a test to evaluate computer speed w PS?

VayCayMom

I found an old test floating around online from a few years ago, it involved a photo, blurring, zooming etc. from a few years ago, nothing updated. My computer of course beat the heck out of the posted times.

I am wondering how my computer rates for what I put it through, hours and hours of editing. Can it be improved? Or is it pretty good . I know many factors are in play, software issues etc. I think Vista is slowing me down, sometimes Windows Explorer just freezes trying to open files etc. I do not run any other programs while in PS.
So in order to pinpoint where I could make improvements, or before I consider maybe a new computer could be faster, I need to compare.

My computer is quite new, but I am now dealing in much larger files, and a whole lot more!
I have a PC and a AMD Athlon x2 64. And lot's of other stuff, my computer guy kinda based it somewhat losely on what a video gamer would need for speed. But he is not an expert on digital editing needs. But it was a GREAT deal and my old computer was put to pasture RIP!

Just wondering...:dunno

Newsy

There are a couple of web sites that have a database of tests versus CPU models.

The key items to enhance your Adobe CS4 experience is:

CPU
RAM
Video Card

And to a lesser extent:

Hard Drive - seems that most are 7200rpm and very few 5400rpm are to be found. Some people insist on using a 10000rpm or 15000rpm drives for the Adobe paging file (? I think this is it).

---

Adobe CS4 can use OpenGL to speed up screen writes so a medium to high end gamers type card would be an asset. A side benefit if you buy an ATi 4800 series or 5800 series card, is that they support 2 and 3 LUT's respectively. LUT's (Look Up Table) are useful if you want to support 2 or 3 "calibrated" monitors off your PC.

---

Web sites:

Anand CPU Benchmarks
..... Adobe Photoshop CS4 - Retouch Artists Speed Test
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/default.aspx?b=25


Toms Hardware (UK but has USA redirect)
..... has benchmarks for Video, Drives, CPU's, Memory Cards
..... CPU: Adobe Photoshop CS4 - Image Processing (Applying 6 filters to a 69 MB TIF image)
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/processors,6.html

.

VayCayMom

Thank you Newsy! This is the stuff I need to show to my computer guy so he can help keep me up to speed. Thanks again.

gecko0

my .02....

if you indeed have an athlon 64 x2, then that is fairly outdated in computer terms already. that cpu was released in 2005/2006 and there have been significant improvements since then in multi-core processors...as well as efficiency, etc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athlon_64_X2

as said above, the three main bottlenecks are cpu, RAM, and hard drive. if you short-change any of those, then your pc will only perform as fast as the slowest component.

Windows 7 is far more efficient than Vista. that alone may get some extra oomph out of your current system. for PS work, load up on RAM and also add in a second (or faster) hard drive to be the "working" drive or swap drive for PS.

regarding the video card, for 2D photo work, any moderately current "gaming" card will be just fine. i'll let others on here chime in regarding what is best for actual quality of output, calibration options, etc. personally, i'm an ATI fan, but have used both ATI and NVIDIA in recent years and both have excellent options.

this is just a super high level overview...picking out a new system can be very easy (such as configuring a Dell system) or quite involved if you select each individual component.

DavidTO

We have an entire thread dedicated to this, which is a sticky at the top of this forum!

jeffreaux2

A dual core processor would be fine for the average laptop, but things have progressed .

I built (on the kitchen table no less) a new pc to edit on last spring. It is based on the Intel Core i7 which is a multi-threaded quad core processor. With multi-threaded applications (like Lightroom) it behaves as 8 cores. It also has 12(twelve) gigs of DDR3 RAM, a 10,000 RPM hard drive for apps and 1 TB of storage with expandability to ...well...really....indefinite amounts of future storage. I am also using a video card that has dual GPUs on it and 1 GB of its own RAM. This machine usues Vista Ultimate 64 as an operating system currently.....though I have already bought a copy of Windows 7 Pro to install. It is V-E-R-Y fast !!!

I know the test you speak of....and Andy pointed you that way....but for me, Lightroom was the axe that broke my old PC's back. It was excrutiatingly slow on that single core processor and no amount of added RAM seemed to help.

Today, I finished a set of wedding photos in LIghtroom. When I exported, there were 894 files to be converted from RAW to JPEG. In the end the output files totalled 7,906 MB (or 7.9 Gigs) and the export (timed with a stopwatch) took 1920 seconds (32 minutes). If my math is good that averages out to about 4.06 MB per second leaving Lightroom. Pretty speedy!

On average we are talking about an 8.84 MB file being converted from RAW to JPEG and exported from lightroom at 2.2 seconds per file!!!


THAT's PRODUCTIVITY!!!!

IT would have taken MUCH longer on my old machine...perhaps hours.....and it would have been useless for other tasks in the meantime.