Just thought I would mention that we have replaced our computer equipment.  Dave's axiom is "Bigger is always better"

Canon 5d Sigma 8mm f/3.5
4 Raw 12mb converted to 4 74.5mb TIF's 8bit singles
Stitched at 5000 x 2500 pixels

Old equipment: [vintage circa 2002] Dell Dimension 8200 Intel Pentium 4 with 1gb ram, XPpro updated to SP2.

stitched time 3.5 minutes

New equipment: Dell 420 XPS Intel Quad Core Duo 6600, with 3gb ram, Vista Ultimate

stitched time 57 seconds

Are we having fun yet??

Nice Dave,

I too have recently upgraded.

• Intel Quad Core 6700 2.66Mhz
• 4GB RAM
• 8600GT 512MB Graphics (may upgrade this again)

Also I'm missing my SATA 10,000RPM Raptor HDD's so I might just add a few of these also.

To be honest, I'm not that rapped in the performance (at least not yet) My 4 year old AMD 3500+ is faster on some tasks I commonly use. So still looking for bottlenecks. I'm using Vista Home Premium and as yet can't see that this would make any difference. Still not a fan of the Vista (Apple copy) folder structure. I like Aero though! But will disable this under a "stitching" user profile for optimum performance.

Yes, all fun (until your 37" Monitor dies  )

Oh, well it's 22" until it's fixed/replaced.

Regards, Smooth

Texas

What are you possibly going to do with all that extra time?

Hi guys

Smooth...... I have to ask....... have you had better luck seeing improvements in the performance since your last post here?

I ask because I am considering to upgrade my computer. This summer I will be photographing a lot of hotels so I want to improve the time used combining images in Photomatix and the time spent stitching (I'll most likely be doing 100's of panoramas during the summer)

I don't want to spent a lot of money if the performance isn't notisable. Then it's just a "waste".

Currently I work on a laptop with a pentium m 760 (2ghz) processor and 2 gb ram - xp home sp2.

I have been eying an offer from a local computer store with these specs:

InteCore2Quad Q6600

4x2,4GHz (8mb cache)

4gb DDR ram

GeForce 8600GT 1gb Graphic card

What is your thoughts about this? Will I see significant improvements, or should I rather save the money for something else?

Best regards

Morten

OH I see I already posted info about new equipment -  After a month performance is same.

Hmm interesting.  We just replaced 2 of our network computers with

Dell 420 Quad Core Intel Q6600 8gb L2 cache w/3gb ram. 

Read a small note in the manual saying something about  if you are using a 32bit o/s  it will only read 4gb ram.  To get 8gb  you would need a 64bit o/s.  Might be something you might want to follow up on.  We are using Vista Ultimate 32bit o/s.

We too are using an GeForce 8600GT with dedicated 512 onboard.

On our old Intel P4 machine with 1gb ram,  stitching a 5000 x 2500 image would take 3 to 4 minutes.

On new machine stitched repeatedly at 57 seconds.

Hope that helps

Sorry about the repeat