Nikon Capture Speed

Good news. It is pathetically slow on my 2.3 GHz PC with 1 MB RAM. I am currently having a new machine built that has a 3.4 GHz processor with a Raptor system drive and 3 GB RAM. Hopefully, NC will become useable on this machine.

 

Well Windows 95 runs really slow on 1MB of RAM. I am guessing you mean 1 GB of RAM.

You are right, you really need a machine with ~1.5GB of RAM at least when working with the D70 RAW files. I make this important distinction because it would appear if you are working with much larger RAW files you need to consider your total cost of ownership which includes, larger RAID storage, larger backup media (or more of it), larger compact flash, longer times to transfer, more RAM, and possibly more CPU.

In any event, while 1.5 GB of RAM works great for me to do my workflow, if I were to upgrade beyond that, I would suspect I would need a lot of more RAM, perhaps even 3.0 gigs as jfrancis is building for.

 

You are quite right - I meant 1 GB of RAM. Capture was OK on my current machine (just about) working with the D70 RAW files, but the 19 MB monsters created by the D2X brought it to its knees.

I went to 3 GB of RAM on the new PC after talking to a Nikonians buddy who found that moving from 2 to 3 GB made a lot of difference to the speed of NC. This machine will have a 74 GB Raptor (10,000 rpm) system drive, which will be only for applications. It will have a 250 GB second drive for data, and I will set Window's swap file to be the first thing on that drive. I also have a 250 GB external drive and twin optical drives. Should be OK for the next year . . . :shock:

 

Holy cow! You were using NC with 1GB of RAM with D2X RAW files.... <swoons>

You probably know this already, but for others following this thread, here are some quick tips to see if you are near that memory threshold.

I was able to tell how much RAM I needed by looking at my peak memory usage. If you press ctrl-alt-delete and then pick task manager (assuming Windows 2000 or Windows XP) or shift-ctrl-esc (works for Windows NT), then you get the task manager.

Look at he lower left hand corner for the Commit Charge tab and look at the upper right (below the graph) for the Physical Memory.

Look at the "peak value" of Commit Charge... that's the max you have ever used. If that value is over 3.0 gigs... please let me know so I can make my little Total Cost of Ownership for the D2X budget a little bigger. I only have so many RAM slots so I got to spec it out further ahead!

Look at the "available" line by Physical memory and you will see if you are near the swapping zone. The OS will try to stop this from hitting zero, but if it starts hitting 30-40 megabytes left... that means once you use that up it will start thrashing (using the harddisk for swap) and this is when you will start cursing at how slow Nikon Capture is!