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Photoshop CS6 on a dual Xeon E5430... not what I've expected!


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dpcdpc11

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Hey guys... hopefully I'll find some real Gurus here that can help me out with this problem.

I've recently bought a HP xw8600 workstation (2x Xeon E5430, 8GB DDR, Quadro FX 4600, 2x146 SAS HDD in RAID), thinking that this would be a perfect workstation for Photoshop.
I've made a RAID from the two 146GB SAS Hard Drives, and split the memory in 3:
- 87 GB for Windows
- 97 GB for scratch disk
- 71 GB other programs and stuff

All in all the work flow is fluid and you can see the power of this little monster but in Photoshop I was really disappointed! Editing a large file (200cm by 80cm) made PS really laggy which was a surprise since I have 8 Cores to take care of the processing. Taking a closer look at Task Manager, I could clearly see the problem: only one Core was doing the processing and was loading at max every time for example I was quickly zooming in and out or when moving a layer with a bunch of layer style applied. Looking for solutions I've found the so called Core Parking fix which didn't do anything. Going one step forward, I've spent a whole day installing Mac OSX 10.7.4 Lion to see how Photoshop was behaving there. To my surprise in OSX PS used all the cores when working the same large file. So it seems that either Windows 7 limits Photoshop's ability to use all the cores of the CPUs or maybe Photoshop for Windows it self has this limitation.

Later on I've heard a guy saying that he came across some special setting in Windows that would unlock all the Cores in Photoshop and other applications and that he would sell me the solution for 250 Euros. It's hard to believe that he knows something I couldn't find across the whole internet.

So what do you think about all this? Is there a way to make Photoshop CS6 use all the 8 Cores efficiently?
 
hmm sounds like you are using a 32 bit version of photoshop or windows there if you use 64 bit it should work
 
Zeealex said:
hmm sounds like you are using a 32 bit version of photoshop or windows there if you use 64 bit it should work
Click to expand...

Come on man... I'm not that noob! Windows 7 Professional 64bit and Photoshop CS6 64 bit as well. I don't even have installed Photoshop 32 bit.
Adobe Premier CS6 uses all the cores when working on projects but Photoshop just wont!
And I'm so soo sooo angry that I can't get to the bottom of this problem. Here I have 8 cores and PS likes to use only one... I know they're not the most recent generation of Xeon, but I got this workstation at a great price and I couldn't resist.
And like I said... in in OSX (hackintosh) all the cores work like a dream in Photoshop.
Any other ideas?
 
woah hey! don't shoot the messenger, it was your failure to add that you were using 64 or 32 bit that sparked it so really you've got yourself to blame for my cruddy answer.

my next guess is windows is just useless, nothing new there. keep using mac, life is much more stress free without windows.

oh and i hope you were using trial versions, i've never known someone to waste £1000 on buying two photoshop versions just to test it on another OS
 
no shooting here my friend... since I've mentioned in the first post that I've got 8 GB of RAM, and since I've bought a workstation, doesn't this answer the question regarding the version of windows and Photoshop used?
and of course I've used trial versions of PS... I'm not that stupid.

The problem with Mac is that way too many things are missing compared to Windows. Yes, mac makes life simpler but not for me... maybe for the simpler people... I'm a guy who like complications.
Windows is a much more productive work environment for me and I can not replicate my workflow in Mac... I've tried but I failed.
One big fail... no M$ OneNote for Mac... and M$ Office works like crap in Mac... due to the difference of DPI (72 on the Mac and 96 on Windows), I have to always zoom in to see documents better in Word and Excel is right damn slow.
Also no Total Commander for Mac... this is something I can't live without! Forklift is a nice alternative but it's not TC. Notepad++ again... not available on Mac... Coda is a good alternative but is missing many features. And so on!
Not to talk about the Dock... using multiple monitors is a pain in the ass... on Windows, thank god for "Actual Multiple Monitors".
Well I don't want to turn this topic into Mac vs. Windows... so if anyone has any idea regarding the previous post... please feel free to reply. Forgot to mention that on my older machine (intel Q6600) Photoshop CS6 was handling all the 4 cores evenly. Is it something to do with the fact that now I have 2 physical CPUs or the fact that these specific Xeon models are missing some instructions which Photoshop needs?
Really I'm out of guesses here...
 
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