Silent Graphics card for Photoshop CS2

David Cole · Post by **David Cole** » Wed Jun 29, 2005 4:59 am

I have recently upgraded from PSCS to PSCS2 and have seen that Adobe are recommending that PSCS2 works better with graphics cards of 128mb or better. I have been using a Matrox P650 (64mb) which is great except that I have noticed some slowness in image redrawing when using filters - this is one of the symptoms mentioned by Adobe. So I am thinking about upgrading my card and am looking for an AGP card of 128mb or more that is passively cooled and with excellent 2D; I am not concerned about price and will not be using it to play games. I would consider the Matrox Parhelia but it has a noisy fan and I would prefer not to have to modify it.

I'd be grateful for suggestions for a card that would fit my bill.

I will be using it on an Asus P4Te mobo with 1024mb rdram and a 2.6 P4 processor.

Thanks

David

shades_of_blue · Post by **shades_of_blue** » Thu Jun 30, 2005 9:01 am

if you want a fairly cheap and silent video card then pick up a 6200 256mb card, they're fanless. not recomended for gaming, but one should do the trick for you.

link to pny 6200 256mb nvidia card http://www.pny.com/products/verto/perfo ... p256mb.asp

Pilot · Post by **Pilot** » Thu Jun 30, 2005 11:13 am

I'm currently in the same situation as you David ; so I was wondering why not go for a Radeon 9250 (128bits version) 128MB as it is nonsense to have more memory ?

Maybe it's the dual display that you need ? But I don't care providing that mine has a DVI output.

Here 9250 seems to be half the price of the 6200.

Please tell me what you chose eventually.

roo · Post by **roo** » Thu Jun 30, 2005 2:29 pm

take a look @ PNY quadro Fx 700

Spod · Post by **Spod** » Fri Jul 01, 2005 12:50 pm

I'm with roo on this, the lower end of the Quadro FX series is a good match to professional 2D graphics apps. The drivers are optimised for accuracy rather than performance, quite the reverse of gaming cards' drivers.
The Quadro FX 700 should be adequate, and not too costly.

David Cole · Post by **David Cole** » Fri Jul 01, 2005 2:02 pm

Much obliged. The X700 it is.

Tephras · Post by **Tephras** » Fri Jul 01, 2005 7:03 pm

David Cole wrote:Much obliged. The X700 it is.

I suppose you mean ATI X700, however, the Quadro FX recommended in the posts above is one of Nvidias workstation GPUs.

David Cole · Post by **David Cole** » Sat Jul 02, 2005 3:49 am

I meant the Quadro FX700 but I see this is for CAD use. I don't know if it would be overkill for Photoshop.
All I want is a passively cooled AGP card of 128mb or better which has very good 2D.
It is very time consuming going through all the graphic boards that are available from different manufacturers and without a personal recommendation based on experience it is very difficult to choose. Someone on the Adobe Photoshop User Forum has now come up with the view that you do not need a 128mb card. Usual confusion.
I'd still be very interested to hear from anyone using Photoshop (particularly CS2) with a card which fits my bill. A suitable card must be out there somewhere!
Thanks
David

cmcquistion · Post by **cmcquistion** » Sat Jul 02, 2005 6:03 am

You don't need a Quadro for Photoshop CS. (Quadro's are for heavy-lifting OpenGL work, like 3D design software. This is NOT what Photoshop requires.) You DO need a lot of system memory (1 GB or more, is best) and any video card with 128 MB will probably suffice. I'm partial to Nvidia cards, myself, but even a cheap ATI card will do what you need.

David Cole · Post by **David Cole** » Sat Jul 02, 2005 11:43 am

Thanks.

In the end, I did what I should have done in the first place and got out my old Parhelia and reinstalled it to see what difference it made to PSCS2 performance. It made no difference I can see. So I'll forget a new graphics card and save myself some money.
Sorry to have wasted folks' time here.
David

shades_of_blue · Post by **shades_of_blue** » Sat Jul 02, 2005 6:21 pm

if you get another card make sure you go into your systems bios and set your bios to 256mb use, even if it's only a 128mb card, you should notice a little boost.

i still rec a lowend nvidia card like the 6200, but if ati is more to your liking then you sould consider a 9800 and firmware flash it so that it is now a firegl card. that'd be more up your alley, specially if you also run cad. i'm sure google would have more information on which cards flash best, as that's not my specialty.

David Cole · Post by **David Cole** » Sun Jul 03, 2005 2:41 am

Thanks. Yes, the aperture size is already set to 256 in the bios. I assume that is what you are referring to.
The 6200 card you suggested looks the fine but hasn't got very good reviews - at least the ones I read weren't too encouraging.
I was thinking about the Gigabyte GV-N66256DP and still might give this a try, but I see it has a cooling pipe going over the top and this may get in way with the Zalman bracket I have supporting the fan which cools my processor. Nothing's simple!
David

shades_of_blue · Post by **shades_of_blue** » Sun Jul 03, 2005 6:22 pm

a 6600 card would be a good choice, just keep in mind they're about 2x the cost of a 6200 card. i'm sure that the only reason you saw soso reviews on the 6200 is that they're not even close to optimized for 3d gaming.

gigabyte is an ok company, but personally i prefer a reference card design like PNY, XFX, BGF and EVGA use. although i do not recommend EVGA as they have a really horrible warranty procedures and my personal exp with BFG is not much better either.

