Bazzer

I have run the PhotoShop bench marks on my new Gateway 830 based system, it has a Intel Mobo. The results are not what I expected. Many of them are as good as the 820 review figures, but some are much worst, the watercolor and extrude for example. I have 1 gig of memory on the system and of course PS CS2.
Does anybody know why? Am I doing something wrong?

Barry

Dreamslacker

Photoshop is dependent not just on your CPU speed and type. It's dependent on your memory bandwidth and latency and storage subsystem as well.

Once the scratch disk and/ or swapfiles are used, the speed of your storage comes into play. Obviously, having a fast disk like a Western Digital Raptor or 4000RE2 or 15K SCSI drives help a lot.
Having seperate drives for swap/ scratch helps too. Otherwise, careful planning of the partitions will help.

Memory bandwidth depends on the speed at which your memory runs at. Also, you need to watch for latencies. I guess you would be using DDR2-533MHz memory.
That's moderately good memory bandwidth but otherwise hampered due to DDR2's high latencies.
Enthusiast level DDR2 memory doesn't suffer the same issue but you won't find them in a Gateway or Dell.

There might also be some adware or some redundant programs in the background that's using up precious CPU time while you're benching. These may have come with your Gateway when you bought it. So do take note. Also remember to allocate sufficient memory to Photoshop in the Presets.