Sensible upgrade?

David Cole · Post by **David Cole** » Sat Jan 16, 2010 11:01 am

I have a Q9550 cpu on an Asus P5K Premium m/board and 8Gb of memory. I am using x2 300Gb Velociraptors and an ATI Radeon 4850 vga card (that has no built in fan but is cooled by a suspended fan). I have these installed in an Antec P182 case and use an Enermax Modu82+ 625W power supply. OS is is W7 64bit

I use the system only for Photoshop and Corel Painter work and having assembled it a year or so ago, and now that there is a newer generation of cpus and memory), wondered if I would get significantly better speed of program operation (for example snappier Photoshop CS4 and Painter 11 brushes, and CS4 filters) if I updated the cpu, motherboard and memory.

I have lost track of the many types of Intel processor available and wondered if anyone here could please advice me on this. I don't want to upgrade for the sake of it and do need to see a significant performance improvement. Also, I don't want to add significantly more heat into the system which would require case fans to be used faster.

So I suppose what I am after is a sort of like for like swap of the cpu, mobo and ram. I don't want to build again from scratch just yet.

Grateful for any thoughts on this.

Thanks.

Parappaman · Post by **Parappaman** » Sat Jan 16, 2010 12:28 pm

Some BIOS tweaking will give you a lot more performance for free, the Q9550 overclocks like there is no tomorrow. A 20% boost is basically guaranteed and if you have good memories and cooler you can aim to get close to 4 GHz. If that will make any difference on your everyday work, it has to be seen, though I think it will improve responsiveness somehow.

RoGuE · Post by **RoGuE** » Sat Jan 16, 2010 3:48 pm

I would recommend against it..any upgrade to a new platform would be such a slight difference in performance you probably wouldn't notice it. Parappaman is right, your best bet to give yourself a little boost is a little overclocking. Get an aftermarket heatsink for your processor..and have a little fun! The only time I would recommend dumping your platform for a newer socket / memory is if you were doing some heavy video encoding or some kind of number crunching / hacking. For anything else less intensive..you just won't see much performance gain even after spending all that money.

You're far better off spending the money on your bottlenecks...like your boot drive. If you're itching for some kind of upgrade, pick up a nice SSD as a boot and app drive. That alone will give you more noticeable performance than an entire platform upgrade.

Post by **CA_Steve** » Sat Jan 16, 2010 4:42 pm

There are always benchmarks for Photoshop..Here's Anand bench. Here's Tom's Hardware chart.

Looks like ~20% speed increase going from the 9550 to an i7-860.

That's not a big jump.

- try overclocking. You can probably get better than a 20% app speed bump there.
- replace the velociraptors with SSDs.
- possibly increase the amount of RAM (don't know what you are running now).

David Cole · Post by **David Cole** » Sat Jan 16, 2010 5:24 pm

Thanks. This all makes sense to me. Can you advise on a decent 256Gb SSD, please? I know they are very expensive but I would like to get one with a large capacity. Is SSD technology changing very quickly? Is there any reason to wait 6 months or just go ahead now?

RoGuE · Post by **RoGuE** » Sat Jan 16, 2010 6:05 pm

SSD technology is still in the early stages, and yes, it is changing very quickly. I personally am waiting about 6 months untill i change over to an SSD boot drive simply for monetary reasons. However, if you have the cash, it's been my experiance that the best bang for buck when it comes to SSD's is to run a RAID 0 config with two smaller drives, rather than one large one.

Also, keep in mind that it is a waste of money to use SSD's for fat storage (as in music, pictures, video etc). The cost per gb is still far higher than for a nice 1tb drive.

If i had the money now, I would probably pick up two 64-128gb SSD's, RAID 0 them, and then buy a slow spinning 1tb drive for storage. You would of course put your operating system, photoshop, and anything other programs that you use often on the SSD's.

Post by **CA_Steve** » Sat Jan 16, 2010 10:31 pm

256GB!

You might wish to adjust...that's $800.

Think about going with one SSD for your OS and another for your Apps/scratch disk, and then a large/quiet HDD to store the data. You could go with a couple of 30-60GB drives for $100-$200ea.

Take a look at the anandtech article and all of the other one's he's done on SSDs to get a better feel for performance.

Intel and Indilinx controller based SSDs are the ones to look at right now. Make sure that the SSD supports TRIM and that it'll work with your OS.

danimal · Post by **danimal** » Sat Jan 16, 2010 10:33 pm

if you get the right cpu cooler, you can use it later, when you step up to the i7... the noctua d14 is one of the top two or three best, while mugen 2 still has maybe the best bang for the buck here in the states... the downside to those big coolers is that they are difficult to install.

going from qxxxx to i7 will increase your performance, in part because apps like photoshop can take advantage of the i7 improvements, but it's probably not enough of a gain to justify the price, over what you have now.

David Cole · Post by **David Cole** » Sun Jan 17, 2010 3:41 am

Thanks very much.

Parappaman · Post by **Parappaman** » Sun Jan 17, 2010 5:10 am

What kind of RAM are you using by the way?

David Cole · Post by **David Cole** » Sun Jan 17, 2010 1:30 pm

x2 - Corsair 4GB DDR2 XMS2 PC2-6400C5 TwinX (2x2GB).

Post by **CA_Steve** » Sun Jan 17, 2010 2:05 pm

if you are using a 64-bit OS, consider increasing the RAM to 8GB. That's another weak link in photoshop speed.

David Cole · Post by **David Cole** » Sun Jan 17, 2010 4:34 pm

Thanks. As you will see from the first sentence of my original post, I already have 8Gb of ram.

Post by **CA_Steve** » Sun Jan 17, 2010 10:20 pm

David Cole wrote:Thanks. As you will see from the first sentence of my original post, I already have 8Gb of ram.

yep it was invisible to my eyes.