Digital Photography Processing

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GPU or CPU: computer digital photography?

Hi all,

I will be buying a computer soon, probably a laptop. I'd like something with enough power to run stuff like lightroom and photoshop without busting a gut. One website I found recommended the Dell Alienware line, but another said that Alienware is specifically good at gaming cos it has a heavy duty GPU.

I won't be doing any video editing, gaming or CAD work. I'm just looking for something that will process RAW files, apply filters etc at a decent speed.

So I guess my question is, what's more important for running stuff like lightroom, photoshop, maybe Capture ... CPU power, or GPU power? And can you let me know of your experiences with the specs of your machines pls?

(I'm currently running a Dell Dimension 2400 with 1GB of RAM, so I'm guessing pretty much anything on the market right now will be a step up ...)

If a system is made for playing current games without lag, then it will have no problems with Photoshop.

The main areas to look at are the memory (the closer to 8Gb the better) and the graphics card (do not use an on-board GPU for a desktop unit since it is using system memory).

My current editing (and gaming) desktop machine is a AMD 2.4GHz quad core, 8 GB RAM, 500watt power supply, a 9800GTX+ video card, 3- 1Tb hard drives, and a DVD/CD burner viewed on a 24" display.

My laptop has:
17.3" High-Definition LED widescreen
2.40 GHz AMD M600 Turion II Ultra Dual-Core CPU
8 Gb RAM
500GB hard drive
DVD burner

Both systems network to another system that handles the backups. They run Photoshop CS4 smoothly, but running CS4 on the laptop does eat the battery quickly in the field (~45 minutes).

Canon Digital Photo Professional Tutorial - Batch processing (15/19)


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