How much power?

[pikey]

Last Saturday I had my first play in a studio (which was great), and following the advice of experienced photograhers there I took all the pictures in RAW.

This left me with about 3Gb of shots. Some are for the bin, a small minority are great and some could certainly benefit from being experimented with (I have an ARW manipulating application from Sony that came with it. Can't remember the name).

The thing is, my PC which has always been fine for anything I want to do, can now be considered "bloody slow". In fact it took me an hour just to view all 3Gb of pics.

So my question is, what is a reasonable spec for an amateur to have a play with? I'm not sure of the chip in there, but it's "mid range" about a year ago. Memory is a miserly 512. The graphics card is some after market expensive thing (I bought an incompatible monitor so needed a v.good card to operate it!) so that's probably ok.

What does RAW picture manipulation use most, is it mainly memory so it'd be worth me whopping it up to 2Gb(?) or is the processor power also be far too important to necessitate an upgrade of the whole machine to get a faster bus, hdd, etc..?

(By comparison, I also have a 3 month old iMac (with about 1GB mem) and this is slower than my desktop. No idea what the chip is in that either.)

I do not need the best, the fastest, quad-core psycho nutter machine giving sub second response times, but something has to give.

Thanks


PS. I found out that Sony a100 can produce some stunning results (mind you, this is at the end of the session, not the start!).
PPS. Did you know Sony (Minolta) have a non-standard flash shoe that makes docking a standard remote impossible? Had to place the units on cell and use my flash on 1/32 to set it off.

[VxDuncan]

Lack of RAM is most likely to be the culprit, though RAW needs both. 512mb isn't enough to run Windows these days really. Stick a couple of gig in (£35 or so), and if that isn't enough upgrade the processor...

Put a new motherboard, Athlon 64 dual core 5000+ and 2gb of ram in mine last week for just over a a hundred quid!

[TonyHetherington]

I did EXACTLY the same thing; was editing jpegs and things on my little laptop, and then when I changed to RAW (a very good choice, by the way) I bought myself a big old computer. For #600 I got a kick-ass pc with 22" monitor. That's doing very well for itself.

RAM in your case definitely has to go up, I think

[pikey]

Mmm..

Ok, I'll whack the RAM up then and see how it is. If not sufficient power, I'll go for a processor upgrade too.


PS. 512 may 'not be enough for windows these days' for some, but it certainly does everything I want at adequate / fast speeds as is. This is the only thing that's scuppered me!

[ehasler]

Slam in the RAM!

You can tell if it will help by looking at the disk activity light on the front of the PC and also the performance tab in Task Manager - if the CPU is maxed out and you have plenty of "Available" in the Physical Memory section, and the Page File graph isn't going up then you need to bump up your CPU.

However I suspect that you'll notice lots of disk activity when loading the RAW files, which indicates that you need more memory.

[baz7175]

I just upgraded my CPU/MB/RAM/PSU/GrCrd last week when moving stuff from Scotland to Germany into the new pad...

Now run a 2.6Ghz quad core processor, not sure of the MB, but came with bells and whistles (not literally of course), 4Gb of RAM, 700w PSU and 512Mb graphics card....350 for the MB/CPU/RAM, a further 60 for the PSU and around 100 or so for the graphics card...I only intended to spend 300 squid but ended up paying 500 or so for all the stuff, but holy moly does the thing fly now compared with the old spec which was in my eyes fastish until the upgrade...

[megy]

pikey said:

PPS. Did you know Sony (Minolta) have a non-standard flash shoe that makes docking a standard remote impossible? Had to place the units on cell and use my flash on 1/32 to set it off.

Hi Ben, something you might like to invest it, had a loo earlier and i think this is what you may need for the next session or future ones.

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/New-Flash-Hotshoe-Adapter-Mi...

Hope thats ok.

Edited to add cheaper link.

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/New-Flash-Hotshoe-Adapter-Mi...

Edited by megy on Friday 9th November 10:42

[poah]

I was running a laptop with 1.6ghz processor and 512 of ram, upgraded the ram to 2gig and thats been more than enough to up the speed to let me use CS3 with out slowing it down.

[pikey]

megy said:

Hi Ben, something you might like to invest it, had a loo earlier and i think this is what you may need for the next session or future ones.

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/New-Flash-Hotshoe-Adapter-Mi...

Thank Ian.

Btw, why are they all abroad... Click

Oh well, not in a rush anyway!

[Gingerbread Man]

Go to the start menu then run (Vista - In the search bar at the bottom of start menu), type dxdiag. This will load up and tell you the spec of the computer.

This could be useful, but more RAM would help.

David

[sgrimshaw]

pikey said:

Btw, why are they all abroad... Click

Probably because they are copies of the real Minolta accessory.

They work fine though, I have one.

You can get some other cheap accessories on ebay for the Sony A100, I picked up a Radio Remote which is really neat for around a tenner.

[tank slapper]

I always liked Minolta's flash system. It was miles ahead of the Canon system for a long time. They have pretty much caught up I think, but there are still some things that you can't (as far as I'm aware) do with Canon - in particular the ability to remotely control a flash gun using the camera's in built flash. You need to have a remote controler or another flash mounted on the camera with Canons.

[pikey]

Took the memory up to 1.75Gb, but it doesn't make that much difference (with RAW)

Guess I need a new PC then (or always use JPG!)

[agent006]

I've found it's mostly CPU that gets used when converting from RAW.