Hardware Question.

P
Posted By
p645n
Aug 24, 2004
Views
298
Replies
9
Status
Closed
I’m running P/S CS with an AMD based machine. File sizes are 350 megs because the scans are of 6×9 negs. I want to output to 26 inch x 36 inch plus prints. Things are oh so slow. Machine specs are AMD 1900+ CPU, 3 times 512 sticks of RAM. 10,000 rpm hard drive and a 7200 hard drive with a 10 gig scratch partition. Maxtor 32 meg video card.

My question — what can I do to speed things up — is there anything I can do short of purchasing a big bucks machine?

thanks…jim

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brent_bertram
Aug 24, 2004
Jim,
That file size is stressing your i/o . If you upgrade your existing machine, add a SATA Raid controller and a pair of fast SATA hard drives. Stripe them for speed and that ought to pick up your hard drive transfers. I think you’re a candidate for a new computer, though, if you expect to continue working with those files. Just upgrading to a new motherboard would involve a new cpu and doubtless new RAM . Might as well go shopping, I think., by the time you sink $600 in upgrades , and then you’ll have 2 boxes to play with . <G>
🙂

Brent
Y
YrbkMgr
Aug 25, 2004
And you will get better performance (theoretically) if you have the PS Scratch Disc on a separate physical drive rather than on the same drive with the OS’ swapfile.
FN
Fred_Nirque
Aug 25, 2004
That machine shouldn’t be all that slow. Try setting up a bare-bones start-up regime for the machine when you intend working on these images – minimal startup apps loaded, minimal hardware loaded.

Check the Windows Task Manager (ctrl-alt-del) processes tab for what is running – make sure you haven’t picked up a virus or gremlin prog that is needlessly using CPU resources. You can find an explanation of what most of the processes do, and which are expendable here:

<http://www.answersthatwork.com/Tasklist_pages/tasklist.htm>

Check that your RAM allocation in CS isn’t set too high, either.

Fred.
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p645n
Aug 25, 2004
Thanks all for the suggestions. A couple of questions.

Brent when you suggest RAID 0 is that to speed up opening & saving the files or will it play a larger part in the picture? I’d buy a second Raptor (10,000RPM ) drive right away if I was going to see an overall improvement.

An interesting thing I found was that it appears the P/S stresses your CPU much more then I thought it would. I always thought that everything was "done" in memory but that’s not true. When I rotate an image or add a filter it’s the CPU pegged at 100 percent whereas the Windows Task Managers Page File Usage graph is hanging around 800 megs.

Fred you made the comment that has really got me thinking when you said " Check that your RAM allocation in CS isn’t set too high, either". Could you explain that to me as I always thought that I wanted to allocate as much RAM as I could to CS. In my case 1200 megs of my 1536 total.

Thanks a lot for your time guys!
jim
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YrbkMgr
Aug 25, 2004
Jim,

I know you didn’t ask me specifically, but I thought I would chime in.

The biggest gain in PS will be achieved, all other things being equal, by optimized data transfer from the hard drive. This is theoretical based on the way photoshop works. In practice, noticable benefit is only reported in the most extreme of cicumstances.

There is always a tendancy to get the absolute most optimized specs, but in practice, the gain isn’t often obvious, except in extreme cases.

There’s another short thread in this forum that discusses this very issue HERE <http://www.adobeforums.com/cgi-bin/webx?14@@.3bb59750/0>.

An interesting thing I found was that it appears the P/S stresses your CPU much more

Absolutely. There is no other commercial software that will strain the nooks and cranny’s of a system like Photoshop (I got that from Chris Cox who appears on the splash screen when PS loads).

I always thought that everything was "done" in memory but that’s not true.

You are correct. PS doesn’t work quite the same way that most windows programs work. Well, it does, but the processing power of photoshop relies on the use of dedicated HD space. Dedicated in as much as it creates a temp file specifically for it’s use and swaps information to and fro.

I always thought that I wanted to allocate as much RAM as I could to CS

You can end up choking RAM required by the OS and other processes if it’s set too high. IOW, there’s a "sweetspot". Where that sweetspot is on your system depends on how much ram, and what other processes are running. For some systems, it’ll be 50%, for others, 70, and yet for some, 90. If you have enough ram, and can do the math, you can find your sweetspot. In general, the rule of thum is to set it at 70-75%, but you know how rules of thumbs go…

Peace,
Tony
PC
Pierre_Courtejoie
Aug 25, 2004
Don’t forget that the AMD XP 1900+ processors do not use SSE2, that is used in certain operations, and that their FSB is only 266Mhz… (2x 133) A newer Pentium 4 or Athlon XP64+ will use SSE2 instructions, and their FSB is 2x 400Mhz (for the athlon 939 pins) the amount of level2 cache memory is either double of quadruple of what you had in your AXP. Remember that processor bandwidth is also very important with Photoshop

You could get a nice boost just upgrading your motherboard, processor, heatsink and ram…
LH
Lawrence_Hudetz
Aug 25, 2004
That’s true, Pierre, but with large files, you hit scratch pretty fast, and then everything slows to a crawl. My files are similar in size to his, and I see it all the time. When I run a small file from a digital camera, even my 850MHz Athlon with 133MHz bus speed is quite satifactory.
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brent_bertram
Aug 25, 2004
So true, Larry,
My PentIII-800 does a fine job on digicam pics, but my 2800+ XP ( ultra 320 boot disk, Promise RAID array for scratch and data ) is a better match for files of any size .

🙂
LH
Lawrence_Hudetz
Aug 25, 2004
There’s a Raid in my future!

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