Originally Posted by procyon
GPU does not accelerate photo editing.
Just a pinch of salt for that statement, you'll find around the web that Aperture have a reputation to rely on GPU while Lightroom is supposed to rely more on CPU.
Adobe have made some declaration that they will work in close relationship with NVIDIA to take advantage from GPU.
Basically, a GPU is a massively multicore processing unit, the idea of using this processing power for pararel calculation is coming it way and we are seeing now some "homemade" and "professionnal" supercalculators based on GPU.
The consumer application that can take the highest benefit from parallel processing is precisely image processing (either 3D or 2D)
Now it is true, that it is much easier to code for a single core.
Regarding the configuration, it's all about tradeof, if you are limitless about your budget go and see and the setup of Mac pro, they are the reference for professional solution for photo and cinema editing.
If you want a realistic setup :
For motherboard : Asus (I have a friend who makes video editing, and he crashed enough motherboards to says that Asus is definitively a go)
For CPU :
- If you go monocore, look for the higher Athlon 64
- If you go multicore, go Intel Core Duo or Quad,
For memory, look for the maximum bus speed that can handle your motherboard, and take brand Samsung, Corsair and so on. I would say that 4GB is reasonable for graphic application at the moment, I not sure if more would be used.
For graphic card, I would say NVIDIA because they support a lot their implementation of C++ for applications that are not games, so if an application try to take advantage of the GPU, I would say it will work better with NVIDIA.
For Hard Drive, take at least 2, one for Data and one for OS, SSD are very expensive at the moment (it will be accessible in 2009) but the last raptors are really good from what I know.
Make regular backups, disks do crash.
Try to make a coherent configuration regarding your budget, if you take middle range elements, take everything middle range.
Regards,
Guillaume