Faster processor or more RAM? [closed]

I just went through this for some of our computers.

We had Core 2 Duo, 4GB of RAM and a 250GB hard drives.

For CS6, my first instinct was RAM and I had a pair of 4GB to swap for the 2GB and it made next to no difference.

The users were working with 600 - 700MB images, so I used performance Monitor and created a custom set of filters with RAM, CPU and Hard Drive usage. I then let the users edit the images for a while and checked the logs.

IO on the hard drive was constantly high, or full. RAM and CPU was consistently low waiting on the hard drive.

I swapped the 250GB 7,200 RPM Western Digital Blacks for a 120GB SSDs and it saved the day.

If I were looking to fix CS6 again, I would go straight to Performance Monitor in Windows, profile the system and then probably go straight to buying more SSDs if my findings remained consistent.

Think of ram like a cup. You pour water into it.

When you buy more ram, you get a larger cup. You can hold more water.

But say you were already only filling the cup up 1/2 of the way full. Getting a larger cup wouldn't help you that much. However, if you are filling the cup all the way up, you do need more ram (which is what's happening here). You have a small "cup" with only 4GB ram, and increasing it would be good.

If you ever find yourself saying "Do I need more ram" in the future, just remember that adding more (getting a bigger cup) won't help if you aren't using all the ram you have now.

In general more ram will make a much bigger difference - or maybe replacing the hard disk with an SSD if thats an option. You can test if your bottleneck is disk performance/memory/swapping by looking to see how much time your hard disk light spends flashing.

i7's are not "by definition" faster then i5's - it really depends on the exact CPU.

You must see where the bottleneck is. You can use Task Manager for that. If the Physical Memory usage is high, buy more RAM, but if it is low and the CPU usage is high when you start Photoshop, then you simply need a faster CPU. Please note that more cores does not make it faster, in fact make it slower if the application (as it uses to happen) is single-threaded. It is not the same to have 5GHz in single core (that is 5GHz for your app) than to have 6GHz in Dual Core or even 16GHz in Quad core (these would be 3GHz or 4GHz for your app).

And if on Task Manager you see no bottleneck in CPU nor Physical memory, buy a better graphics card or better Hard Disk drive (or better Motherboard with better Hard Disk bus).