Photoshop CS4 vs CS5 speed comparison - video

[Agent 9]

Unless the systems you are looking at other than the older toshiba's uses DDR3, you will want to steer clear of getting a 8GB set of ram, reason is that a lot of them use DDR2 ram (the HP 2730p, Fujitsu T5010 & T4410, and pretty much anything older than those), and it is ridiculously over priced compared to DDR3 (it cost me $175 to get 8GB of DDR2, and while the prices have gone down a little, it is still a solid $130 investment at best; while 8GB of DDR3 is $45!!). So, not to scare you away from the DDR2 machines, but they will cost more to upgrade fully; but you should be able to get a 2GB or 4GB set of DDR2 for $5 or $45 respectively, but you could certainly pull some ram from a old laptop, or ask a friend who has spares after upgrading his

Plus, if you are going to be using a decent SSD with the system you have little need for a lot of ram because Photoshop will just use the SSD as a fast scratch disc. On that subject it looks like the the M7 uses SATA I like the M4, so it probably won't get better speeds than my M4 does (but it should be slightly better because it uses newer SATA controller chipsets, and chipsets which are actually comparable with Intel Rapid Storage Technologies (it is supposes to help speed things up some)


the battery I have (and got mine with) is what looks to be a OEM, it reports 8% wear, but the computer reports 7% battery life after it drains to about 50%, so it is a little more than half worn. When the system was new with XP the battery was supposed to get about 3Hrs, but I get a bit over an hour of decent use on my worn battery, eventually I might get another, but there is no urgency for now.
I would recommend buying a replacement battery from ebay, but only from a seller that has a DOA warranty and possibly a return/ exchange policy, and most importantly that has the Item located in the US and not in China; it would also help if the seller claims fully functional or lists it as 'new' that way it is easier to dispute it that way if it is a dud you can quickly settle it... the Chinese batteries are usually not worth the lead they are filled with, most of the time they don't even hold a charge, so try getting a battery that seems legit, or somewhat OEM-ish because at the very least it has a better chance of working



I know nothing of the different Windows 7 license types available, but OEM licencing reminds me of bulk purchasing, but IDK. you can always call up or email MS and tell them you are running a OEM of Windows XP and would like to know the best option for a current user; be sure to ask if there are any discounts or coupons or the like, you never know

[thatcomicsguy]

1)
the Wacom driver and the Video driver came from Wacom and Nvidia respectively -the Nvidia driver using a modified file so it sees the card and installs the latest driver

Hey, Agent 9!

I resurrected this thread because I had a question for you. . .

I just ordered one of those funky 64Gb M4 Crucial SSD's, (should be here in a couple of days), and am gearing up to install Win7.

Can you tell me which specific video driver you installed for your Tecra, and what modified file you used to make it recognize the card?

Thanks!

[Agent 9]

Hey there,

I just followed the directions here Tecra M4 and Windows 7

Basically just grab the Windows 7 driver from here Drivers - Download NVIDIA Drivers (I think you choose GeForce then 6 series, then Win7 32-bit then download) once downloaded, run it and it will extract to a folder in the C drive, in that folder you need to navigate to the folder 'Display.Driver' in which you'll find a file called 'nv_disp' open it and edit in these lines:
This one about 1/4 the way down

%NVIDIA_DEV.0146.01% = Section001, PCI\VEN_10DE&DEV_0146

And this at almost the very bottom

NVIDIA_DEV.0146.01 = "NVIDIA GeForce Go 6200 TE/6600 TE"

Then you should be able to install the driver just fine. After a reboot, sleep as well as proper resolution and rotation should be working. Then you need only install the other drivers (get the Win XP drivers either from your M4's old HDD, or from Toshiba's driver page Model Content Page)


One thing, when you get your new SSD it should come completely unformatted (not even a partition table) so you will need to 'initialize' it by writing a partition table to it -otherwise it won't be seen by the Windows 7 installer. The easiest way would be to hook the drive up to a working Windows computer (using a USB to 2.5" SATA adapter, Inland makes a great one that goes for about $5 USD) then use the built in partition manager to do the job; after that you should be able to drop it in the M4 and install Win 7 to it.


