How to set up a great Photoshop machine

Question

How to set up a great Photoshop machine
From the blog of John Nack, [former?*] Photoshop Principal Program Manager
At Photoshop World this week, performance testing lead Adam Jerugim
presented a performance guide with hardware recommendations and
information about the CS5 performance preferences.  I’ve put his notes
in this post’s extended entry.
http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2010/09/how-to-set-up-a-great-photoshop-machine.html#more-271 2
Operating Systems: Mac OS 10.6.4 and Windows 7 64-bit
CPU: Intel Core i7/Xeon or AMD Phenom II/Opteron with 4 cores. More than 4 cores gives diminishing returns.
RAM: Enough to keep Efficiency readout at  100%. If Efficiency is low (<95%), adding RAM will provide biggest  benefit. 4GB will cover most digital photography uses. 8GB leaves room  for other apps and fits huge documents in RAM.
Video Card: Any modern card with at least 512MB VRAM; 1GB if doing heavy 3D work.
Disk: Use a separate disk for Photoshop  scratch. If you spend a lot of time opening / saving large data  files, another separate disk for data files will speed that up. Faster  disks are better. RAID0 is faster. SSD is faster yet. RAID0 of SSDs is  fastest but super expensive. If you have plenty of RAM (meaning your  Efficiency readout is 95% or more), separate/faster disks for scratch  provide minimal benefit. If Efficiency readout is low, a separate SSD  for Photoshop scratch will be a big win. SSD boot volume will speed  booting and app launch, but not Photoshop operations.
Memory Usage: this should be no higher than  70% on systems running 32bit Photoshop or with less than 4GB of total  physical RAM. On systems with 8GB or more, use 70% if you plan on  running other applications at the same time as PS, or higher (up to 90%)  if you only plan on using PS on your system.
Efficiency %: can be found in the document window drop-down options. Operations fit in RAM when this 95% or greater.
History & Cache: if you work with small  documents with lots of layers, start with the Tall and Thin  button (which will set cache levels = 2, tile size = 128K/132K). If you  work with large documents with few layers, try the Big and Flat button  (which will set cache levels = 6, tile size = 1024K/1028K). Using more  history states uses more scratch disk space.  More history states may  also use more RAM, particularly when running actions or scripts on  large documents. If you see Efficiency drop below 95%, especially after  running actions, try reducing history states or adding RAM.
Scratch Disks: a separate drive for Photoshop  scratch disk will avoid slowdowns from Photoshop and the OS trying  to access the disk at the same time. If your Efficiency number often  drops below 95%, the gain can be large. Faster disks are better. A RAID0  array is faster, an SSD faster still. If using a RAID or SSD, try  setting the Tile Size to 1024K – AMD CPUs prefer 132K / 1028K sizes, but  128K and especially 1024K are more efficient for RAID and SSD use  regardless of CPU type.
GPU Settings: you can change GPU settings by  clicking on the Advanced Settings button. For more more modern  video cards there will be three options: Basic, Normal, Advanced.  Changes to this setting will only take effect after PS restart, and  would be worth experimenting with if painting performance is sluggish.
Posted by John Nack          at 7:10 AM on September 03, 2010
* I understand Mr. Nack may have moved to a different area of Adobe management?
Wo Tai Lao Le
我太老了

Answer 1

Nice of you to point it out here as I at least don’t follow Mr.Nash’s blog regularly.