Hi! What is the most essential part of computer to speed up PhotoShop CS2/CS3 startup and working? Is ti CPU, or RAM, or GPU?

I have DualCore AMD 4200+, 1GB RAM, Gf7600GS 256MB, and it still takes about 5-6 seconds to start up, and when performing some complicated task, it could be a little faster. What shoul I do? Get more RAM or faster CPU? Tnx.

RAM first. I have 2GB of RAM and that maked many things easier. (was 512MB first)

Definitely RAM.  I only have 256MB of memory and have issues all the time with memory running low when I use PS.  Takes at least a full minute just to open the program.  Horrible.  And I can't open files any of my files that are 5000 x 5000 pixels (or review them at LuckyO, for that matter).  Once the tax refund comes, 2 gigs of memory is at the top of my list.    

The more memory the better  I have around 1800 meg of memory in a AMD 1800+ I just added one gig.   using photoshop elements I found
in the preference section an adjustment for memory cache, I made my adjustment and now people I am blazing fast. I am sure CS2 &CS3
has that option

I built a computer specifically for that - kept freezing at first because stupid BIOS was set to look for SLI and all my memory slots are filled with RAM.

Duocore 2.33 GHz 1333 MHz FSB
4GB of RAM DDR2 800
Was using Vista, now back to XP for reliability
Photoshop CS3
Bridge CS3
XFXforce 680i SLI LT motherboard
GeForce 8500GT
DVI for the monitor
3 hdd's - 160 for programs and the operating system, 300 and 400 GB for the storage of files.  Works like a dream now that I ironed out the bugs.

 i use toshiba laptop with 4GB of memory. no speed problems with CS2 . my problem is the disk space. 80GB disk is not enough, I am using external 500 GB disk for backup, but what needs to be still on the machine uses almost 75 gb and I have to delete files almost every day.

I'm on HP laptop with 2gb RAM, and 2.1ghz centrino CPU... Everything working fine...

RAM! and a secondary hard disk for temporaly swap files.

Regards,

If you are running XP you can turn off unnecessary services and that will speed up your system as well.

To confirm the above, ram first, plus a scratch disk that is a different physical hard drive. Just making another partition does nothing.

If you can add a RAID array drive as the scratch disk, that will make a difference, but it's starting to get "out there". On the other hand RAID drives have come down in price and are much easier to configure than they were only a couple of years ago.

Raid 0 may be fastest but it has no redundancy, Raid 1 is not as fast but has redundant backup. Then there's Raid 5 which is a little of both.

New "hot" editing computer. Haven't really fired it up and installed everything yet. Hardly installed anything actually, just too busy. I got it for the video editing that I haven't ever done and probably never will. I'm sure it will be able to handle CS3.

Dual Xeon 2.8 gHz, IBM 235 server, 3gb ram. Dropped a 180 IDE drive in for the OS, plus a DVD-RW, and it has the five SCSI drives configured RAID 5 for the slack drive. - used of course!  Under $700! Now that's a smokin' system.

The 3 gHz Dell I have with two drives, (as in scratch drive on a different physical drive!) 2gb memory and XP works fast enough for me. It was also a used desktop with XP professional, bought off lease. It does take awhile to load CS2 or Elements, but once it's running, I don't find any long pauses or delays.

Desktops are always going to be faster than laptop rated with the same processor speed.

I think best way to get most speed of photoshop is use much ram you can get and get most powerful processor you can afford. But there is a little problem. Photoshop is 32bit application and so is the Win XP (there is a special 64-bit version of it also) and Vista 32-bit version. That means the photoshop can not see anything more than 3255megabytes of ram. With windows xp or vista 32-bit version the limit is lower because the operating system can not handle memory more than that 3 gigabytes limit (due the 32-bit architecture and on some computers this limit much lower (e.g. 2gigabytes)).

But there is a work around which helps a little bit. Use vista 64-bit on your operating system and upgrade memory to 6 or 8 gigabytes. Yes the Photoshop will not see anything more than 3,25gigabytes, but the operating system can see lots of free memory. So the system will not swap so much and photoshop cache/swap can utilitize this extra memory to speed things up and so can other process too (like standalone plugins which are launched from photoshop if they run on different process).

