[Tad Seeley] "The HD Pavillion at Best Buy offers the minimum 8GB for the Master Collection in)memory (which is the maximum capacity)"
RAM is used as the computer's scratch pad. Consider it working memory, where the images you are working on now can be loaded and quickly manipulated. RAM is not permanent, so anything that you wish to save must be pushed off to the hard drive, which is also fundamentally a kind of memory, but is drastically slower.
Whenever your computer runs out of RAM, it looks for pieces of information in RAM it doesn't need right now, writes them out the the hard disk and frees the RAM. If it turns out the computer needs that item in RAM again, then it must write something else out the hard disk, free some RAM, read the original information from the hard disk into RAM, then free the space on the hard disk.
This use of hard drive space as temporary memory is called virtual memory, and the process of moving things back and forth from RAM to disk is called swapping.
Swapping lets you do more with your computer by avoiding out-of-memory conditions, but it comes with a big trade-off: speed. Swapping is very slow, as anyone who has ever watched an hourglass cursor and listened to their hard drives chatter whilst switching between programs or documents can tell you.
This is especially true in large-format image work or in video work (which is fundamentally a huge sequence of still images). These applications tend to require lots of RAM for peak performance.
A maximum of 8 GB of RAM will not leave you any room for expansion -- and as above, RAM is one of the easiest and cheapest ways to improve performance. Can you find any similar systems that will accommodate more RAM in the future, even if they aren't pre-loaded with it?
[Tad Seeley] "64 bit processing (rather than 32)"
64-bit is a must -- not because it makes the CPU faster (sometimes 64-bit processing is slower than 32-bit processing), but because it allows you to address more RAM.
Think of RAM like a whole lot of slots, each one with a numerical address. To find a particular piece of information in that system, you must know its address.
When counting the number of bits in a system, it's like digits. If we have only 1 digit, we can only count from 0-9. By adding a second digit (the tens digit), we can count from 0-99. By adding a third (the hundreds digit), we can count from 0-999. Each digit we add increases our ability to count tenfold.
A 32-bit system can only count enough memory addresses to use 4 GB of RAM. A 64-bit system can theoretically address something like 16,000,000,000 GB of RAM (yowza!).
[Tad Seeley] "HD 2000 Graphics controller model"
This is the lowest-level integrated GPU available from Intel. If the system has a 16x PCIe slot, you can replace it with a more performance-oriented GPU like an NVIDIA Quadro later -- but even consumer-class GPUs from ATI and NVIDIA will outperform the HD2000 in Photoshop CS6.
[Tad Seeley] "Intel Core i5 processor."
This is the CPU -- the main processing chip. It's in the middle of Intel's consumer line of processors. This is probably the hardest thing to upgrade in a system, so it might be worthwhile to step up to an i7 quad-core.
Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at
Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog - What I'm thinking when my workstation's thinking
Creative Cow Forum Host: Live & Stage Events
Reply
Like
