Hello, everyone. I can't spend a day without looking around on this club because I'm so interested in the potential progress of my car, and I also want to help a whole lot of people. I am thinking about taking up Gimp, CorelDraw, Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator for photo work and some video editing programs for videos. I have a student discount and am definitely going to get this software. I'd like to know the differences people have seen between pieces of hardware. Right now, here'* what I have:

Mobile 'Puter
2GHz AMD Turion laptop with 1GB memory, 160GB hard drive, and an X1100 video card. LINUX! I am running Ubuntu with about 119GB to spare, so I can probably really easily pick up Gimp and use that to edit images.

Home 'Puter
I sold the processor and the memory, but had a Core 2 Duo 6600 and 2GB DDR800. The PC felt very laggy, but I had Windows. I guess that'* the issue. The rest of the PC is this:
4 300GB Seagate SATA drives in RAID 5
GeForce 8800GTS 640MB
XP Pro SP2

I was told that some Adobe products use the video card to provide an advantage in processing pictures and videos. I doubt it unless this is a Mac thing for vector graphics. But vector graphics should be easier than OpenGL, and DirectX anyway, right?

Should I go for a quad-core, or would a good dual-core work just as well with the imaging products? What has been your guys' experience? How much memory should I get? I can't believe I'd need more than 2GB, but I guess I could. Oh, and this PC will also be used for games....

And if you're wondering about the hardware, I got the video card for Christmas and bought everything else after getting a long-overdue payment for work and products sold over the course of several months. A friend sold me the laptop, an Aspire 5100, for $300.

8800 GTX FTW lol but the dual should do fine but hell if you can upgrade i say got for it

Well, that'* the thing - the upgrading part. I could, but I am sincerely considering not going for the quad core. Would I need it? Does anyone know how soon the 8-, 16-, and perhaps 32-core processors are coming out? I'd rather not buy a 4-core right now to have a lower clock speed but more cores only to find that in about 2 years, people will have 40-cores. Anyone up to date on this?

you wouldn't need the quad core unless your app supports it. Your apps would make it worthwhile I beleive.

For gaming stick to dual core.

As for memory, with Xp your probably stuck with 2gb if you want to keep dual channel and 3Gb if you go to single channel. Xp has a 4gb limit for adress space; address space that aslo gets used for vidoe card memory, nic address, bios addressing,....
You can try 4gb dual channel, some motherbds will work but you'll only see ~3-3.5Gb of it, others lock right up.

That raid array will slow you down. If you're looking for best speed change to two raid 1'*. Photoshop will definitely thank you for having a main and a seperate working drive (arrays).
If you're looking for most secure then keep the raid5 but maybe throwin a 80Gb boot drive and leave the raid as the work drive.

I have the RAID 5 for redundancy, and HDTach shows about a 250MB/* max transfer rate. I wish I had some pictures, but the processor is out... Well.. It was basically a constant oscillating line at about 200MB/*.

If I were to have 2 1GB sticks and 2 512MB sticks, I could have 3GB in dual channel mode. How does the 965 memory controller handle 4 sticks of memory?

Like I said, raid 5 is great for keeping your data secure. if thats what you need. I keep my photo'* & stuff on a 4x80 array.

I didn't think about 512 sticks, that should work! Just make sure you put it in right, ie keep the 1gb'* in one color and the 512k'* in the other color slots but check you manual to be sure.

I think I may need to rework the RAID anyway since I want to move to the 680i chipset. If I do that, I could run a 1333MHz FSB processor.

What'* your favorite DDR2 memory chip? I'll probably take anything that does 4-4-4-12 at 800MHz, but I just love overclocking! Didn't Micron have some chips that went into sky-high frequencies? Also:
http://www.bonnevilleclub.com/forum/...c.php?p=974958

So, I guess I should pick up a quad-core processor. Does anyone want an ECS mATX motherboard? I can get it with the Q6600 as a combo deal at Fry'* for under $300. Does anyone have a memory recommendation? I'm looking into OCZ, Patriot, and even Geil for overclocking to crazy frequencies.

I'd parouse Tomshardware'* reviews of those memories.
IIRC timing begins to play less of a vital roll as shear speed increases.

The reason I'm looking for good timing is that I can keep it fairly within spec at clock speeds in the stratosphere if I can get the latencies to be low enough when just stok.

Micron did make chips (i believe called DS9'*) that were known for being darn good
and at having sky high clocks. but i don't see the point. I have a duo 6600 and 2 gigs of DDR 800
running 4-4-12 at 2.0 volts. The processor is at a FSB of 1066. DDR 533 in dual channel will keep up with that.
At 533-dual channel the ram would have a bandwidth of 8.5GB/sec. An Intel 6600'* bandwidth is 8.5GB/*.
DDR 800 has a limit of 12.8 GB/*. Which is way more than necessary.
If your gonna over-clock, Start with the processor, As far as i can tell overclocking
your ram wouldn't do anything but generate more heat and decrease the lifetime of the sticks.

Now as for the Raid array. i am a bit curious as to how you think a RAID 5 with 4 drives is slower than dual mirrors?
RAID5 is advantageous because we use less disks in the endeavor to provide large amounts of disk space, while still having protection.
example.
he has 4 300 gig drives.
Raid 5 will have you use 3 drives and sacrifice 1 to parity so 900 gigs with redundancy for 1 drive to fail.
Raid 1+0 (I think this is how you worded it) will have you use 2 mirrors. each with
2 300 gig drives. but you lose half the volume for redundancy so each mirror is now
300 gigs. Then this is where i get lost. do you want to stripe them via a Raid 0 array to get 600 gigs or just have 2 mirrors on your system?
Either way he loses more space for no real performance benefit.
I currently have several arrays, and because the data i store is of no real importance (games) I Raid 0 them. 2-80 gig'* Raid 0(older) 2-120 gig Raid 0(old)
3-18 gig Scsi'* Was Raid 5 now 0 (old) and numerous others that i
no longer have. And through all this when it comes to making Raid arrays
there are only 2 choices for me. Raid 0 for performance. And Raid 5 for redundancy.
Raid 1 (or 1+0) was never a cost efficient unless you only had 2 drives.
But that'* just me. I think it is just a matter of preference.
Good luck with the rest of you rig dude. And i think you motherboard was the
problem. my 6600 with ddr800 screams. Nice video card too! WANT

Rubix