The PC Workstation designed for the Digital Photographer

How much time and effort do you put into choosing your camera and lenses? I bet its a lot. The Camera is the source for all the photographs you take if it isn't right to start with its more difficult, time consuming and costly to put it right with editing later. So to ensure you have the best quality result you make sure you have the right quality lenses, the right lighting and the right camera body. Who makes the best Camera's and lenses? Hasselblad, Nikon, Canon or Minolta for example? All photographers will have an opinion and some experience to share. Ask a photographer what his favourite PC is and its unlikely you will get a clear answer. The best you usually get is either it has to be a PC or a Mac, and that's more a recommendation on religious grounds than technical merit.

We think the reason for this is no one has ever designed as we do, a PC from the ground up for specific needs of specific professionals. Even within the photographic field each photographer will have his or her own particular preferred way of working which requires a PC made just for them. What we give you is a PC designed to meet the needs and challenges a professional photographer faces day-to-day. Including:

• The interfaces (Firewire 800, Gigabit Ethernet, PCI Express 2.0, and USB2) to cope with the large digital image sizes used today, extending to 100's of Megabytes.
• Storage space to reliability keep up to several Terabytes of RAW, psd or other compressed or uncompressed image types and libraries
• High performance storage subsystem to quickly be able to index, thumbnail / contact sheet and retrieve images on demand with little or no delay
• Snappy editing performance in applications such as Photoshop CS4
• Specific effects, transformation and manipulation acceleration technology support through GPGPU (General Purpose Graphics Processing Unit) parallel processing of tasks (Adobe CS4 CUDA support)
• Support for the in memory manipulation of many images simultaneously
• Practical (tool-less) chassis design with good aesthetics for easy on the eye looks and component based upgradability aiding a longer useful life
• Use of high performance cooling technologies to reduce the noise emanating from the PC to virtually zero

The Technology

Cryo PC Workstations are based on the new Nehalem platform from Intel. This brings with it a new chipset and a new performance envelope that with the aid of our unique processes and technology we can push higher and further than ever before. Our workstations go from four cores and eight simultaneous threads of execution (Intel Core i7 920) up to a massive 12 cores with 24 threads of execution ensuring that as much parallel execution that can be done there is a core or thread available to do the work eliminating the dreaded hourglass wait. Not content to stop at what the standard processors give us with our Cryo Boost™ we accelerate the processors core from a standard clock speed of 2.66GHz to over 4GHz, and with our ultra performance machines that utilise extreme cooling technologies we can get close to or over 5GHz. We apply the same process to the memory, bus and interface speeds to give an all around significant over performance. This represents at least a 50% performance increase and possibly a lot more, it effectively gives you a PC today that wont be available as standard from Intel for another three years or more. Locking in a longer viable life and increasing your return on investment and all at the price of an average camera body.

Improving Quality while Reducing Costs

Inevitably you want to give your customers the best possible quality results but time and money are always a constraint and of course there is your competition to worry about. By giving you better performance, a higher level of capability and more seamless access to what the technology can deliver we can transform the way you do your work so that you can offer more to your customers but at a reduced cost. Time taken to edit images and get the right results has a high dependency on the immediacy of access to images, applying changes and transformations (automating as much of that as is possible) and then outputting the results. This acquisition to delivery cycle is key to your business costs and the technology is there to help reduce it.

Reducing the Impact of Obsolescence

Over time its inevitable that new processor, graphics cards and storage technology will become available and new software will make better use of it. Understanding this is a big concern for our customers we offer an Upgrade Assurance policy which allows you to come back to us to buy back your old components and have them upgraded with new ones. This is because we treat our customers differently to most PC manufacturers and retailers. We see all our customers not as buyers of PC's but as professionals with whom we want to build an extended relationship to meet your business needs long term. The sale of the PC isn't the end of the relationship its the beginning. In the spirit of this we provide the Upgrade Assurance together with a comprehensive warranty, technical support and guidance. We think it's a smart offer as we can and want to learn as much from you about your business as you can learn from us about how best to make use of your technology infrastructure.

Now all there is to do is choose the right Cryo PC for you, and take a look at it in more detail...