3.2 quad upgrade to 3.33 six core question

[sjordan]

Hey guys,

I bought a 3.2 quad mac pro last year with 24gigs of ram and a ssd drive.

The machine has been working well but I am wanting a boost. I am mostly working out of CS5 (64bit) and Lightroom 3 (64bit). I do heavy photo editing with a Medium format camera....so my pictures are 40megapixels. Simple editing is quick but if I do heavy editing that requires high cpu usage I am usually waiting.

Will a jump to a 6 core 3.33 help much? I do see that photoshop takes full advantage of my 4 cores when doing big edits...they are usually pegged at 100% using most plugins. I am trying to figure out if the 2 extra cores will help along with the slight boost in mhz

My other question is will this be a simple upgrade (meaning just replace the processor and I am done)

 

[derbothaus]

It will help in Lightroom. Not so much in PS cept for the 133MHz boost.

 

[sjordan]

In lightroom I have no major slow downs. Imports and exports are good enough and scrolling through pictures is fine because I set lightroom to automatically generate large previews.

So CS5 utilizing 2 extra cores won't help on something that requires mass cpu? I am not talking about slow downs on opening files and saving...my issue is with plugins that use things like blur that utilize high cpu. As I said before I see all 4 cores at times pegged to 100% when doing certain edits. A perfect example is Perfect Photo Resize which enlarges an image. I run this and it slams the cpu's to 100% resulting in something that could take 5 minutes to complete. If 2 extra cores won't help in this example then it's not worth the upgrade to me.

Can you please explain why it would not help? Does photoshop limit itself to 4 cores?

 

[wonderspark]

Run that Photoshop benchmark test that's stickied at the top of this section, and see how fast your system runs it now. Mine did it in 11.7 seconds, for reference. I have the 6-core 3.33.

 

[sjordan]

Run that Photoshop benchmark test that's stickied at the top of this section, and see how fast your system runs it now. Mine did it in 11.7 seconds, for reference. I have the 6-core 3.33.

Thanks for the tip. I ran the test. First run after a clean reboot was 15.5 second run (ran right after) was 14.84...so that tells me I should get a 20+% increase. Not to bad