you and 6 just sitting around. Most of photoshop filters aren't optimized for multi-core computers.

The 8 cores are nice for batch processing, but if you are working on just one file, ram and disk access are more of a factor than 4 or 8 cores.
Click to expand...

If RAM is more important get the 2.26GHz Octad skip the Quad and skip the 08 models.

Skip the Quads because you can put in 32GB max as to 8GB.

And skip the 08' 8 core models because in memory tests its 2x slower compared to the new nehalem.
 
Tesselator said:
And for pro photography you won't need more than 6 or 8 gigs of RAM so I wouldn't consider that a limitation whichever you choose.
.
Click to expand...


Oh shut up...
Even if the photoshop doesnt utilize directly more than the 3.789Gigs of memory it can use more for scratch.
AND we photogs usually work with different programs open (lightroom,eos capture etc..) so decent amount of memory is good.


Grimace said:
p.s. Aperture is multi-core aware -- use that over LR! :)
Click to expand...



Lightroom is very,very much multicore aware. Move on...
 
spacepower7 said:
For pro photography, the ram is more important than 8 cores.

In the current photoshop, an 8 core is like have 8 people, 2 of them working for you and 6 just sitting around. Most of photoshop filters aren't optimized for multi-core computers.
Click to expand...

Yup all true. But In all of the many various editing situations I've been in with PS and other image processors I've never seen it go over 6 or 8 Gigs. Really 4 is enough for almost everything. So the 32GB comment above is not correct. 6 to 8 max is just fine and probably will be for 3 to 5 years to come.


EDIT: From above...

LR2.3 Kicks a$$ on Aperture. And Capture One kicks both their butts in speed and quality of output! :D
I Think Aperture has to be the worst image editor in it's feature league.

Also Macinposh has a point about using multiple apps. He's confused about memory scratch which doesn't happen tho. :D So if you intend on running 3 or 4 large applications at once then maybe 8GB would be just seeing the wall. 8 or 10 large apps at once would probably push it over - depending on the apps and data of course. ;)
 
Tesselator said:
Also Macinposh has a point about using multiple apps. He's confused about memory scratch which doesn't happen tho. :D So if you intend on running 3 or 4 large applications at once then maybe 8GB would be just seeing the wall. 8 or 10 large apps at once would probably push it over - depending on the apps and data of course. ;)
Click to expand...


Nope. It should be quite well documented on PS forums : Directly PS can utilize the 3.8gigs but it can use up to that same amount as a "virtual scratch" before starting to feed the I/Os to the physical disk.

If you have been working with multiple large files (few 400meg,few 1.5gig pics) you can see the mem usage creep up till 6-7 gigs.


My personal record is a bit over 8 gigs with PS+LR+Mail running. You can´t say that that is too many programs open at the same time... :D
 
As someone else who has watched his available memory in Activity Monitor creep down to a few hundred MB, do yourself a favor and allow for more than 8GB even if you don't need it right now.

Photoshop and it's layered files are pigs for memory so there's no such thing as too much RAM :D
 
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