Speed of thought is roughly between 550 and 750 milliseconds. Any longer than that, there’s a perceived delay.

Since 1994, I have been doing graphic + photography work going through Pentium, AMD machines and Macs. None had approached speed of thought until NOW.

I use blending techniques plus burn+dodge to enhance images and it does get frustrating when the image updates 2-3 secs later when I using a 3% airbrush to delete the layer. It breaks my flow of thought. When I airbrush over an area, I expect to see an instant update, like in real life. No consumer machine had been able to do this real time with 16MP files.

Until now.

The new Core i7/12GB/CS4 machine has finally made it possible to work with images at the speed of thought. Due to the perfect combination of processor speed, memory size and software, I am able to think, apply & respond in real time. Like in real life. Photoshop never touched the scratch disk no matter how many files I had opened up, it didn’t even go near the 10GB RAM limit. This is seriously great.

Update: A friend popped over 24Apr night and took a look at the machine. He’s a Macpro(2008)/16GB/CS4/Velociraptor user. We tried out opening 99x 12MP Tiff (a few were cropped) files on the Core machine coz he mentioned the Mac slowing down after loading several files. The Core loaded all of them at full speed showing 5.10GB/10GB on the RAM usage in the image window. (If the friend doesn’t mind being named, just let me know. :-)

Recently, I also assembled a super quiet PC for Kelvin Koh. It was pretty fun. I spent some time researching and finally ended up with an Antec 183 case. It’s well designed, well built and seriously damped for noise control. Another constraint was power/noise ratio. It had to run Diablo3. The system is pretty amazing, there is very little or no noise beyond 1.5 meters.

Had to choose a card with customized fans.

Efficient 3rd party cpu heatsink with low speed fan

Case that had separate chambers to great heat management.
Chose a small but efficient power supply. Too bad the cables couldn’t be
managed better but they were very short and couldn’t go round back the mobo.