Finding the Parts

It took me a couple of weeks to decide on the parts for the new system. First I decied to go with 8gb of Corsair Dominator ram.

Graphics Card

Another factor in my design was the fact the Photoshop CS4 will now support some sort or graphics card acceleration using OpenGL. So I decided that I wanted to include a powerful graphics card in the system. The new Nvidia 260 card ended up being my choice. It is a really fast card but with a desent price point, about $250. I ended up with the Asus ENGTX260/HTDP/896M.

The CPU

I also wanted it to be a quad core system. So I chose the Intel Core 2 Quad 9550. It is the price point for a quad core chip right now and it runs at 2.8 Ghz.

Storage and Speed

Fast hard drives were also a priority. I thought about solid state drives but they are still way to expensive. The Western Digital VelicoRaptor 150GB hard drive is about as fast as they come, so I got 2 to but in a Raid-0 (stripped) array.

Because the data on a Raid-0 array is not that secure and I also wanted some data storage, I got 3 500gb Westen Digital drives and put them in a Raid-5 array.

Motherboard

After I decided all of this I had to pick a motherboard. This was by far the hardest part. I decided on the Intel P45 chip set and the Asus Maximus II Formula. It has 6 usable internal Sata points which worked for the hard drives well. Also you can put up to 16gb of ram on it, but I went with 8gb mainly because the 16gb ram is just not as fast of ram modules as the 2gb ones I could use to get to 8gb. The last thing about the motherboard is that it is really easy to overclock without getting into all the settings in the bios that could screw you up.

Case and Power Supply

Lastly I wanted the system to to quite and the ablity to overclock it. For this reason I choose the Cooler Master HAF case. This one has plenty of airflow and all the fans are big and quite. I got a Zalman 750 Watt modular power supply to power the whole system and cut down on cable clutter.

The Heatsink!

The heat sink and fan for the cpu are by far the best I have ever used. I got the Thermalright Ultra-120 eXtreme with a ultra quite Scythe S-FLEX SFF21F Fan. This thing is awesome. I choose it because Anandtech had it rated as the best cpu cooler out there, and I don’t dought it. With this I was able to get the 2.8ghz cpu to 3.5Ghz without even trying hard!

Overclocking

In the bios of the the Asus motherboard it detects what cpu you have and displays choices of the higher speed processors of the same line of chips. I started with it set to the extreme edition chip and it was stable at 100% cpu usage and the temp only hit 38 degrees Celicus. I then set it to the crazy setting. This overclocked the 2.8 Ghz chip to 3.5 Ghz! It was stable and only at 41 degrees at full load! I have yet to go further mainly because I will have to start messing with stuff in the bios manualy and I want this system to be quite and stable without pushing the edge.

Hard Drive Speed

I did some testing with the raid arrays with HD Tune. First up was the 2 Veliraptors in a raid-0 on the motherboard. I got a average speed of 171 mb/sec with a access time of 7.1 ms.

The Raid 5 array of 3 Western Digital 500gb drives tested 76 mb/sec and a access time of 12.2 ms.

I am very impressed in the system so far. I can’t wait for CS4 to come out so I can really test some of the new features. This thing screams at Lightroom!

Also they are going to show off some of the features at Photoshop World during tommorow’s keynote.

You can sign up to see the annoucement here.

Adobe is taking a page from the Lightroom specialization playbook for Photoshop by trying to make it more customizable to specific users and tasks. But in contrast with Lightroom, company is trying to do so without sacrificing the software’s general-purpose nature, said John Nack, [principal] product manager for Photoshop.

“We want to make it possible to be everything you want and nothing you don’t,” Nack said. “One of the tough things has been dealing with the enormous breadth of Photoshop. We end up presenting same interface to architects as we do to Web designers as radiologists as prepress folks.”

To achieve that goal, Photoshop’s interface will become more open-ended and even programmable, he said.

“You’ll see some of the things we’ve learned about Lightroom–making things browsable and less modal–come into Photoshop,” Nack said. In other words, it’ll be easier to shift Photoshop from one task to another.

With a “Configurator” application that should be released by Adobe Labs within a month or two of release the next version of Photoshop, Adobe will let users create and share their own Photoshop control panels written in Adobe’s Flash programming language, Nack added. “Our goal is to make it possible for expert users to reconfigure the environment on a task-by-task basis and share those workspaces with other people. You don’t have to write code. You can knock together an interface and make it sharable.”