My home machine is in sad shape, being about 4 years old. I've been looking at some new machines with photoshop in mind and I am wondering if anyone is using it on a 64-bit system. If so, does it work well in that environment? Are there any special knobs to turn or switches to flip to get it to use as much RAM as you have?
I'm using a dual core 64-bit Athlon processor on Win XP pro (not the 64-bit version) Things do seem to run faster. (they'd probably be even faster if I added even more RAM to the measly 1Gbyte I'm using now.
You use the same window in the Preferences setting to allocate RAM as you would with any other system.
Posted by Paul Burwell on April 21, 2006 at 11:02 PM
I run CS2 on Windows XP 64 bit edition on a dual core 64-bit Athlon processor.
The big Advantage to XP64 is that the OS can access a lot more memory and that helps to speed up CS2. CS2 can't access any more memory with XP64 than you can with XP, but because the OS can, and it handles it better, the application runs faster. Build your XP64 machine with 4GB or more of RAM and Photoshop flies.
You can see a PDF that Tim Grey (a Microsoft employee and CS2 guru) put together at http://www.timgrey.com/x64benchmarks.pdf that documents the performance increase.
Posted by Paul Burwell on April 21, 2006 at 11:39 PM
One caveat I'll add in regards to using XP64 right now is that there are a number of devices (printers, scanners(!!), monitor profiling tools, etc.) that do not have the necessary 64 bit drivers yet.
Before switching to XP64, make sure your devices are supported.
Posted by Ned Fenimore on April 23, 2006 at 6:25 PM
I just built a system with the Athlon X2 Dual Core, Win XP Pro 32 Bit, and 4 Gig of RAM and it works simply great. Building the whole machine wasn't that bad price-wise.. So far I am amazed at the speed compared to my older machine - Pentium 4 hyper-threaded with 1 Gig of of RAM.
My new (two month old) Dell has an Intel 64 bit dual core 3.0 ghtz processor and 4 gig of RAM. It is super fast and all my peripherals work fine. The other day I had CS2 with a large TIFF file open, Bridge,and PSE3 Organizer open while listening to a music CD and checking posts on this site - all at the same time!!! Technonogy is fantastic.
That said I am sure in 4 years my new fast system will seem old and slow
You don't really need XP64 bit to get some benefit from the newer Dual-core AMD and Intel processors, XP32 will still run faster and will use both processors. Under XP32, there are a couple of "switches" that need to be set for CS2 and XP32 to co-operate more easily when using more than 3Gb of Ram.
Having said that, CS2 works fine under the true XP64 Bit Edition although, as Paul mentioned there are a number of stumbling blocks when it comes to things like printer drivers. Even where the drivers exist, they aren't always as fully feature rich as their 32 bit counterparts . You do have to check very carefully over 64bit driver availability, and you may also find that some hardware will never be supported (eg the original Colorvision Spyder). However, unlike XP32, you don't have to set any switches to get the best use of memory.
One other thing to watch for - it isn't always easy to find a decent anti-virus program that works well under 64bit windows. "Avast!" antivirus can be used free for personal use, and offer both 32bit and 64bit versions.
Discussion
6 repliesThanks!
Kelly
You use the same window in the Preferences setting to allocate RAM as you would with any other system.
The big Advantage to XP64 is that the OS can access a lot more memory and that helps to speed up CS2. CS2 can't access any more memory with XP64 than you can with XP, but because the OS can, and it handles it better, the application runs faster. Build your XP64 machine with 4GB or more of RAM and Photoshop flies.
You can see a PDF that Tim Grey (a Microsoft employee and CS2 guru) put together at http://www.timgrey.com/x64benchmarks.pdf that documents the performance increase.
Before switching to XP64, make sure your devices are supported.
That said I am sure in 4 years my new fast system will seem old and slow
Having said that, CS2 works fine under the true XP64 Bit Edition although, as Paul mentioned there are a number of stumbling blocks when it comes to things like printer drivers. Even where the drivers exist, they aren't always as fully feature rich as their 32 bit counterparts
One other thing to watch for - it isn't always easy to find a decent anti-virus program that works well under 64bit windows. "Avast!" antivirus can be used free for personal use, and offer both 32bit and 64bit versions.