Very interesting article regarding system architecture choices when looking for a system to play with Photoshop.

http://www.news.com/8301-13580_3-9846714-39.html?t

That is an interesting article Frank and a dilemma I may be facing myself in the near future when I get thoroughly sick of the dying relic I work on now and get a shiny new PC. I use a few other Creative Suite applications- Illustrator, Fireworks, Acro Pro, Dreamweaver (learning), and often two or more of these concurrently, I wonder if the findings in that article are true for all Adobe stuff- you know largely vector work in Illustrator and animation, 3D rendering tools \capabilities in other CS3 products and what system build is best for all this overall.... Erm, maybe I'll just get a Mac Pro hehehe

until you can allocate more than 3 gigs of ram to photoshop it seems moot at this point, photoshop is such a ram hog it's ridicules...

... in the mean time, per this tech note (http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=320005),If you are running Windows XP Professional with Service Pack 2, you can set the 3 GB switch in the boot.ini file, which allows Photoshop to use up to 3 GB of RAM.
until you can allocate more than 3 gigs of ram to photoshop it seems moot at this point, photoshop is such a ram hog it's ridicules...

it's already using 3 gigs and that isn't enough at times, i'm on a mac btw...

How bad is it on a Mac?

it's already using 3 gigs and that isn't enough at times, i'm on a mac btw...

it's pathetic that i work on a 200 meg image and my efficiency drops to 92%, i would've thought it would stay at 100% as the machine has 13 gigs of ram...

The problem is more complex than RAM and processor speed. A key ingredient people overlook is Hard Drive speed. In most configurations Photoshop is quietly moving massive amounts of data in and out of its scratch disk. Faster hard drives make a difference. Have the scratch disk on a separate physical drive other than the drive that has the OS also makes a difference.
The other most signiificant factor is History States setting. Here are some data points to generate some thought when selecting new H/W.

I have a 1 year old Dell laptop. It has 2GB of RAM (only 1.2 usable by Photoshop) and runs with a T7600 Core 2 Duo (a Centrino family device) @ 2.2GHZ; single physical drive with 2 partitions. I also have a brand new desktop with a Core 2 Quad 6600 processor, latest ASUS P5K Premium Mobo, 4GB of RAM (3GB usable- only 1.7GB usable by Photoshop), dual 7200RPM Sata drives.
If you run the RetouchPRO speed test found in this thread http://www.retouchpro.com/forums/hardware/8440-photoshop-speed-test.html it takes 16 secs on the laptop to complete. When I run it on the Desktop unit it takes 15 secs.
Now when you run the Retouch Artists Photoshop speed test action found here, http://www.retouchartists.com/pages/speedtest.html The results are as follows:

1. History States set to 20
Laptop: 11 mins 40 secs
Desktop: 2 Mins 32 secs

2. History states set to 1
Laptop: 7 mins 50 secs
Desktop: 28 secs

Test 1 is all math algoritms and basically runs in RAM but does not need a huge amount of it.
Test 2 is heavily disk drive intensive. The more History states you use the more massive amounts of data Photoshop has to shuffle and things get exponentially slower.

BTW, while the limit for RAM in a 32 bits system is about 3GB because the other approx GB is reserved by the BIOS and OS, the OS will restrict Photoshop to about 2/3 of the avail RAM because it reserves RAM for other apps, processes and services.

I think the bottom line when upgrading H/W you still want to get the fastest processor and probably a quad core over a dual. But attention to the hard drive speed and number of drives is important. But also very key is how you have set up Photoshop to run. Optimizing Photoshop cache and History States and scratch disk to your needs may make a big difference.

Regards, Murray