The macosxhints Forums - How Can I Get G5 Speed out of a G4?

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- - How Can I Get G5 Speed out of a G4? (http://hintsforums.macworld.com/showthread.php?t=49561)

Quote:

Originally Posted by CAlvarez

The SATA drive will only help when loading/saving files and programs. Photoshop does use the scratch space a little even with enough memory, but not enough to make much of a difference. That drive would improve your save/load performance a bit, but not by a huge amount.

Not quite correct. Photoshop behaves more like an AV program than most other apps. It has its own virtual memory system and relies heavily on it. If you don't quite have enough RAM for a particular image it will need to hit the disk all the time. Disk performance does make a difference with large files. Photoshop pros often start talking about how they bought a bigger hard drive, then a faster hard drive, then a RAID.

If you are speccing out new Photoshop hardware it should be with these factors in mind.

Note that the quoted article is about systems with more than 3,5 GB of RAM.
Before that, unless a processor update provides dramatically better performance, more RAM is still the way to go.

Disk performance becomes an issue once you hit either OS X or PS swapping.

Given the shoddy performance of 2,5" disks, a mini is a really poor choice for PS. Maxing out the RAM and booting off a FW disk are possible solutions.

On the surface the article is about systems with more than 3.5GB of RAM, but the lower half of the article is about allocations and disks and applies to anyone. Knowing how all parts of the system are critical, not just RAM, supports the idea that it's often better to get a whole new machine with up to date subsystems.