I'm looking for some extra speed with my home computer, and need some direction which route to take. 95% of this setup is for processing large RAW files from both my Nikon and 4" x 5" scans, and the balance is surfing and email. My current set up is:
2008 Mac tower with 2 x 2.8 GHz Quad-Core
10 GB of Ram (with 4 available slots)
ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT 256 MB
4 hard drives:
640 GB SATA main HD
2 separate 1 TB hard drives for library and back up
640 GB Barracuda scratch drive
NEC LCD 3090WQXi monitor
LR 4
CS 6
Should I bother to upgrade with more Ram and SSD main HD and/or scratch drive, or wait and purchase one of the new iMac in December?
My other dilemma is that my Spectraview II calibration software will not work with the latest MAC OS, so I should probably look at a 3rd party calibration system as well.
Since Apple has said there will be a major update to the Mac Pro in 2013, I added a 240 GB SSD drive from OWC. This will get me by until we see the update. I really like the ability to upgrade the Pro so I did not consider the iMac. As for a larger scratch drive, are you really swapping out to the scratch drive that much. If so, add more RAM which is much faster than a swap hard drive.
If your tower is still going strong then I would leave alone apart from what Robert said. Upgrade your main drive to an SSD will really bost performance. I have a 2009 tower and although it has a 640GB system drive, I only use 130GB so I am thinking a 240GB would work fine. The 2 things I am thinking of are the drive and perhaps the video card. I use Aperture and I know it used the GPU so an video card might be helpful. I currently have upgraded my RAM to 16GB.
I use the ColorMunki for calibration. It also profiles the printer.
I think those 3rd party options will not talk directly with the NEC monitor as the spectraview does. The result is a profile that manipulates the 8-bit graphics cards lookup tables instead of the monitors 12-bit LUTs. It also takes significantly longer to profile.
With those large files ram is your friend the more the better, a ssd will make Photoshop load faster but Lightroom will sing with it. A new maxed out I7 Imac will be faster than your current box, those extra 4 cores don't do much for the programs you use.