Second thing is to speed up the system with dedicated photoshop swap file drive as mentioned on previous posts. You should go for sata 2 drive or special high speed drives like Western Digital Raptor (they are expensive 80gb / 200euros) and need something to silent them up. But they fastest drive in the market with sata interface. If you want real good speed put two of them on RAID0 . But one is enough, it is cheaper to buy more ram.

My current computer which was upgraded on last december because the old one was not capable of handling Canon 5D files:

-Intel Quad core (current clock speed 3,1ghz, helps silence the machine)
-4 gigabytes of high speed ram
-WD Raptor drive on silence block for swaps
-Normal sata2 drives for windows vista 64bit and storage/backup (few terabytes) (local,usb and nas drives)
-Nvidia 8800gts graphics card (enough power to handle few 24" lcds which will be upgraded into system in near future (still using CRT monitor).

Photoshop cs3 starts less than 1,5 seconds with few external plugins. Photoshop runs nice but could be faster .

Next I will upgrade more ram, because it's seems that photoshop swap file is used quite often and that will help speed things up. Also considering use faster drives for "work directories" (faster bridge usage, saving and loading). My setup may sound overkill but it should be "future proof" for next two years and next photoshop upgrade (cs4 or something) and new monitors and stuff.


br, MJP

Very informative. I keep thinking about getting a new PC, and I think maybe I should do it while I can still buy XP Pro. MS will stop selling it someday and make us all buy Vista on new PCs.

So how do you like your new system so far? Did you put it together yourself have custom order it somewhere like Puget?

I'm not really sure PS uses multiple cores. The test of choice regarding this applications was and still is the gaussian blur filter, but as far as I know, higher clocked Duos (speaking of today) perform better than Quads. And this would probably apply to CPUs with one core as well.

p.s.: So for filters (and such) higher CPU frequency per core is better. The overall PS speed might prosper with more than one processing unit, but I'd almost bet that anything over two CPUs gets lost. Nevertheless the whole system works better with more cores (especially if you're multitasking a LOT while using PS or you have multiple applications running in the background).
p.p.s.: The 64 bit extensions of PS are coming to the PC user in the next version (CS4) (there's btw a hot, hot debate about the exclusion of Apples from this particular functionality). What this means is that all us users who already are running 64 bit OSes and more than 4GB of RAM will rejoice immensely. It is kind of a joke that this feature wasn't implemented earlier, though.

My take (even if it was already said earlier): get more RAM (it's supercheap nowadays), set up an additional swap file (the primary not being on your OS disk) and only than think about a CPU upgrade. And defragment your disk. Working with big files with chunks spread all over the partition slows PS like hell.

Very informative. I keep thinking about getting a new PC, and I think maybe I should do it while I can still buy XP Pro. MS will stop selling it someday and make us all buy Vista on new PCs.

So how do you like your new system so far? Did you put it together yourself have custom order it somewhere like Puget?

I love my new system.   Just put it together last week when my old MB crapped out.  I built it myself (it is really easy to do, just time consuming, especially with SATA drives that don't require jumpers, not a single jumper needed to be set on my new system).

I reused some parts from my old computer (2 x 500 GB drives, optical drive, internal card reader, XP).  All I bought was the case, power supply, MB, chip, ram, graphics cards, and 4 drives (2x 500GB, 2 x 80 GB Raptors), cost me about $1400 total.  I didn't need a new case, but I splurged on a nicety, didn't want to put my new hot rod back in my old case. 

Quote from: Vonkara on March 28, 2008, 09:43

Quote from: ichiro17 on March 28, 2008, 09:22

I built a computer specifically for that - kept freezing at first because stupid BIOS was set to look for SLI and all my memory slots are filled with RAM.

Duocore 2.33 GHz 1333 MHz FSB
4GB of RAM DDR2 800
Was using Vista, now back to XP for reliability
Photoshop CS3
Bridge CS3
XFXforce 680i SLI LT motherboard
GeForce 8500GT
DVI for the monitor
3 hdd's - 160 for programs and the operating system, 300 and 400 GB for the storage of files.  Works like a dream now that I ironed out the bugs.

Very good machine. A hardcore one

Its great. No problems anymore.  Only cost 1000 dollars cdn

Throw in a 36GB Raptor drive and use that for your PS scratch drive.  It'll pick up quite a bit since PS doesn't have to wrestle with Windows near as much for access to paging.