P8700 to T9900... Worth it?

Hey y'all....

I got a fully maxed out Studio 15 notebook, well sorta.

Now if I were to upgrade to T9900 processor, do you think there will be a significant speed increase from P8700?

I mainly do photoshop on my Studio 15.

Advice welcome. Thanks. I heard the L2 cache 3mb vs 6mb will make difference in PS right?

 

if you upgrade your hard drive to SSD, there will be a significant speed increase than current CPU upgrade...

 

and how does that speed up photoshop? I know it does for loading times is it? Thanks...

 

http://download.intel.com/design/flash/nand/extreme/Photoshop_CS4_Performance_Comparison.pdf

 

Cache memory would help if your Photoshop files were HUGE. Are they huge(by huge I mean bigger than the average 1920*1200 resolution)? If not, then a CPU upgrade of that caliber wouldn't really make a noticeable speed difference IMO.

 

In my testing,

see:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?t=436882

I returned the Torqx SSD I compared to a Scorpio Blue + eBoostr (beta) combo.

Mostly, the more you filled the SSD past 50%, the more the speeds compared to the Scorpio Blue (or, were actually worse).

(Note: still want to test an Intel G2 160GB and then I'll have experience from the top three; Samsung, Indilinx and Intel).

My overall times stayed effectively the same (+- 3.5%) with/without that SSD.

To put this in perspective, the times between my Scorpio vs. the SSD were a savings of one minute over a 26 minute test (and the Scorpio 'won').

So, unless the OP is willing to stay below 50% usage (capacity-wise) on the SSD, I would 'vote' for the CPU upgrade - especially if it costs around the same price (SSD or CPU).

Of course, the 'ultimate' would be both, but he/she can always upgrade to a 'real' SSD when they do come out.

1720Maxwellist,

In your situation and assuming that around 70-80 GB is not limiting you, I would try a returnable Intel 160GB G2 and see for yourself the speed increase you can expect - we already know that the CPU will really speed up CS4 around 20% minimum - the only unknown is how the SSD will react to your system and your workload demands.

I would be really interested if you do report back with your SSD experience with real world (instead of strictly benchmarks) tests, maybe something along the lines of my link above? Cheers!

 

get a T9600 and a ram upgrade... should help in photoshop.. IMO T9900 is overpriced and you can easily reach its speed by ocing the T9600 which is 0.2GHz slower...

 

It will depend on what you do in Photoshop.

A SSD can be be useful if your work is Temp File heavy - I once managed to create a 32GB temp file with Photoshop - a giant photomerge.

If however you'll be rather editing RAW images and batch converting many images a faster processor may offer a better performance - however how large that increase will be nobody could tell just like that.

Then: Some tasks in CS4 are GPU accelerated, e.g. HDR creation - thus a goog GPU will benefit you more in these cases.

 

sean473, yes, very good point about the RAM - very important for PS speed but the OP already has 8GB, can he go to 16 economically?

DetlevCM, again, very good points - which is why I mentioned the importance of testing in his/her specific scenario if they can.

Another data point is maybe upgrading to a better mechanical HD, if PS swapfile usage is high.

See the last two posts on this page (posts 198 & 199):
http://forum.notebookreview.com/showthread.php?p=5568381#post5568381

Not scientific at all, but as real world as you can get. (for medium/large file size transfers, which PS swapfile should mimic closely).

 

That does give a bit of an idea
Another idea which I haven't tested is getting something like an expresscard SSD and have 2 temp files - if you have seperate drives that may work too - however do not spread temp files over several partitions - that would have a negative performance.

 

It wouldn't be that much of an upgrade. Photoshop relies more on your RAM (for effects) and HDD speed (for opening files and presents). Anything over 2.2 Core 2 Duo is more than enough for photoshop.

Now if you were doing video editing, the 6mb cache and higher processor might save you a few minutes off of rendering previews and encoding, but just a few minutes, nothing drastic like an i7 that would be saving you in some cases, hours.

Stick with the processor, go with the SSD.

 

It actually runs on the CPU for RAW to JPEG conversion, on the CPU for HDRs (unless you have GPU acceleration) and on the CPU for photomerging alongside the temp file.

 

DetlevCM, Just make sure that you have a 'real' expresscard SSD. I have a Lexar 16GB SSD ExpressCard 34 and trust me, it's crap for writes (I think Floppy disks are faster) - however, for reads, it can hit 28MB/s with very little access wait time!

A possible fast card is the Solidgo products. Would love to try them, but they are too expensive and too prone to die (I think because of the excessive heat they generate) for me to consider seriously.

But if they work, for a PS swapfile, they should be awesome (almost on the order of a RamDrive).

See:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...0&Order=BESTMATCH&Description=Solidgo&x=0&y=0

I can agree with the i7 option, but as for the SSD have you seen my post #6 in this thread?

 

I think that was one of the things that kept me off buying one - in my HDD time when I looked at them, the reviews suggested bad write performance.

And now I have my Intel SSD... an I havne't thrown a really large panorama together for some time - let's see.

But thanks for the heads up

 

If you want to speed up your CPU and ram for free you should overclock the FSB. I can help you with that if you want.

Here is a cpuz validation of a P8700 @ 3.3ghz:
http://valid.canardpc.com/show_oc.php?id=681273

If you just want the ram to be faster, you can flash lower timings with thaiphoon burner.
Or you can even flash another frequency onto the ram.

 

Those are really dangerous things though... There is a very good chance that you may brick your RAMs.


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No, not a big chance.

See if you have two sticks of ram, you will always be able to fix a bad flash.

If you lower the timings on one stick and it was a bad flash.
You can put in the second good stick, both sticks will run at the slower speed. Then you can flash a good SPD onto the bad stick.

I have done this many times. I have flashed really bad values but have always been able to undo what I did.

As long as you think things through, you wont have any trouble.

Also, as a final thing you could do if all else fails is to tape all the pins on the stick of ram except the 4 pins associated with the SPD, then hot plug the bad ram and flash it.

 

I have never thought about them... Makes a lot of sense + rep.


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How much performance increase does lowering the memory timings give? Is it noticeable?

 

Not much, I couldn't notice the difference.

But I didn't notice the difference going from 1gb to 4gb ram so I'm not the best person to tell you.

I think I saw some tests recently and it shows about 1 or 2 frames per second increase if you go from 6-6-6-18 to 5-5-5-15.