[Digikam-users] New computer for Digikam

[Gerhard Kulzer]

Am Sunday 09 December 2007 schrieb 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?

xfs, reiserfs and ext3 all come journaled by default, but you can disable it. 
That's not what I recommend, however. The trick is to format the partitions 
so that the journal is on another disk (not partition, important). Then you 
don't loose speed because of the journaling. 
$ mkfs.xfs -l logdev=/dev/sdb1,size=10000b /dev/sda1
Mount ~/.thumbnails on a separate partion gains nothing.

> > 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?



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