Once you get the SSD setup you should really feel like you are using a whole new machine; Enjoy the difference!

[thatcomicsguy]

Thanks! That's perfect.

Those missing two lines were exactly what were bugging me. I found an .inf from a NVIDIA fan-based driver site, but it didn't appear to include the Tecra's graphics card, so I had this sense of, "Bah. This is SO not going to work."

Also. . , turns out the USB 2.5" SATA hard drive enclosure I picked up by accident a couple of years ago (needed an IDE at the time) will finally be put to use. Cool.

With the new year, I'm doing a deep clean of my studio, repairing stuff, and finally getting around to taking care of things like installing Win7 and an SSD in my work board. I'm really looking forward to trying it out!

[thatcomicsguy]

So I got the Crucial 64Gb M4 SSD in the mail yesterday morning and spent the day with various computers pulled into pieces, trying it out. Given that I was in the thick of a rather crappy cold, this was not a bad way to occupy the afternoon. Felt somewhat similar to how I'd spend my time back when I was a kid home sick from school to watch Sesame Street and play with Lego bricks; takes the bite out of drippy-nosed misery.

Anyway. . .

Several points which are still relevant to this thread:

1. Even with the order of magnitude speed increase, neither Photoshop CS4 or CS5 worked any better with an SSD drive versus the old spinner. (Aside from the obvious start-up speed as well as loading and saving files much faster.) It didn't help with any of the actual stylus/brush functionality as I'd hoped.

2. I also learned that Windows 7 is inferior to Win XP on the Tecra M4 in terms of speed. Under Windows 7, CS4 and CS5 suffered massively in terms of brush response. And yes, I had Aero, "flicks", and every other bell and whistle I could think of and find switched off in both Photoshop and Windows 7. Nothing helped. I also tried both the old 2006 and the current NVIDIA video drivers, but neither made a difference.

Windows 7, I learned, also wants a whole lot of drive space, which when you're limited to only 64 Gigs, is a very poor selling point. I think by the time I reformatted the SSD, Windows was eating up about 10 Gigs, and that was after I'd deleted a ton of files and turned off a lot of memory-hungry functions, such as hibernation and restore-points.

So finally I wiped the SSD and re-built a Win XP system. Windows now lives in under 4 Gigs and my drafting board is back where it was, but with super-speedy load times. Though Photoshop has otherwise undergone no noticeable improvement. That's okay, because it works well enough. But CS5 it seems, is just not going to happen.

Agent 9: I wonder if perhaps your Tecra was running a faster CPU than mine, (which is 1.78 Ghz), or if there was some other obscure bit of driver issue I didn't adjust for. In any case, I just didn't have the same luck as you wrt CS5.

Oh well.

Also. . .

This is a side note about SSDs in general. They ain't silent!

Mine emits a high-pitched whine when in use, just on the outer edge of hearing. -Up in the 16-17Khz range, like the back of an old CRT monitor, but more noticeable as it is intermittent rather than a steady sound as the drive writes and reads.

This issue has been discussed on several SSD forums, (and no, it's not my CPU, madness, or any other part of the computer; to test this, I put the SSD in an enclosure at the end of 10 feet of USB cable to test the source of the sound. No question; it's the SSD. And definitely present).

Check here to see what your own hearing response is. Some people can't hear above about 12 Khz, so for them an SSD is silent, but other people can hear as high as 20+ Khz. My own hearing range tops out at around 17 Khz, so it was bloody annoying for me.

I did some research into sound-proofing, and it turns out that audio engineers have wrestled with the problem of whining electronics for years. It also turns out that whines in that frequency range are effectively damped by wood-fiber baffling.

Solution: I wrapped the SSD in a couple of sheets of paper towel. Problem solved. -I also creatively added some tinfoil as a heat sink so the little bundled drive didn't cook, and I had to pull the hard drive caddy to make room for it all inside the computer drive bay, but with a bit of pressure, it all went back together nice and snug.

And so that's where my little adventure with the Tecra M4 and Photoshop CS5 ends for the time being.

Cheers!

