Photoshop CS3 CPU Usage

[Wineohe]

I just installed a Q9400 and was curious to see if it would actually yield any tangible benefits. What I see is usage across all cores that is roughly north of 50% with one core reaching as high as 80%. Peak reported is 67%, but only rarely and I assume an average. Similar to what I have read elsewhere, and this is at 3.28Mhz.

My next step is Hard Drives. I've come to the unfortunate reality as others have mentioned that all the cores and CPU power in the world won't overcome a slow drive. I really should have invested my money there first. Loading CS3 for example barely tickles the CPU. I also realized only recently that it was using one of my oldest IDE drives as a Swap Drive, after it ran out of space. Duhhh.

 

[i7guy1]

What is that saying about the weakest link? Deciding on the components to upgrade is dependent on the way one uses their system. I would think for heavy graphics usage a faster hard drive and slow cpu is just as much as a bottleneck as a fast cpu with slower hard drives.

 

[Denithor]

The WD Caviar Black drives are an excellent value these days, the 32MB cache helps with speedy data transfer to & from the drive.

Otherwise, if money is less an issue than speed, go for an SSD (Intel makes a nice one ).

 

[Wineohe]

I think I have more serious issues at the moment. I ran the RetouchArtists Speedtest and Photoshop is hanging/not responding during the filter tests. It's taking over 5 minutes to run. Heck my laptop will do it in 73s. Something is seriously wrong. I'm now in a debug mode for my computer. I've played with Default Preferences, History States, Memory settings, sway drives, printers,. yada yada. I fear my next steps are to reinstall Photoshop and maybe Windows. Frustrating.

 

[Denithor]

Are you certain your OC is truly stable? What validation testing (OCCT, Linpack, etc) have you used & for how long?

 

[Wineohe]

I actually just completed a re-install of Windows XP up to SP3. It's taken me almost all day to get everything back up and running. I had been moving the install from various drives and upgrading. It was getting pretty slow. I tried running the RetouchArtists Speedtest again and I get 35s which is in the ballpark. Windows is much punchier now too, especially loading. I should have done this a long time ago. I had actually dialed the overclock back at one point to see if it affected it but was no different. As for validation I should run something but have not. I will look into that. At this point I'm pretty happy with the way things are working.

I've read many complaints about CS3 and it's tendency to hang up. I still get a bit of it towards the end of the test.

 

[dbcooper1]

With 2GB of RAM, it's probably writing to your scratch disk; does the light stay on at the end of the test and seem unresponsive? Are you using a separate physical drive for swap and scratch? When I run that test, that's what it does; I went to 8GB and XP64 before it quit doing that. I'm running a Q9550 at 4.0 and it would run fine until near the end of the test. Making those changes shaved over 10 seconds off the benchmark time.