Retouch Artists' Speedtest

[DenisM]

I took delivery of my new PC the other day and have only just got it up and running.

My principle reason for changing was that I was simply spending too much time in front of the monitor. Far too much, in fact and I was sick of it.

I bought a DELL (I know, I know, I hear you!), my fourth, and went for the following:

1. Vista Ultimate 64bit

2. Intel Core2 Extreme CPU X9650 @ 3.00Ghz.

3. 8Gb RAM.

I got an additional 500Gb HD just to use as a CS3 scratch disk.

Just now, for the hell of it, I decided to run the Retouch Artists' Speedtest.

With the setup as specified: i.e. History States @ 1. Cache @ 4. Memory @ 100%, over three attempts I averaged 20.5 seconds. This is faster than any time on the Retouch website (you can read the times here> http://retouchartists.com/pages/results.html ) the nearest being 23 seconds.

It saves out 39Mp, single shot, 223Mb files in 13-14 seconds.

I paid €2400 (I haggled. I ALWAYS haggle.) plus VAT and I'm one very, very happy bunny. I reckon it will have paid for itself in a couple of saved days.

Denis

[NickT]

I hate to admit it (as a die hard mac fan) but my macpro (2X quad core 2.8, 6 gig Ram) came in at 28 secs.
Nick-T

[Dustbak]

You mean a dual processor machine with 4 cores on each processor comes in slower than a single processor dual core machine? Does the 2Gb of main memory difference make that kind of difference in performance?

I will be upgrading my desktop somewhere in the coming months and was thinking about the MacPro instead of building a PC myself. Problem with the PC is that it is very difficult to find a dual processor mainboard that is designed for desktop use instead of server use.

Another advantage of the MacPro is that it can run Windows natively and really fast. On my MBP Windows is faster than MacOS, unfortunately I find MacOS much more pleasantly to work with (even after having used Windows since the early 90's).

Still a big decision not having Windows PC's in the house anymore besides my servers.

[Dustbak]

I have a base model 2.26 Octo Nehalem at this moment. I have run the test several times. I average on 22seconds. It is basically 22 seconds dead-on everytime. I see it is all fairly old by now. I used CS4 and the site still mentions CS3, etc..

[rsmphoto]

I hate to admit it (as a die hard mac fan) but my macpro (2X quad core 2.8, 6 gig Ram) came in at 28 secs.
Nick-T

Nick,

My MacPro 2x Quad 2.8 with 10GB ram was 21.2 sec. I ran it twice to make sure. CS4. Not so bad...

[Phil G]

Retouch website  "Please note: New Macintosh systems with intel chips are running photoshop under a rosetta emulation layer and don't represent the native speed of the upcoming CS3 (UPDATE - CS3 RESULTS ADDED!)" 

[Alex Maxim]

Got it down to 8 sec in CS6 with i7 3770K under Win 7 x64
Haven't tried overclocking the CPU yet. Should be around 6 sec when overclocked to 4.6 GHz
Stopwatching is getting imprecise under new hardware. A more complex test is required

[Martin]

OMG what the hell of a machine have you got!  8 seconds!!
well, mine does it in 12 seconds using the test image thats in the test.
6core 3,33mhz  (only) 16GB ram, Accelsior SSD

[Douglas Fairbank @ Classic V]

Getting 12.9 secs with CS4 Win 7 and HP Compact 8200 Elite CMT, Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-2600 CPU @ 3.40GHz, 8GB RAM and 64 bit. A very pleasant surprise to find that it is so quick.

[Alex Maxim]

OMG what the hell of a machine have you got!  8 seconds!!
well, mine does it in 12 seconds using the test image thats in the test.
6core 3,33mhz  (only) 16GB ram, Accelsior SSD

Maybe because they are hand-picked components. I'll post again after overclocking with a detailed list of parts.

[Dustbak]

Mine did appr. 10sec's. MacPro 2.93Ghz 12core, 48GB memory and SSD's. Test is kind of dated since it doesn't really seem to take advantage of multiple cores. Higher clock speeds are more advantageous in this case.

[meshuggener]

11.24s with I7 3770K and 16Gb . 

[Alex Maxim]

Mine did appr. 10sec's. MacPro 2.93Ghz 12core, 48GB memory and SSD's. Test is kind of dated since it doesn't really seem to take advantage of multiple cores. Higher clock speeds are more advantageous in this case.

Ray, as I've read, Photoshop is not optimized for multiple cores and does some tasks slower with more than 4 cores. On the other hand, CS6 uses CUDA (Nvida only) GPU instructions that speed up some tasks quite a lot. That might be another reason for the test results I get, because I have Nvidia GTX 580 in my PC.

[Alex Maxim]

Nope,
can't get it better than 8 secs.

The specs:
Motherboard: ASUS Maximus V Extreme (with Thunderbolt)
CPU: i7 3770K
Memory: 2x8GB G.Skill Trident X 2400
Video: EVGA GeForce GTX 5800
SSD: OCZ Vertex 4
plus some other stuff

[DenisM]

Just read my first post on this thread.

I cannot believe this machine is 4 years old and that I paid a whopping €2400 for it!

Compare this for less than half the price and on another planet performance-wise.......

http://configure.euro.dell.com/dellstore/config.aspx?oc=d00x8515&model_id=xps-8500&c=ie&l=en&s=bsd&cs=iebsdt1

Time to be able to do the speedtest with something new, methinks. 

D.