[Agent 9]

Thanks for the update; it sucks to hear you can hear the thing, lol... I can't hear a darned thing from any of the SSD's I've owned (but the noise of mechanical hard drives is well within my range of hearing!) I can hear the CPU whine on my 2730p and that is quite the annoying sound (usually only in quiet rooms or when I'm looking for it), I did your test and it seems 14kHz is the highest I can hear, I guess that's fine though because there aren't many pleasant noises above that frequency anyways

Yep, SSD's speed up loading and access/ saving of files and stuff, those kinds of things will be a order of magnitude better, and it will make your HDD systems feel that much slower (you'll start to notice the wait times anyways). As for the Performance you are seeing, I'm not sure what you are experiencing in Win 7, but I have Win 7 on my M4 and use CS4 (2.0Ghz [Pentium M 760] with 2GB ram, and the standard 60GB HDD, the Geforce 6600 not the 6200 which was more common; I even heard there was a 2.2Ghz or some such processor in use in the M4, not sure what it was; but as the M4 is socketed you can really easily [in a manner of speaking] upgrade the CPU by dropping one in... food for thought)
I just booted the M4 (still mostly in pieces as it has been for a few months now... the creative process of hardware design is harder than it seems ) but it seemed to me to do alright in Photoshop, not as good as my 2730p or F5, but better than the M1400 and IX325 which really don't run it well; I suppose there is a bit of lag to the brush strokes, but I'm only doing simpler things usually with basic brushes (in the free time I find to devote to actual digital drawing in Photoshop I mostly do just 'painting with colors' and the like, nothing much, and I haven't made the time as of the past few months to finish anything; otherwise Photoshop is just used for minor photo editing)


Windows 7 is a pig, a fat, slow and lazy one at that, but me and XP or Vista really just don't get along at all (I started computers as a Linux guy, only the lure of Windows 7 is strong enough to get me away from it; the others have too many issues for me to want to put up with, and they are too cumbersome [among other things] for me to choose over Linux, even if they can run great Windows programs)... so that and the fact that Photoshop isn't a primary use of Tablet PCs for me makes the performance drop acceptable on the M4, for you Photoshop is a necessity and that's very understandable


I am curious though, care to post your WEI scores to get a rough idea of performance difference, assuming you took them down? As is with the HDD, 2.0Ghz, 6600 its: 3.8 | 4.4 | 3.4 | 3.6 | 4.2 otherwise you can loosely compare the processors by wPrime score, it gets 109.251 seconds for the 32M calculations. I wouldn't expect a large difference, but IDK, maybe the 2.2Ghz is worth a shot

EDIT: just found it, it seems the Pentium M 770 & 780 are the models above the 760 I have, they are 2.13Ghz and 2.27Ghz respectively, it seems the 770's go for a 'modest' price on ebay.ca ($35-40 CAD), while the 780's are quite a bit more ($80 CAD)... there doesn't seem to be much of any chance for incompatibility (though it would be better to ask if one you were looking at is compatible or not), and you can usually return it to the seller or re-sell it yourself if it doesn't work out... mmmmm, food for thought, now I'm thinking too...

[Hattori Hanzo]

I did your test and it seems 14kHz is the highest I can hear, I guess that's fine though because there aren't many pleasant noises above that frequency anyways

No love for birds?
14kHz seems very low. Have you been clubbing half your life and played drums without ear protection?
You should do the test again with proper headphones or "real" (not laptop) speakers if you haven't so in the first place.

[Agent 9]

Well I just tried it with my headphones (I am using a pair of Sony V6's so they are at least decent) with minimum volume I can hear up to 14kHz, raise the volume a little and I can hear 15kHz, and raise it a little again and I can hear the next and so on until 20kHz there which I can't seem to hear... though if I crank max volume I can hear a noise made bay all up to 22kHz, but I don't think its even possible to hear that so maybe the test isn't exactly scientific -what we need is a solid [calibrated and functioning] auditory frequency generator, something similar to what my highschool has in the physics labs would do... but I don't have access to that and it can't be shared across the internet and even then I'm sure there are variables like elevation and other things that would factor in... so we may never know...

One things for sure, I hear no noise made by SSD's... but I do hear CPU whine as well as the whine of CCFL inverters when not at max brightness (I'm assuming they are using a PWM method to get light to appear dimmer to us, which explains the noise)