Shall we compare? - Win 7 experience index

I've been finding I've been wishing for faster performance when I do certain things in Photoshop. It does fine with basic tools like the clone tool, the paintbrush, the blur tool, etc. What's slower than I would prefer are plugins such as Imagenomic Portraiture, ACR, NoiseNinja, and Alien Skin Bokeh. They're not excruciatingly slow, but they're show enough to make me realize I could be more productive with a faster computer.

If you're using a Windows 7 or Vista PC, you'll be able to directly compare your performance to mine via the Windows experience index. Here's how. Go to:

A bunch of info comes up, including a listing called “Windows Experience Index.” Mine comes up as 3.0. I pulled up this info on display machines at a local store and the machines ranged between 3.3 and 5.5. The other information that came up is this:

This is a somewhat older PC that was pressed into service when my main PC, a home-built Windows XP machine konked out before I could build a screamer Win 7 PC from scratch. What I'm using I originally bought as a debranded and refurbished no OS PC, an ex-HP that I originally put Linux on and used as a jukebox/home entertainment PC. When my other PC's motherboard fried, I maxxed this one's memory to 4 GB, up from 1, and put Windows 7 on it so that I could install all my photography software, which would not run under Linux.

Now right by your rating, there's a blue link titled “Windows Experience Index.” If you click on that, you get more info. Here's what I get:

It says the base score is determined by the lowest score of these, which for my PC is 3.0. This leads me to believe I could dramatically improve my computer's performance if I upgrade my video card. I wouldn't have to wait until I can afford to build my screamer PC. The PC is just using the video card built into the motherboard. I'm pretty sure I have an available PCI Express expansion slot.

Let's compare. I'm curious to others' performance indexes. If you don't mind, post yours, including the individual ones when you click on the blue Windows Experience Index link. I'm interested in those and your impressions on your Photoshop and plugin performances.

If you're in Win XP, Macintosh, or Linux, you won't be able to do this, but if you're in Win 7 or Vista, you can. One other thing I did to boost performance was to designate an 8-gig ReadyBoost thumb drive as virtual memory. I made the whole thing virtual memory so that the computer will use it instead of my hard drive for that.

So what do you think? Will a new and faster video card dramatically bump up Photoshop's performance on this thing or am I better off waiting till I have the bucks to build my new high-end PC?

My two main machines are as follows

Work (Dell Precision T3500, W3680 6-core 3.33GHz, 12GB ECC DDR3, WD Velociraptor 600GB, nVidia GTS 250):

• Processor - 7.7
  
• Memory - 7.7
  
• Graphics - 6.9
  
• Gaming Graphics - 6.9
  
• Primary Hard Disk - 5.9

• Processor - 7.8
  
• Memory - 7.8
  
• Graphics - 7.6
  
• Gaming Graphics - 7.6
  
• Primary Hard Disk - 7.7

Here's another one that goes to show how useless WEI is. This is from my work notebook, a Dell Latitude E4200.

Dell Latitude E4200 (SU9400 2-core 1.4GHz, 3GB DDR3, Integrated Intel Graphics, 64GB 1st-gen SSD):

• Processor - 4.5
  
• Memory - 4.9
  
• Graphics - 3.2
  
• Gaming Graphics - 3.2
  
• Primary Hard Disk - 6.2

WEI is a pretty useless number. Raising your graphics score won't do much besides raise the score if you don't do anything that requires much GPU power... I guess it'll point you to the bottleneck in your system, but not much more than that.

jasonlitka wrote in post #11388275
My two main machines are as follows

Work (Dell Precision T3500, W3680 6-core 3.33GHz, 12GB ECC DDR3, WD Velociraptor 600GB, nVidia GTS 250):

• Processor - 7.7
  
• Memory - 7.7
  
• Graphics - 6.9
  
• Gaming Graphics - 6.9
  
• Primary Hard Disk - 5.9

Home (Dell Precision T3500, W3680 6-core 3.33GHz, 24GB ECC DDR3, OCZ Vertex 2 240GB, nVidia 460 GTX):

• Processor - 7.8
  
• Memory - 7.8
  
• Graphics - 7.6
  
• Gaming Graphics - 7.6
  
• Primary Hard Disk - 7.7

Now that's an interesting difference.

Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU 920 @ 2.67GHz 7.7 7.7
Determined by lowest subscore

Memory (RAM) 12.00 GB 7.8
Graphics NVIDIA GeForce GTX 480 7.8
Gaming graphics 4095 MB Total available graphics memory 7.8
Primary hard disk 11GB Free (56GB Total) 7.7

Here are the numbers from my box. This is a machine that is basically for Lightroom/CS5 and CAD tools.

Intel I7-930
Intel X58SO
Sapphire HD5750
6 GB OCZ DDR3
Seagate 1.5TB (5900RPM)

* Processor - 7.5
* Memory - 7.5
* Graphics - 7.3
* Gaming Graphics - 7.3
* Primary Hard Disk - 5.9

Regards,

110yd

Intel i7-860
Nvidia GT220 1gb
12gb DDR3-1333
OCZ Vertex 2 60gb

Processor - 7.5
Memory - 7.5
Graphics - 6.5
Gaming Graphics - 6.5
Hard Disk - 7.7

Core 2 Quad Q9550 @ 3.0 GHz
EVGA GTX 260 216SP
2x2GB DDR2-800
1TB Western Digital Caviar Black

Processor: 7.3
Memory: 5.9
Graphics: 7.3
Gaming Graphics: 7.3
Primary Hard Disk: 5.9

hollis_f wrote in post #11392945
Now that's an interesting difference.

I find it unsurprising, really. The Velociraptor is already slow compared to most SSDs, let alone a top-of-the-line Sandforce SSD like the Vertex 2.

My laptop.

Processor Intel(R) Core(TM) i7 CPU Q 720 @ 1.60GHz 7.0
Memory (RAM) 6.00 GB 7.2
Graphics ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870 6.8
Gaming graphics 3802 MB Total available graphics memory 6.8
Primary hard disk 349GB Free (446GB Total) 5.9

System
---------------
Manufacturer ASUSTeK Computer Inc.
Model G73Jh
Total amount of system memory 6.00 GB RAM
System type 64-bit operating system
Number of processor cores 4

Storage
---------------

Total size of hard disk(s) 631 GB
Disk partition (C: ) 349 GB Free (446 GB Total)
Disk partition (D: ) 135 GB Free (185 GB Total)
Media drive (E: ) CD/DVD

Graphics
---------------

Display adapter type ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5870
Total available graphics memory 3802 MB
Dedicated graphics memory 1024 MB
Dedicated system memory 0 MB
Shared system memory 2778 MB
Display adapter driver version 8.683.0.0
Primary monitor resolution 1600x900

hollis_f wrote in post #11392945
Now that's an interesting difference.

Not really. What you might find interesting though is the people with slower drives (WD Black 7200RPM, Seagate 5900RPM) posting equal scores of 5.9. I believe the WEI takes not only speed into account but also free disk space. One more sign of its uselessness...

jasonlitka wrote in post #11405002
Not really. What you might find interesting though is the people with slower drives (WD Black 7200RPM, Seagate 5900RPM) posting equal scores of 5.9. I believe the WEI takes not only speed into account but also free disk space. One more sign of its uselessness...

Nice eye; I hadn't noticed that. Now that really is lame.

dont forget to use more than 1 drive for your OS.. i do stripe no parity on 2 drives.... better performance.. while the chart isnt the best.. it is good for the person to get a baseline before upgrading anything.. then upgrade stuff slowly and running the benchmarks again... see if any one item drastically changes everything...

TeleFragger wrote in post #11405029
dont forget to use more than 1 drive for your OS.. i do stripe no parity on 2 drives.... better performance.. while the chart isnt the best.. it is good for the person to get a baseline before upgrading anything.. then upgrade stuff slowly and running the benchmarks again... see if any one item drastically changes everything...

The thing is, I'd much rather get a 64GB SSD than a RAID 0 setup. Since 1TB WD Blacks cost ~$60 apiece, getting a second drive for RAID 0 reaches the price point of an SSD, which blows away any HDD RAID setup.

r31ncarnat3d wrote in post #11405042
The thing is, I'd much rather get a 64GB SSD than a RAID 0 setup. Since 1TB WD Blacks cost ~$60 apiece, getting a second drive for RAID 0 reaches the price point of an SSD, which blows away any HDD RAID setup.

but what are you going to do with 64gb?
install windows 7, photoshop, microsoft patches, few apps then where are you going to store your pics or raws?????????

space per performance too....