[Digikam-users] New computer for Digikam

[Dotan Cohen]

On 08/12/2007, Gerhard Kulzer <gerhardkgmx at gmail.com> wrote:
> Right now digiKam is not yet taking much advantage of smp for the heavy-load
> plugins (CIMG), but that will change in the future, so a dual processor is
> recommended, although not fully exploited today. There are a lot of tasks
> running in threads by now, but those are not the time consumers. If you
> planned for today only, a fast single CPU would be better, but I don't
> recommend it. Don't buy a dual core machine that is too slow in clock. Intels
> can be overclocked, but you need the MB that goes with it. L2 cache is quite
> important in my experience. Two cores is fantastic even if you don't run many
> applications in parallel. I just enjoy my machine churning on digiKam stuff
> and still be reactive as nothing would happen in the background :-), it's
> impressive.

My laptop has a dual-core Intel. I am very impressed with it's
performance, especially considering it's modest clock speed. I most
definetly intend on using a dual core processor on the desktop. I
don't know about overclocking an Intel, though. While I've thoroughly
abused AMDs, in my limited experience Intel's tend to fry.

> My CPU recommendation is Intel E6750, that is really cheap for what it is,
> cheaper than slower CPUs. But you need an 1333MHz FSB motherboard. I'd
> recommend that anyway, because if you want to upgrade later, the CPUs are
> likely to run at least that fast (I just sold my E6400 CPU on ebay for 98% of
> the price I bought it a year ago, upgrading is possible).

Motherboards are up to 1333MHz FSB now? That will support a 10 GHz
(figure 8x multiplier) processor, no? I can't believe that! I just
looked at the E6750, and it seems more than decent. 4 MB of L2 is
amazing.

> Buy enough memory, 1GB is not enough, buy >=2GB. The memory speed is not so
> important, between the slow ones and fast one there is hardly 10% difference
> in endperformance.

I think that I'll sacrifice the memory a bit now, so that I can pour
the funds into the processor. A single stick of 1GB will be easy to
upgrade to 2GB when I have the funds.

> SATA or ATA, my hdparm tests don't show much of a difference. But modern MB
> will oblige you to go SATA-II. The file system makes more of a diff, not for
> saving the images, but for the thumbnails caching. Mount them with 'noatime'.
> Without journal is much faster. Better is (you seem to have two disks) to put
> the journal of one disk on the other drive. Speed is then as a fs without
> journaling because of the parallel access. xfs, reiserfs or ext3 are all
> good.

Are you suggesting that I mount ~/.thumbnails as a separate ext2 (no
journal) partition? I thought that xfs and reiserfs are journaled like
ext3. Can you inform me better, or should I ask around on my distro's
mailing list?

> digiKam don't ask much of graphic cards. But nowadays even good ones are
> cheap, I bought a nvidia NT8600GT for less than 100 euros, has 260MB RAM,
> passively cooled. And I wouldn't want to miss compiz anymore.

As the wife wants TV-out, I probably will opt for an nvidia card as
opposed to the onboard Intel chipset I was hoping for.

> Think rather of a good monitor, we had this discussion already on this ML.
> Photos require an excellent screen, notbooks are no good in general.

This is obvious. Our 17" CRT will continue to serve us untill
opportunity finds us an affordable 19+" unit. I don't like LCDs,
especially not for photos.

Thanks for the advice. I've quite a lot to learn.

Dotan Cohen

http://what-is-what.com
http://gibberish.co.il
א-ב-ג-ד-ה-ו-ז-ח-ט-י-ך-כ-ל-ם-מ-ן-נ-ס-ע-ף-פ-ץ-צ-ק-ר-ש-ת

A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text.
Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing?