Processor speed dual or quad core

[jay_soft]

Hi,

I'm going to get a new computer in the next month or so and wanted to get people's opinions.

I was planning to splash out on a quad core but I did see a post on the forums here saying a dual core was all that was nessecary for working with images. On the other hand, I work in a marketing agency and I know some of our studio guys are running mac's with two quad cores in them.

I often run photoshop cs3, lightroom v2, explorer and windows media player at once and probably will continue to do so.

Is it the case that there will be no real difference (bar a couple of seconds here or there) between a similar speed duo or quad core in photoshop? Or will there be a noticeable improvement in processor speed.

Cheers.

[sarahgirl777]

I was just looking at the same thing and settled on a Dell with 6GB RAM and a 2.33 GhZ Quad core processor and I definately can run all my programs so much faster than before. (I just had a single core processor and 1GB RAM. Before when I made adjustments in GIMP it would take sometimes 1-2 min. just to apply gaussian blur. Now it does it immediately. I don't know what a dual core would do but I thought I might as well just go for the quad core and make sure I'm not dissappointed. Oh and I got mine on Dell.com through the Dell outlet, they have refurbished ones on there for a very good price. It looks and acts brand new but I saved like $125 over the new price.

[jay_soft]

Yeah thats kinda what I was thinking - I also wanted to future proof myself a bit.

[yorkiemom]

I'd go with the quad. I had a duo core and when I had CS3/Bridge/Outlook/ACDSee open, it was lagging.

[ARKreations]

There's no substitute for horsepower.
I have a quad core desk top and a dual core laptop with similar CPU speeds. The desktop runs rings around the laptop. In fact the last on-site event I shot, I had to swap out the laptop for the desktop since my laptop just couldn't keep up with the processing load.
If you're going to be doing any volume, buy the biggest, baddest, fastest system you can afford.

[Quo Fan]

Not only do you need a fast system processor, but get a fast graphics processor. Most of what photoshop does is graphic intensive, meaning your video card is doing most of the work, not your system processor.

I recently upgraded my system, and got a dual core processor, but got a much better video card.

[Silverz]

theres probably not much difference in price or performance between quad and dual core so if you can i would take the quad but if not you wont miss out on much.
As for running multiple applications at the same time, that is handled mainly by your ram, 4gb will be enough for what your planning on doing and an upgrade in ram will give a much bigger benefit than more processor cores

[jdepould]

My philosophy is "buy the best you can afford." It'll maximize the life span of your computer, and streamline your workflow. Less time on the computer = more time with the camera (or in bed). If you can afford the quad-core, buy it, if you can't, don't worry about it. Max out your ram, buy the faster hard drive, whatever.

[Magic-SG1]

Definitely the Quad dude, those programs are optimized for multithread so essentially the more cores you throw at it the faster it'll run. Just make sure the pc you get has some fast RAM also!

[AgBeard]

Quad + fast graphics card is the way to go + 64bit Operating Systems so that it can address anything above 4Gig of memory