Graphics: Adobe Suite CS3 , what do you think?

cs3 makes Vista look good.

I have some colleagues who run a PC business specializing in high end, build to order PCs that are 'green' meaning they are totally silent, even with the case open. I was interested in buying one and they were interested in selling.

So we set up CS3 using XP Pro, sata 2 500 gb raid for the OS and 500 GB for the temp files, 4 GB Corsair Dominator memory, one 768mb 8800 GeForce NVIDIA ultra, Wacom tablet, and 2 INTEL Quad Core clovertown 3.0 ghz processors, liquid cooled. Sort of a games machine for photoshop geeks. We didn't use SLI graphics cards because I was only interested in 2D performance, and but we used two 22 inch samsung monitors. This was one very powerful machine. Unless you're using CS3 Photoshop and the new Bridge application.

The only things running were photoshop, bridge, windows, and the company's monitor equipment.

The first surprise is that there is no point in having quad core at all. The only time we could get quad core action as when I used a 'real' rotate function, meaning select part of the image and rotate that part. Rotating the whole image does not invoke quad core or even dual core. This means that Adobe is doing what Steve Jobs used to do for Apple. THere will be a constant stream of updates to Photoshop functionality. Some functions will be quad core, some dual, some single, and you're going to have to maintain an ever changing list. In my view, if you buy now, you're just wasting money.

The next surprise is that there is very little point in owning dual core. Even though Photoshop only uses 2 GB of physical memory, when the bridge is loaded, the paging begins and 4 gb of memory, including paging disks starts instantly swamping this monster PC. When this happens, I couldn't get control of the system until the paging activity ceased, meaning you can bang on the mouse all you want, but nothing is going to happen.

Essentially, CS3 is still a single processor application with some exceptions. The problem seems to be that the bridge is also a separate, single processor application, so there are two big applications competing for resources, and most of those resources are not supported by Photoshop or the Bridge, meaing the quad core and ram greater than 3 GB if you patch Windows.

I thought that perhaps running the bridge on one machine and Photoshop on another might work using a KVEX switch and giga bit ethernet. But Adobe will recognize that I am trying to run two copies of CS3 with the same serial number on the same network and shut me down.

Essentially Adobe is putting us through the same craziness that Intel did when they introduced PCI Express a few years ago.

Now I do make big pictures, and I do have a lot of photographs on my disk drives, but I really believe CS3 is out of control and not worth the bother for at least a year unless you just like wondering why things don't work.

Regards,