RSS/Atom feed Twitter
Site is read-only, email is disabled

hardware

This discussion is connected to the gimp-user-list.gnome.org mailing list which is provided by the GIMP developers and not related to gimpusers.com.

This is a read-only list on gimpusers.com so this discussion thread is read-only, too.

5 of 5 messages available
Toggle history

Please log in to manage your subscriptions.

hardware Shawn Lindsay 07 Feb 03:03
  hardware John Culleton 07 Feb 09:26
   hardware Geoffrey 07 Feb 15:04
hardware Shawn Lindsay 18 Feb 10:20
  hardware PL O'Smith 18 Feb 14:13
Shawn Lindsay
2003-02-07 03:03:57 UTC (about 21 years ago)

hardware

What's a good processor for gimp? I'm pricing a new computer. I kind of have my eye on Intel's 3.06 P4 but am waiting for prices to drop. What are some advantages of other processors? Mostly what I want is quicker processing of some plugins, and being able to run other programs at the same time. Almost anything will be better than my Celery, but I want something really good and not outrageously expensive. What should I look for?

Thanks.

Shawn.

John Culleton
2003-02-07 09:26:09 UTC (about 21 years ago)

hardware

On Friday 07 February 2003 02:03, Shawn Lindsay wrote:

What's a good processor for gimp? I'm pricing a new computer. I kind of have my eye on Intel's 3.06 P4 but am waiting for prices to drop. What are some advantages of other processors? Mostly what I want is quicker processing of some plugins, and being able to run other programs at the same time. Almost anything will be better than my Celery, but I want something really good and not outrageously expensive. What should I look for?

Thanks.

Shawn. _______________________________________________ Gimp-user mailing list
Gimp-user@lists.xcf.berkeley.edu
http://lists.xcf.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gimp-user

I do all right with an Athlon running at about 795 Mhz. Tiger Direct will have deals on computers, cpu+motherboard etc. that will be much faster than that.

The efficiency of your OS will also be a factor. I am running Slackware Linux but I am looking at Gentoo Linux which has all kinds of speed optimizations that are selectable depending on your chip. When I find time I will get it running (installation is a bit of a bear.)

Geoffrey
2003-02-07 15:04:41 UTC (about 21 years ago)

hardware

John Culleton wrote:

On Friday 07 February 2003 02:03, Shawn Lindsay wrote:

What's a good processor for gimp? I'm pricing a new computer. I kind of have my eye on Intel's 3.06 P4 but am waiting for prices to drop. What are some advantages of other processors? Mostly what I want is quicker processing of some plugins, and being able to run other programs at the same time. Almost anything will be better than my Celery, but I want something really good and not outrageously expensive. What should I look for?

Thanks.

Shawn. _______________________________________________ Gimp-user mailing list
Gimp-user@lists.xcf.berkeley.edu
http://lists.xcf.berkeley.edu/mailman/listinfo/gimp-user

I do all right with an Athlon running at about 795 Mhz. Tiger Direct will have deals on computers, cpu+motherboard etc. that will be much faster than that.

I was on a Celeron 400 with .5 gig pc100, migrated to an athlon xp 1800+ with .5 gig ddr. Either is sufficient, but the athlon obviously blows the Celeron away.

Tiger Direct has always appeared to be high to me, I've not been there in a while because of that fact.

http://www.pricewatch.com/

Check various vendors.

The efficiency of your OS will also be a factor. I am running Slackware Linux but I am looking at Gentoo Linux which has all kinds of speed optimizations that are selectable depending on your chip. When I find time I will get it running (installation is a bit of a bear.)

Gentoo is sweet, but not for the novice.

Shawn Lindsay
2003-02-18 10:20:17 UTC (about 21 years ago)

hardware

Thanks for the feedback. I'll definitely take another look at dual Athlons.

I still have some questions, though.

Is Intel's 533 MHz fsb a real advantage? Or only with certain kinds of RAM? Some benchmarks show the Athlon is a real fast cruncher, so for most things it probably gives you the most bang for the buck. Btw did anybody see the review of AMD's Barton chip at Ace's? ( http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=50000364 --yea! Pricewar!) . They used a Photoshop benchmark and the P4 3.06 GHz was best at most but not all filters. Ace's said that Photoshop had been optimized for SMP and hyperthreading. Would that be true of Gimp? I'd think stuff like Gaussian blur would be the same or similar. Dang I wish they'd use Gimp for some benchmarks.

Loading up on RAM I know is good, but which kind? RDRAM, DDRAM, DRDRAM, SDRAM, DDR SDRAM--ECC or not?--ack!--just give me speed, reliablity and let me keep my shirt.

