[g__day (Matthew)]

I asked this on a PC forum - but interested in what astronomers would plan it out. If I wanted to build a PC - high end - for image processing - what ideal set up would folk recommend?

At present I use a 2-3 year on quad core Conroe 2 chip on a motherboard with 8GB of RAM and a ATI HD5850 video card . I don't believe any of MaximDL, Deep Sky Stacker or Adobe CS4 is GPU enabled where it most matters for processing speed up - so I guess I'm processor bound.

In that case is the ideal set up a I970 (So 6 core = 12 threads) plus say 24 GB of RAM the optimal solution for faster image processing? At present DSS can take 2-3 minutes to stack 30 shots of 10MB (RAW) each - and some CS4 astronomy scripts take 3 minutes to process (e.g. Enhance DSO and diminish everything else).

Interested in folks thoughts.

BTW - For video encoding - ATI's GPU based video encoder - seems way faster and higher quality that a 2.3GHz quad core processor.