Questions about MacPro performance with photos

Help!!!! I have a new MacPro 2.26 GHz quad core with 6 Gigs of RAM. I shoot with a 5D Mark II so the files i work with can be fairly large (sometimes the tiffs will be 150 MB). I use Lightroom and CS4 to edit my images. I have two monitors connected to the NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 graphics card. I also have two additional hard drives for backup. My computer seems to be really slow and I spend a lot of time waiting for the spinning ball to stop. It seem to me that this machine is not any faster than the MacPro 2.0 duo core i just sold. My questions are: will running two displays slow down the time it takes to generate an image? and will two addition hard drives slow down performance? Any suggestions out there?

Hi, welcome back!

The external hard drives would only slow you down if you are opening the images from them. You said they are just for back-ups, so I'm guessing you are using the Mac Pros HDD?

Two monitors shouldn't slow you down either considering you're just doing 2D work. However, CS4 does support OpenGL acceleraration. If you go to Photoshop > Preferences > Performance, make sure the tickbox for 'OpenGL Drawing' is selected. I found this made a massive difference to Ps's rendering/redraw speed.

Hope that helps some...

Shouldn't really. I did a composite that was about 150mb with multiple 5d MKII raw files open for editing. That was with a new base model 15" unibody MBP. The only time it slowed down was when the settings reverted to using the integrated graphics instead of the dedicate GPU.

Thanks for the tips. I'll do more testing and see what happens.