Even with a couple gigs of RAM I'm going to be swapping. Is an SCSI drive worth the extra price? I'm thinking no because I can get a 7200rpm ide for $40, or a 10K RPM IDE drive at a fair price, but if somebody has good things to say about their 15K SCSI I'd like to hear it. Do better latency and seek time make much of a difference? Are the 15Krpm Cheetah's and Fujitsu's really as quiet as the reviewers say? What's the optimal balance between transfer rate and access time for working on large .xcfs?

Finally, would a smaller main drive (with / /usr /home /tmp and swap) be faster? I was thinking it would be most efficient to have a small fast drive with a second, larger drive for storage. Am I wrong to suppose a large main drive would slow me down? Does putting the swap on the first sector still matter, or have advances in hard disk technology made this inconsequenstial?

Thanks again.

Peace,

Shawn.

PL O'Smith
2003-02-18 14:13:59 UTC (about 21 years ago)

hardware

On Tuesday 18 February 2003 04:20 am, Shawn Lindsay wrote:

Thanks for the feedback. I'll definitely take another look at dual Athlons.

I still have some questions, though.

Is Intel's 533 MHz fsb a real advantage? Or only with certain kinds of RAM? Some benchmarks show the Athlon is a real fast cruncher, so for most things it probably gives you the most bang for the buck. Btw did anybody see the review of AMD's Barton chip at Ace's? ( http://www.aceshardware.com/read.jsp?id=50000364 --yea! Pricewar!) . They used a Photoshop benchmark and the P4 3.06 GHz was best at most but not all filters. Ace's said that Photoshop had been optimized for SMP and hyperthreading. Would that be true of Gimp? I'd think stuff like Gaussian blur would be the same or similar. Dang I wish they'd use Gimp for some benchmarks. ==================

Shawn, the only place you will ever see the 533mhz fsb an advantage is in the lab as Intel will not be releasing the chipset to fully utilize it anywhere else. That's the information I have gathered thus far. Those buying the faster Intel cpus will be disappointed when getting their new box up and running, because of the bottlenecks the motherboard provides, it's only going to seem as fast probably as what they replaced. The P4 from Intel, for the most part, has been a very bad joke played on the buying public, but there may be some hope for the newer Hyperthreading cpu, if things work as they should. I would still never consider it over a dual Athlon board though with scsi. -------------------

Loading up on RAM I know is good, but which kind? RDRAM, DDRAM, DRDRAM, SDRAM, DDR SDRAM--ECC or not?--ack!--just give me speed, reliablity and let me keep my shirt. ------====================

If you decide to go with the Athlons, then your DDR SDRAM will prove to work well for you and much cheaper too. --------------------

Even with a couple gigs of RAM I'm going to be swapping. Is an SCSI drive worth the extra price? I'm thinking no because I can get a 7200rpm ide for $40, or a 10K RPM IDE drive at a fair price, but if somebody has good things to say about their 15K SCSI I'd like to hear it. Do better latency and seek time make much of a difference? Are the 15Krpm Cheetah's and Fujitsu's really as quiet as the reviewers say? What's the optimal balance between transfer rate and access time for working on large .xcfs?
-------==================

Try to find a system with scsi drives working and then come back with your questions! You'll probably not have a question about scsi then, but wonder why you waited so long to use them! :o) Unix/Linux have been built around scsi for years, do you think that is just by chance? You'll also probably find in your research that some IDE drives are quite fast, but then you have the bottleneck of the motherboard controllers slowing them back down, making the added speed just a benchmark, nothing else.
-------------------------------

Finally, would a smaller main drive (with / /usr /home /tmp and swap) be faster? I was thinking it would be most efficient to have a small fast drive with a second, larger drive for storage. Am I wrong to suppose a large main drive would slow me down? Does putting the swap on the first sector still matter, or have advances in hard disk technology made this inconsequenstial?

Thanks again.

Peace,

Shawn.

========================

I don't think the last thing will make a difference to you, except maybe slow both drives down on the same IDE chain. Realize the IDE for the most part is still 8 & 16 bit technology. That's a small part of PC hardware that is still dated, there are more. Remember also that the IDE system will adjust to the slowest drive attached to it and two hard drives on the same link causes a slowdown anyway. Two cdroms on a chain will work satisfactorily as their transfer rates are slow to begin with, but never add a cdrom to a hard drive chain, unless of course you just like waiting! Again, this goes back to the advantage of having scsi Ultra 160 or 320. More drives can be attached, true 32 bit transfer and noticable differences in speed. I think you will find many of the hard drive probs have been eliminated in Linux with those last points you bring up.

Good Luck in your Quest! Patrick

--- KMail v1.5 --- SuSE Linux Pro v8.1 --- Registered Linux User #225206
On any other day, that might seem strange...