What PC Hardware for Indesign CS5?

[subxero]

I have recently changed jobs and have moved from a Mac based studio to a PC based studio in the design industry. When I started, we were using CS3 (Indesign, Illustrator & Photoshop) All was fine untill my boss decided we should update to CS5. We have bought the CS5 trial to test and installed it on my PC as it is the the most up to date PC in the studio. It has an Intel Core i7 950 3.06GHz processor with 8GB ram running on Windows 7 64-bit. Problem is... Indesign lags badly on this machine.

Simple procedures such as resizing multiple images and text sometimes takes up to 30 -40 seconds.. Whereas in CS3, it was almost instant. Moving an image from one place to another results in a 5 second delay. After moving an image, the background takes a couple of seconds to redraw. The machine specs are really more than adequate ... Surely! The only bit of hardware that I am not comfortable with is the HD4300/4500 graphics card the IT guys supplied. But surely Indesign does not need a gaming card to perform.

AT home, I am using the Mac trial of Indesign CS5 on my i-mac. It has a core 2 duo processor @ 2,8ghz with a Ge-Force 9400m graphics card and 3 GB ram. It runs absolutely fine. No lagging, no having to reduce display settings... Instant resize and as responsive as CS3 was on the PC setup.

Any ideas? My boss refuses to go the mac route, so what do I need to consider based on what I have at the moment? Is it the graphics card? Surely the 9400gm is at least on par with the HD 4300/4500 card in the PC.... Yet delivers. The PC processor is quad core! My i-mac is core 2 duo... In the meantime, I have had to disable features on the PC like instant live redraw and change the hand tool to greek image to make my experience liveable. Any help would be most appreciated.

 

[Pada]

It could very well be due to the low end graphics card that the IT guys installed. It could also be that the IT guys didn't install the proprietary drivers from AMD. If you don't have the AMD Control Center, then you most likely don't have the proprietary drivers installed.
It is actually recommended that you install a workstation class graphics card, like an AMD FirePro or Nvidia Quadro graphics card.

I'd suggest that you first look at the drivers, and then at CS5's hardware acceleration settings, because they might be set too high for those entry level desktop graphics cards.
If installing proprietary drivers & changing the hardware acceleration to none (or just less) doesn't make a difference, then you should most definitely get a better graphics card.

I would recommend something like the HD5770/HD6790 or Nvidia 550Ti at the very least for CAD/graphics design stuff.

I can always ask a friend of mine to test the speed of things on an an i3 540 (dual core with hyperthreading) + 4GB RAM + Nvidia GT430 (which is an entry level nvidia graphics card), but I'd have to install InDesign first - and I have a copy somewhere
The earliest I can do this will be tomorrow after work and I'll need samples & procedures to follow to test it though.
Unfortunately my own PC's are pretty fast (i7 860 + 8GB RAM + HD5670 1GB (costs about R700 now) + Win7 x64), so I'm not sure if testing it on that machine would be of any help to you.

Oh, and I've never thought there would be any use for a SSD for graphics design, until my brother showed me how slow InDesign + PhotoShop CS5 was with his 600MB image file, on his laptop (Core i7 + 4GB RAM).

 

[subxero]

It could very well be due to the low end graphics card that the IT guys installed. It could also be that the IT guys didn't install the proprietary drivers from AMD. If you don't have the AMD Control Center, then you most likely don't have the proprietary drivers installed.
It is actually recommended that you install a workstation class graphics card, like an AMD FirePro or Nvidia Quadro graphics card.

I'd suggest that you first look at the drivers, and then at CS5's hardware acceleration settings, because they might be set too high for those entry level desktop graphics cards.
If installing proprietary drivers & changing the hardware acceleration to none (or just less) doesn't make a difference, then you should most definitely get a better graphics card.

I would recommend something like the HD5770/HD6790 or Nvidia 550Ti at the very least for CAD/graphics design stuff.

I can always ask a friend of mine to test the speed of things on an an i3 540 (dual core with hyperthreading) + 4GB RAM + Nvidia GT430 (which is an entry level nvidia graphics card), but I'd have to install InDesign first - and I have a copy somewhere
The earliest I can do this will be tomorrow after work and I'll need samples & procedures to follow to test it though.
Unfortunately my own PC's are pretty fast (i7 860 + 8GB RAM + HD5670 1GB (costs about R700 now) + Win7 x64), so I'm not sure if testing it on that machine would be of any help to you.

Oh, and I've never thought there would be any use for a SSD for graphics design, until my brother showed me how slow InDesign + PhotoShop CS5 was with his 600MB image file, on his laptop (Core i7 + 4GB RAM).

Thanks for your input. Gut feeling is that the graphics card is to blame. I may convince bossman to consider testing a decent graphics card. Just thought that the overkill cpu would have made up for any graphics card inefficiency. Been a bit out of the loop in terms of PC hardware since working in a mac environment so long. Your input would help a lot! We need to upgrade 11 Pc's and I have to make the recommendations... as our IT company have no clue when it comes to design efficient PC's. One top-end gamer's PC can be a designer's nightmare.

 

[Pada]

Please don't upgrade before you've made 100% sure that the graphics card is incapable of running things smoothly!
First ensure that you have the latest Catalyst drivers installed for the AMD graphics cards.

If installing the graphics card drivers didn't make any difference, then fiddle with the hardware acceleration settings within InDesign/Photoshop.

Only if none of the above made any difference, then go for a better graphics card. I would also suggest that you first try 1 graphics card before buying a whole bunch.