CS4 Bottleneck?

<p>I just added another (faster) physical drive to my PC hoping it would improve CS4 performance. But to my great surprise, I could not detect any change (at least based on the Retouch Artists test).<br>

<br /> Out of the 4GB or RAM installed, Windows 7 sees 2.87 GB as available. Would adding RAM help this or do you think this is a CPU bottleneck?<br>

<br /> Here are the complete specs:<br /> CPU: Pentium 4 650 3.4 GHz<br /> Motherboard: Intel D915GUX<br /> RAM: 4GB DDR2 PC2-5300 (4 chips of 1GB each running in dual-channel mode)<br /> GPU: EVGA GeForce 8600 GTS 256MB<br /> HD1: Hitachi 500GB 7200 RPM SATA-300 - used for Windows and Program Files<br /> HD2: WD Caviar 1TB 7200 RPM SATA-300 - I created a 100GB partition at the start of the drive for CS4 to use as a scratch disk.<br /> Operating System: Windows 7 RC1 64-bit (build 7137)</p>

<p>well a few things, first you say you're new drive is faster, but it seems like they are both 7200rpm, so you def. won't see any increase in performance from that. To actually get a faster drive you'd need to go up to a 10,000rpm, which are expensive and pretty rare these days. The new drive may have a larger cache which helps when sending and getting things from RAM, but mostly when you're working with lots of files, not large files as is usual with PS.</p>

<p>When you say windows only sees 2.8 GB of ram, do you mean when you look at a graph, 2.8 is available and the other 1.x is used up? Or it's only recognizing the first 2.8? A pentium 4 should be able to use up to 4 gigs, so maybe you're just reading that wrong, or it's a limitation of the motherboard.</p>

<p>As for seeing any actual benefit to a new (or even faster) drive, I'm not sure what the Retouch Artist test is, but the only performance there is to gain from a hard drive is during loads and saves. If you're ever using up all your RAM, and the computer needs to keep paging (freeing up space in memory by putting some stuff into a cache on the hard drive) you could also see improvement, but even if your PC is only using ~3gb of ram, you'd need to have some pretty huge files for that to happen. Faster hard drives (like 10,000rpm or the new solid state drives) are really only going to benefit you when booting up the computer, starting an application, or opening a file; there will (literally, in most cases) no actual benefit when you running an application, since the computer just simply isn't using the hard drive.</p>

<p>I use a 150G WD VelociRaptor 10,000rpm as a dedicated scratch drive and notice improvement over intense scratch drive task.</p>

<p>A 64-bit operating system should see all 4 gigabytes of storage. I am not familiar with your motherboard; the board is not listed on the Intel site. If you are certain the memory is installed correctly, I would look in the bios settings and see if there is a 64-bit option. Exactly which chip set does the board use? You can use CPU-Z to find out: <a href="http://www.cpuid.com/cpuz.php">http://www.cpuid.com/cpuz.php</a> .</p>

<p>Are you using the 64 bit version of PS? You have both. Depending on what you're doing in photoshop, 4GB isn't a heck of a lot anymore. I've used 9 of my 12GB in PS before.</p>

<blockquote>

<p>I would look in the bios settings and see if there is a 64-bit option.</p>

 

</blockquote>

<p>A 64 bit environment is soley implemented by the processor and the OS and other software. The BIOS will have no 'enable 64 bit' setting. It's either possible or not depending on the processor.</p>

<p>It looks like you already have the maximum RAM (4GB) installed for your motherboard, according to the specs I found on the Intel website.</p>

<p>Obviously going to a system that allows for more RAM would improve performance. More RAM is always better, within reason. However, since you are capped on RAM the next best thing to do is increase the speed of your scratch disk. You could go to a faster drive such as an SSD or 10k RPM drive, or you could go with a RAID 0 (striping) hard drive array. A RAID 0 array will be faster than either the single SSD or 10k drive.</p>

<p>I recently upgraded my scratch disk from a single WD Caviar Black 640 GB drive to a pair of them in RAID 0, with the first partition set up as the scratch disk. I saw dramatic improvements in performance on operations that were heavily scratch disk dependent, roughly on the order of 100% better than before.</p>

<p>FWIW, the Retouch Artists Speed test is not that demanding on scratch disk performance. I have 8GB of RAM in my 64bit system and it doesn't even use the scratch disk during the test. When the test doesn't run into the scratch disk and can just use RAM it is much faster (my result on the test was 18 secs). For a test that really pushes the scratch disk, check out the test actions used in this article...</p>

<p>http://macperformanceguide.com/OptimizingPhotoshop-Intro.html</p>

<p>The manual <a href="http://download.intel.com/support/motherboards/desktop/sb/c6413602_en.pdf">http://download.intel.com/support/motherboards/desktop/sb/c6413602_en.pdf</a> has the following caveat about memory:</p>

 

<blockquote><em>

<p align="left">System resources (such as PCI and PCI Express*) require physical memory</p>

<p align="left">address locations that reduce available memory addresses above 3 GB. This may</p>

<p align="left">result in less than 4 GB of memory being available to the operating system and<br>

applications.</p>

</em></blockquote>

<p> It also shows support for</p>

<blockquote>

<p align="left">The desktop board supports the following operating systems:</p>

 

<p align="left">•</p>

 

<p align="left">Microsoft Windows* 2000</p>

 

<p>•</p>

 

<p>Microsoft Windows XP</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Support for 64-bit operating systems is not mentioned. I suspect there are not enough address traces on the board to address greater than 4 GB.</p>

<p>You would be surprised how quickly you go through 3-4gb when you have multiple layers, a couple other apps open, and you have the history at 7 or more levels with the cache up. I don't know how much RAM Win7 takes up vs XP, but that would be a nice numer to know as you might see that newer OS's are more demanding of your mem.(I think this will be the other way around for Win7 to Vista).</p>

<p>My Win7 64 uses about 1.6GB when doing almost nothing but quite a bit of software installed.<br>

Really to improve your PS64 performance get a new motherboard and a decent processor (I7 or PhenomII).<br>

6 or 12 GB of DDR3 RAM and a good graphics card in the 250 US$ class with fast memory.<br>

You could use three hard drives. Drive one for the WIN system + etc. ; drive 2 with Windows swap file and drive 3 with PSCS4 swap file.<br>

At least this is a very universal sytem.</p>

<p>Win 7 sees all 4GB, but approx. 1.1GB is listed as reserved for system use. I read somewhere that turning on memory mapping / memory swapping can fix this, but don't see that option in my BIOS. Guess I'm stuck with 2.87GB for the time being :(<br>

My plan is to go i7 in a few months. I was thinking of getting a used motherboard that can handle 8GB of RAM (and maybe one of the faster quad-core chips - also used), but I'm starting to think it'd be best to upgrade in one fell swoop.</p>

<p>Yes, wait to when it makes more sense to buy a new Mobo. I would stay away from used mobo's.</p>

<p>I have recently read that 3 drives for the swcratch significantly increase the speed over 2 drives. Anyone try and see before ordering a 4th VelociRaptor 10K drive?</p>

<div></div>

<p>are you saying:<br>

3 = Windows drive + photo storage drive + scratch disk<br>

is significantly faster than<br>

2 = Windows drive / photo storage + scratch disk</p>

<p>?</p>