Am just in the process of putting a friends engagement party invite together on the Mac Pro. Is the first time i've done any design work on the new machine and am surprised by the slow performance and wanted to get some feedback on wtf??

My system specs are 2x 2.8ghz Quad-Core, standard 2gb Ram, and 500gig HD. Am running the latest Lepoard, and Adobe CS3 programs.

Files i'm working on are nothing huge, just a DL sized artboard with few photos @ 300dpi but are no more than few mb each, and text. Is a pretty simple design.

Was also running iTunes with just InDesign open and felt the performance to be a quite sluggish???

Could this be the 2gig RAM just not being enough even for just a single Adobe program??

Any thoughts solutions?

p.s. yep i do intend to put some more ram in, up to 6gig but have work to do and though the system should be bearable just with 2gig for now...??

I run the same setup. You need at least 8 gig or ram. I have 6 at the moment and whilst a lot faster than the standard 2 gig. 8 is better

The rule of thumb is 1 gig per core as a minimum

Get ram as its cheap! OWC all the way and you will have it in 4 days

Aye, the Adobe programs are greedy bloated monsters, and 2 GB is barely sufficient for a quad-core, let alone 8 cores. Get some more FB-DIMMs asap

I use CS3 on a dual G5 at work with only 2.5gb and most of the time it is fine (okay, it could be better, but it's certainly still very usable).

I find this a bit surprising if they were the only two apps running. However, of course far more RAM will speed things up tons.

OWC sells high quality RAM at very decent prices (as somebody else mentioned.)

MyOWC at OtherWorldComputing.com

Still, I'm just wondering if the Mac Pro with 2 GB of RAM is running appreciably slower now than when first purchased or what. "Sluggish" and Mac Pro generally don't go together in the same sentence even with only 2 GB of RAM if all else is good.

Dave

One Gb per Core.

Feed the beast.

I find my Mac Pro quite snappy with 4GB of ram (4 cores though). I've often wondered whether I should go to 8GB but I'm happy with the current performance.

And the stability. 15 days uptime... it just feels eternal and solid as a rock. My Macbook pro always ran hot so I feel bad leaving it on.

Same here. One thing of note though is RAID STRIPED setup will increase performance.

Infact i did a fresh install a few weeks back and just installed onto a single drive (since i had the machine- it has been RAIDED over 2 drives).

Anyway- during the install of the apps (CS3- MS office etc) i could not believe how slow it was! I deleted it all and setup RAID STRIPED over 3 drives.

Whhhhhooooooosh!!!!! I was back to multiple installations- surfing- massive file renders- what ever i could throw at it.

But in your case. More RAM (1GB / core) + RAID that monster!

Remember that Adobe apps work with uncompressed image data, which is an order of magnitude larger than what the image files are. I'd say you should have 4Gb of RAM at least on any Mac, at they very least because RAM is cheap nowadays. If you're working with pro applications, you could do with at least one extra hard drive which you'll set as the scratch disk for Adobe apps.

What's probably happening is that, because you're playing music, the hard disk has to jump between reading music and scratch files. Though it shouldn't be that much of a hit on a modern hard disk, it is the bottleneck in a machine's performance.

Yeah- so RAID the sucker.

I hope you've got good backups. A stripe over 3 drives sounds like a recipe for disaster.

Sure have (always have )- only 3x 250GB inside- so my external $750GB drive does the trick.

I have a 320GB boot and 2x 1TB storage. It would be interesting to backup as a Stripe.