CS4 and 64-bit Systems, Part 2

DCP by Jan Ozer

In this month’s first installment, I discussed the technical aspects of 64-bit computing as it related to Adobe Creative Suite 4 (CS4) performance. In this installment, I’ll detail the head to head tests between a 2.83GHz HP xw6600 workstation running Windows XP (32-bit version) with 3GB of RAM and a 3.33GHz HP xw8600 workstation running 64-bit Vista with 16GB of RAM. Both workstations have dual, quad-core processors for a total of eight cores.

From a strict processor-to-processor comparison, the xw8600 should be about 18 percent faster simply because of processor speed, 2.83GHz compared to 3.33GHz. To account for this, in addition to presenting raw scores, I also showed adjusted scores that reduced the encoding times of the 6600 by 18 percent. read more...