PS CS4 Lagging and stuttering (help needed urgently)

Hey folks

I’m starting to rip my hair out now and I’m hoping someone around here can help. It’s pretty urgent as I’ve got a hell of a lot of work to do for university and the problems i’m having are really hampering my progress.

I’ve just rebuilt my PC with the following specs:

CPU – Intel I7 920 2.66ghz Quad Core
Mobo – Asus P6T Deluxe OC Palm Edition
RAM – 6Gb G.Skill DDR3 PC3-12800 (1600mhz) (9-9-9-24) RAM in Triple Channel setup GPU – BFG nVidia GeForce GTX280 1024mb OC2 Edition
HDDs – Seagate 500GB 32mb Cache SATA II Main drive, Western Digital 500GB 16mb Cache SATA II Documents Drive, Western Digital 320GB 16mb Cache SATA II Photoshop Scratch Disk
PSU – Hyper Type M 880W
Case – Coolermaster Cosmos

I am using Windows XP Pro x64 Edition and the 64bit version of CS4.

I’m quite pleased with the system so far, it pretty much obliterates everything you throw at it without blinking an eye. However, I am absolutely stumped as to why the in the world Photoshop CS4 (and CS3) are running as if my system is 10 years old…

So here’s what’s happening:

After rebuilding my system with the above specs I have installed Photoshop CS4 and have opened up a painting I have been working on. I zoom in and the screen redraw is sickeningly slow. I hold space and drag the canvas to navigate around it, and again the redraw rate is terrible and results in what I can only describe as more like a render in something like 3D Max than simply dragging the canvas in Photoshop. While the brush control is smooth for the most part, when painting using several quick strokes I get a lot of lag after a little while which manifests as my brush strokes not registering and then all of a sudden happening at once.

Now, I have CS4 installed on my other system at my parents house which has the following specs:

Intel Core2Duo E6750 2.66ghz (OCed to 3.1ghz) CPU
Asus P5KE Deluxe Motherboard
8GB OCZ DDR2 800mhz RAM
BFG nVidia GeForce 9600 GT OC2 Edition
2x Seagate 250gb HDDs (Not in RAID)

And with this system, Photoshop CS4 works great with the only exception being the OpenGL support not being supported.

I have updated all of the drivers on this i7 system. I’ve even reinstalled older versions of the video card driver and still I get lag. I’ve uninstalled Nod32 Antivirus, Comodo Firewall, stopped Diskeeper from automatically defragging and ended lots of uneeded processes but I still get this problem. I’ve uninstalled my Wacom Tablet drivers and used the mouse in Photoshop and that hasn’t helped. I’ve reinstalled 3 older versions of Wacom Drivers also to no avail.
I’ve even formatted and tried a fresh install.

Also, I tried reinstalling Photoshop CS3 and get similar problems. Only in CS3 there is no issue with the redraw rate, only it lags all of a sudden while trying to navigate an image with space held down and dragging on the mouse or wacom pen (or a blank canvas for that matter) then it will freeze the images movement then suddenly jump.

I’ve not had these problems on previous builds and older less powerful systems and with the amount of money I have thrown at this latest PC build I am really starting to lose my mind.

If anyone can please give me any advice on this I would really appreciate it. Also, if anyone has any ideas how to enable OpenGL on Photoshop I would really appreciate that too – i simply cannoy believe that a high end card such as the GTX 280 or even a popular mid range card like the 9600 Gt doesn’t support Open GL on 3 versions of drivers.

Thanks everyone.