Photoshop, Bridge, and ACR/Adobe Camera Raw Performance Analysis Q6600 and i7 2600K

hihohito wrote in post #13251523
Thanks for the time and work you put into this. I have about the same system you build.
A ssd cache disk of 120 gb for bridge and acr makes that a big difference in working speed?

I don't know, I haven't compared it with a spinning disk. I can give that a go some time, when i'm bored.

tim wrote in post #13252090
I don't know, I haven't compared it with a spinning disk. I can give that a go some time, when i'm bored.

Oeps!! Sorry, don't bother I thought you had a special reason to use a $200 120 GB SSD for Bridge and ACR cache. So don't get bored.

hihohito wrote in post #13253311
Oeps!! Sorry, don't bother I thought you had a special reason to use a $200 120 GB SSD for Bridge and ACR cache. So don't get bored.

It's a good question, i'll do it some time. I just understand how things work, and I know it should give a theoretical advantage, so I bought one to help speed up my workflow. At up to 60,000 images per year anything that can speed things up helps.

have you tested with HT off?

Bobster wrote in post #13263573
have you tested with HT off?

Nope.

I had virtually the same set up as you did, when I did move to the i7, I was so impressed, just one more jigsaw was missing until a couple of months after the upgrade....the ssd drive, so glad now with my set up

Tim,
thanks for the review. SSD might be the bottleneck. I hav a bac in Computer Sci, the bottleneck of PC speed has always been the harddisk at 7200rpm etc...
i am only using a core 2dualE8400, few months back i upgraded to a SSD have i felt the amazing improve in the speed overall. bootup is faster etc. i had the operating system installed in the SSD. i can now see that my bottleneck is the CPU speed and my RAM (8GB). I am thinking of an upgrade now.

cheers,
Scott

tim wrote in post #13263631
Nope.

why not?

Bobster wrote in post #13276029
why not?

Lack of interest, mostly. I'll give it a go next time i'm bored. I doubt the results will be much different from with hyperthreading, and probably much the same as the i5 2500.

So you think replacing my system drive with a 128GB or 256GB SSD would give me a nice bump in speed? I can copy the batch of files I am editing to the SSD too. Once I am done, I can copy it back to disk based storage. Is that what you do?

nicksan wrote in post #13278985
So you think replacing my system drive with a 128GB or 256GB SSD would give me a nice bump in speed? I can copy the batch of files I am editing to the SSD too. Once I am done, I can copy it back to disk based storage. Is that what you do?

Nope. An SSD for boot will make your system boot faster, and your programs load faster, but won't help your editing productivity unless you reboot your PC between editing each photo.

If you have one SSD I suggest you put your cache on it, and your images on a fast large hard drive. If you have two SSDs put the images on one and the cache on another.

I have an SSD for boot, and an SSD for cache. Sometimes I copy the images i'm editing onto the boot SSD, but I don't think it makes a lot of difference. I'll have to look at my results and have a play to figure it out.

Ok i've done some more tests this morning. The original spreadsheet linked from the first post has been updated. My observations:
- When creating thumbnails it makes no real difference to performance whether the source images are on hard disk or SSD.
- Hyperthreading slows things down by about 2%. Everything was very slightly faster when hyperthreading was turned off.
- Neither the disks nor the CPU were working at full speed. I believe that better software in future will take better advantage of the hardware.

I wanted to test how quickly the cache was loaded from SSD vs HDD, but I ran out of enthusiasm. I might do it later.

I have a similar setup to yours. I am using a Crucial M4 128GB SSD, 2500K, and 16GB of RAM. Everything feels very snappy and fast.

tim wrote in post #13228312
Conclusion

The i7-2600K takes between 1/3 and 1/2 the time the Q6600 takes to do real world batch image processing tasks. That's a really worthwhile speedup for people who have a large number of images to process.

Of course interactive speed is probably even more important than batch speed, but it's difficult to quantify. It definitely feels faster and more snappy, with less waiting around.

I'm not sure where the bottleneck is. The disks can read data a lot faster, and the CPU wasn't fully used, so my theory is the software is the bottleneck. Multithreaded programming for multicore machines is relatively difficult, so I expect things to get faster as technology improves. CS5 may be better than CS4 in this regard. I hear Lightroom can do simultaneous exports, which speeds things up, but I don't like the LR interface much.

The tests do show that Windows 7-64 can take advantage of lots of RAM to effectively cache files, both files already requested by a program, and reading ahead to files not yet requested. Once i've culled my photos the working images i'm left with are generally 6-12GB, so they should sit nicely cached in RAM

Tim, I know we are a photography forum and I'm guilty of being an overclocking geek. So since you have an i7 2600K... I sure hope you are overclocking it, too since it is a "K" version of the chip. I'm at a cool 4.74Ghz on all cores... the best chip ever. I'm sure your test would vastly improve and the Q6600 is no match at that level.

rich9cinti wrote in post #14549131
Tim, I know we are a photography forum and I'm guilty of being an overclocking geek. So since you have an i7 2600K... I sure hope you are overclocking it, too since it is a "K" version of the chip. I'm at a cool 4.74Ghz on all cores... the best chip ever. I'm sure your test would vastly improve and the Q6600 is no match at that level.

I'm not overclocking, I don't really know how, but I know it's pretty easy these days. I think I'm rarely CPU bound, only very occasionally, maybe it'd be worth it during wedding processing season.

I'd rather have a quiet PC than a loud one that's 10% faster in the real world.

My day job is as a solutions architect focusing on performance of enterprise systems. We don't get down to the clock speed level though, it's more about number of cores and how they're distributed, what loads what on which machines, architecture of software, etc.