"louise" wrote in message
...
I've just purchased my first DSLR (Nikon D40X) and I'm
shooting in RAW. I am using Capture NX to do intial
adjustments to the raw image and then saving it as a tiff.
I then open the tiff in CS3 and continue editing.

So, Capture NX, CS3, Outlook and Firefox are usually open.
And my computer is moving between Capture NX and CS3 very
very slowly, pictures are being drawn slowly and changes are
previewed....slowly. It is only slightly better if I close
Outlook and Firefox - it is still slow enough to be
frustrating for any quantity of work.

I want to emphasize that everything works, but it is slow
and I am constantly waiting for large files to open and to
adjust to changes. I find the transition from Capture NX to
opening the tiff in CS3 to be extremely slow.

I don't know whether I really need a new computer, or
whether it is simply that my graphics card isn't up to the
tasks I am now presenting to it. Here are the specs:

P4, 3.2 with 2 gig of ram and an Asus Motherboard. Large
seagate hard drive with plenty of space.

The video card is a Saphire Radeon 9600 Pro Atlantic with
128 meg of memory in the AGP 8x slot of an Asus P4C800E
Deluxe motherboard.

Do I need a new computer with a much faster processor, or is
the the video card the main bottleneck? If the video card
is the bottleneck, do I get another AGP 8X with 256 meg of
ram or do I get a regular PCI card and not use the AGP slot
at all? I do have an open PCI slot. What specs should I
look for in a card?

I am hoping that a new video card will take care of the
slowness for another year when I will feel more ready to buy
a new computer. But if not....then it will have to be sooner.

Thoughts, opinions, suggestions, etc., all very welcome.

TIA

Louise

I doubt that your graphics card is the problem. I think the Radeon 9600 Pro
is a very good card for what you're doing. And your computer specs sound as
though you have plenty of processing power and memory.

Forget about a graohics card for your PCI slot. Most if not all new
computers use PCI Express for the graphics card, but PCI Express is entirely
different from the standard PCI slots that you have, which are significantly
slower than AGP. Since you have AGP, you surely do not have PCI Express. The
real-world advantage of PCI Express 16x over AGP 8x is trivial anyway.

My guess is that the slowness you're experiencing is due mostly to using
those 10Mp RAW files. I'm assuming that you had no similar problem with
digital photos before you got the D40x -- is that correct? But I don't have
a 10Mp SLR, rarely if ever shoot RAW, use the older Nikon Capture 4 and
don't use any flavor of Photoshop, so I can't really put myself in your
situation.

Do you have any such problems when shooting JPEG?

Neil