David Cole · Post by **David Cole** » Mon Jul 04, 2005 8:11 am

Thanks for that. I have two ignorant follow up questions -
What is a reference card design?
And if I get a 6600, should I use Gigabyte drivers or Nvidia (from their website) ones? Or are they both the same?
Thanks
David

jamesm · Post by **jamesm** » Mon Jul 04, 2005 8:50 am

a reference card is nvidia's sample cards that are pre-released/distributed to OEMs (like XFX, MSI, PNY, etc.).

You'll want to use the drivers from the nvidia site. gigabyte (and all other OEM's for that matter), just act as a lossless proxy for Nvidia drivers.

check the gigabyte GV-NX66T128VP.

David Cole · Post by **David Cole** » Mon Jul 04, 2005 5:37 pm

Thanks for the explanation and advice. The card you mention is no good for me because it is PCI-Express and I have only AGP.

AZBrandon · Post by **AZBrandon** » Mon Jul 04, 2005 7:42 pm

Does anyone know how good the standard 6600 is for gaming? Not the 6600GT or Ultra, but just the normal 6600? I can't find hardly anything for the "standard" 6600. I'm mainly looking for something I can quietly cool in a SFF system (either passive or with a Zalman VF700. One thing I noticed about a lot of the 6600 AGP's I see is that the GPU is mounted high up on the card, which might lead to clearance problems on a SFF.

HolyBastard · Post by **HolyBastard** » Mon Jul 04, 2005 8:03 pm

you can look for PCIe Benchmarks. From what I know agp are about the same (maybe a few percent lower).
Toms hardware has some benchmark for the standard 6600 PCIe.

AZBrandon · Post by **AZBrandon** » Mon Jul 04, 2005 8:32 pm

I haven't had any luck with that either, really. Does anyone know how the 6200 compares to the ATI 9600? Like, the normal 9600, not the XT or Pro.

Edwood · Post by **Edwood** » Tue Jul 05, 2005 4:43 am

Why bother with 3D gaming cards?

My current favorite vid card for my Photoshop workstation is the Matrox P650. Dual DVI goodness, and passively cooled.

-Ed

Pilot · Post by **Pilot** » Tue Jul 05, 2005 6:11 am

Maybe we could soluce the OP question even if it happened to be solved otherwise.

What graphic card would be the best bang for the buck in 2D use only, like photo editing ?

Matrox P650 is €150 worth and matrox (past) superiority seems to be based on its high quality of the analog output, ie : no longer relevant when used with a DVI interface.

6600 are around €110-180, equipped with 128MB of 128bits DDR and most are equipped with a fan.

6200 are €55-115 equipped with 128MB of 128bits DDR and most are equipped with a fan

9250 are €35-70 equipped with 128MB of 128bits DDR and most are fanless.

For a user who will never have a 3D use, what are the differences between these cards (let apart the price and power consumption) ? Can we perceive a difference in 2D usage ? I think the only reason i would spend more than a 9250 would be the dual dvi as the 9250 only has DVI+VGA.

scruzbeachbum · Post by **scruzbeachbum** » Tue Jul 05, 2005 7:16 am

Tom's Hardware just posted the summer VGA card shootout.

sPECtre · Post by **sPECtre** » Tue Jul 05, 2005 7:32 am

Chris Cox, one of the Photoshop Engineers, said that that Knowledgebase article is not accurate: you do not need a 128MB videocard to use Photoshop.

Certain drivers have an issue with a peculiar API so I recommend to shop locally and get the possibility to change the videocard. Some users reported slowness problems with GeForce5600, some Quadro, some other an ATI card. When they changed the videocard, slowness remained, so it is not certain that the videocard is the culprit. Remember it is a very small (but vocal) minority that experiences problems. Maybe download the Demo version to assess its speed with your setup.

I'm running PSCS2 without redraw problems with a GeForce 5200 (fanless, of course!)

Freelancer77 · Post by **Freelancer77** » Tue Jul 05, 2005 8:34 am

In my current employment, there is a crew of graphic artists using quite powerful workstations, and they are working with Adobe CS2, 3dsMAX7, FlashPRO, and GLStudio. The graphics card of choice here is the ATi FireGL X1. It's about $100 more than the PNY Quadro FX700, but it's easily worth the difference. There are two machines here with Quadro FX 1300's, and the FireGL smokes them as well. And that is true even though the FX1300's are on PCIe.

The very top-end PNY cards are phenomenal, but they're also over $1200 each. Other than that, for graphics workstations the FireGL cards are great for the money.

cmcquistion · Post by **cmcquistion** » Tue Jul 05, 2005 7:11 pm

Freelancer77 wrote:The very top-end PNY cards are phenomenal, but they're also over $1200 each. Other than that, for graphics workstations the FireGL cards are great for the money.

I feel it necessary to point out that the originator of this thread is asking for video cards for PHOTOSHOP. Photoshop does not do any 3D rendering or need heavy OpenGL work. FireGL and other "workstation" class cards are NOT necessary, in any form or fashion, for Photoshop.

David Cole · Post by **David Cole** » Thu Jul 07, 2005 10:32 am

For completeness, just to report that I bought a Gigabyte GV-N66256DP in the end - even though it now turns out that 128mg graphics cards are not in fact necessary for Photoshop, I thought I'd have a change. I am very impressed by the new card so far - 2D performance seems to me as good as, if not sharper than, my Matrox Parhelia and P650 cards. Very crisp. Photoshop filters seem to me a little faster - though this may be my imagination. A nice card.

David

www.davidcolepictures.co.uk