I need your help with my config.
Prime use: Aperture, Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator (at the same time, switching back and forth)
Filesize: Heavy. PSD up to 500M, up to 30 layers.
Hardware:
I am price conscious (or to better put it - the investment needs to be cost justifiable, it is a tool, not a toy project) , so decent Octads were not an option. I plan to upgrade CPU next year to either 6 Core, if such option is going to work or to a decent Quad Xeon if the new 6 core CPUs are not going to run on the current Mac Pros.
What else can I do with this machine? Would SSD for System help? To be honest with you, apart from lots of noise, I do not even see much of a difference between the Stripped RAID Data partition and a slow non-RAID drives. I tried Write on a 1.2G psd file and used both, "fast" RAID Data and a "slow" Backup drive - same result, 37 sec. Yes, Xbench shows that there is a 200% gain in performance, but I do not see it in real life. To be fair, if I try the Scratch partition it gives me 18sec for the same file. So, I am not sure why there is no real life performance gain there.
What else can I do apart from getting another 4G RAM to fill up the memory slots? Video card? Will it help with PS?
Any help is greatly appreciated.
Prime use: Aperture, Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator (at the same time, switching back and forth)
Filesize: Heavy. PSD up to 500M, up to 30 layers.
Hardware:
- Basic Quad 2.66
- ATI 120 Video
- 12G RAM (in the mail)
- Bay 1- Hitachi 640G system
- Bay 2-3: Seagate 7200.11 2x1T, Stripped RAID, two partitions: 64G Scratch (use for PS), remaining - Data
- Bay 4 - WD 500G for back up (to be replaced with a 2T drive a bit later)
I am price conscious (or to better put it - the investment needs to be cost justifiable, it is a tool, not a toy project) , so decent Octads were not an option. I plan to upgrade CPU next year to either 6 Core, if such option is going to work or to a decent Quad Xeon if the new 6 core CPUs are not going to run on the current Mac Pros.
What else can I do with this machine? Would SSD for System help? To be honest with you, apart from lots of noise, I do not even see much of a difference between the Stripped RAID Data partition and a slow non-RAID drives. I tried Write on a 1.2G psd file and used both, "fast" RAID Data and a "slow" Backup drive - same result, 37 sec. Yes, Xbench shows that there is a 200% gain in performance, but I do not see it in real life. To be fair, if I try the Scratch partition it gives me 18sec for the same file. So, I am not sure why there is no real life performance gain there.
What else can I do apart from getting another 4G RAM to fill up the memory slots? Video card? Will it help with PS?
Any help is greatly appreciated.