Most people are tired of running 3dmark and Pcmark and
similar benchmarks, while these are visually attractive
benchmarks they are not in many cases indicative of real
world situations, this is not the case with photoshop.
This is a real world application with a myriad of uses
appealing to all users from digital photographers to budding
graphic designers. It is also a wonderful test of all
round system performance, specifically memory bandwidth
and CPU processing power. Massive files are also a good
test of hard drive access performance as photoshop will
rely heavily for its "paging file". For full
information and links to download this bench for yourself
and to compare scores with other Driverheaven members,
head over
here.
| Test (Lower-Better) |
FX57 |
X2 4800+ |
3800+ |
3.46EE |
820 |
| 1: Texturiser Test (1) |
1.6 |
1.7 |
1.8 |
1.7 |
1.1 |
| 2: CYMK Colour Conversion |
4.4 |
2.6 |
5.1 |
3.9 |
2.3 |
| 3: RGB Colour Conversion |
5.1 |
3.1 |
5.9 |
5.0 |
2.9 |
| 4: Dust and Scratches |
6.7 |
2.4 |
4.4 |
4.1 |
2.2 |
| 5: Watercolour |
14.7 |
5.0 |
17.0 |
15.9 |
17.5 |
| 6: Texturiser Test (2) |
4.4 |
4.3 |
4.6 |
4.5 |
3.5 |
| 7: Stained Glass |
7.0 |
7.3 |
7.5 |
6.7 |
4.5 |
| 8: Lighting Effects |
8.6 |
6.6 |
9.3 |
9.9 |
4.4 |
| 9: Mosiac Tiles |
14.4 |
16.4 |
16.4 |
14.4 |
13.4 |
| 10: Extrude |
46.8 |
50.8 |
55.1 |
56.1 |
32.9 |
| 11: Smart Blur |
43.2 |
46.4 |
47.5 |
41.7 |
39.6 |
| 12. Underpainting |
18.7 |
21.4 |
21.5 |
14.4 |
13.4 |
| Total time |
175.6 |
168.0 |
195.1 |
178.3 |
137.7 |
Sometimes as a reviewer you get results from a product
which you just cant believe, this was one such result.
The performance of the Pentium D in Photoshop use is noting
short of amazing. We had to run the tests 5 or 6 times
before we believed that they were correct however on every
occasion the CPU was just as fast as that shown above.
Even when comparing the £180 Pentium D 820 to the
£750 X2 4800+ we see that the Intel chip just blows
the AMD chip away. Percentage wise the 820 comes out 19%
faster in total time taken to complete this hugely demanding
test. It almost seems unfair to compare the 3800+ to the
820 however those are the two chips which are most comparable
in terms of features and price. In that battle the Intel
chip is 29% faster in completing all tests. There is no
doubt that if you use Photoshop CS2 the benefits you would
get from using the Pentium D are huge.
For those interested in what the cores are doing during
the test, here is a task manager grab, taken during test
5. Also shown is the X2 CPU usage for comparison between
the two architectures rather than performance.
Pentium |
X2 |
