Beyond disappointed with my KBL i5-7500

[euskalzabe]

In March 2017 I upgraded my PC to Kaby Lake - I wish I had waited 6 more months to get the upgraded-core models, but we didn't know those were coming. My 6-core FX 6300 was ancient, and I didn't trust 1st gen Ryzen before release (and I needed to upgrade right then). So, an i5-7500 it was.

It's been a year and a half of tremendous disappointment. Playing games I have no issue, then again I play at 2560x1080, not like that should be hard for this CPU. However, on day to day workloads, I've been so surprised by how much this CPU sucks. I was expecting some great value, like I experienced with my Sandy Bridge i5-2500, and instead I feel like I got hot garbage. It is utterly impossible to edit RAW pictures in Photoshop (24mp from a Nikon D3400, nothing fancy here) while playing 1080p video in the "background" on my 2nd monitor. Youtube keeps hitching, it stops, Photoshop functions like molasses... it's just not feasible to do both things at the same time.

Somehow, my FX6300 did this for 4 years with 0 issue - and I'm talking the same scenario: 1080p youtube and 24mp RAW file editing, using the same 8GB RAM capacity then as now - but my RAM is now faster. I am in disbelief at the - disgraceful - performance I'm getting for a $200 CPU. What gives? Am I somehow missing something? The kicker is that even setting Chrome/Photoshop both to use GPU rendering, the CPU still cannot cope, which I can clearly see in the task manager spiking:



This CPU has left such a horrid taste in my mouth, it's convinced me to get the next generation Ryzen in 2019 for 6 core/12 thread - which is cheaper than a current gen i5. Maybe the i5-7500 was a bad CPU, but if I was sold this product for $200, that's what Intel thought I deserved for $200, and that's an outrageous thought. Is it just me?

 

[mnewxcv]

Try setting your power plan to high performance. It could be fluctuations in clock speed causing those hitches.

And even if you were fine before, it looks like 8gb is not enough for your workload.

 

[euskalzabe]

Try setting your power plan to high performance. It could be fluctuations in clock speed causing those hitches.

And even if you were fine before, it looks like 8gb is not enough for your workload.

I tried high performance, same issue happens constantly. As for RAM, if I was fine before, there's 0 reason the same workload would need more RAM now under the same Windows 10 OS.

 

[Archaea]

Did you reformat your drive and reinstall your OS after upgrading from the FX processor to the Intel?

It’s clear the I5 is NOT slower than a FX processor. So something else is askew.

http://hwbench.com/cpus/intel-core-i5-7500-vs-amd-fx-6300

Another possibility:

Maybe your HD is starting to fail and making exerything feel sluggish with behind the scenes write or read errors.

 

[mnewxcv]

Did you reformat your drive and reinstall your OS after upgrading from the FX processor to the Intel?

It’s clear the I5 is NOT slower than a FX processor. So something else is askew.

http://hwbench.com/cpus/intel-core-i5-7500-vs-amd-fx-6300

Another possibility:

Maybe your HD is starting to fail and making exerything feel sluggish with behind the scenes write or read errors.

He should also be sure to be running the latest chipset and sata drivers. Memory usage like that is relying heavily on page file.

 

[euskalzabe]

Did you reformat your drive and reinstall your OS after upgrading from the FX processor to the Intel?

It’s clear the I5 is NOT slower than a FX processor. So something else is askew.

http://hwbench.com/cpus/intel-core-i5-7500-vs-amd-fx-6300

Another possibility:

Maybe your HD is starting to fail and making exerything feel sluggish with behind the scenes write or read errors.

Thanks for the ideas, and I agree clearly this KBL is faster than the FX, hence why I don't get why this happens. To answer your questions, yes, I've done fresh installs a couple times in the past year. I usually do a fresh install when there's a new Win10 version - aka, next month I'll do one. As for drives, I only use SSDs, a 500gb one and a 2TB one, so HDD's are not the problem either.

He should also be sure to be running the latest chipset and sata drivers. Memory usage like that is relying heavily on page file.

My sytem is fully updated, the Asus motherboard has the latest BIOS. There's nothing else I can fresh install/update. The only spike I see in the task manager is the CPU freaking out. Which it shouldn't do. Any other ideas?

 

[Archaea]

Thanks for the ideas, and I agree clearly this KBL is faster than the FX, hence why I don't get why this happens. To answer your questions, yes, I've done fresh installs a couple times in the past year. I usually do a fresh install when there's a new Win10 version - aka, next month I'll do one. As for drives, I only use SSDs, a 500gb one and a 2TB one, so HDD's are not the problem either.



My sytem is fully updated, the Asus motherboard has the latest BIOS. There's nothing else I can fresh install/update. The only spike I see in the task manager is the CPU freaking out. Which it shouldn't do. Any other ideas?

When you say fully updated — did you install the actual motherboard drivers or just let windows install it’s HCL drivers? Over the years I always install the actual motherboard maker supplied drivers as I’ve derermined in several instances they are better. I try to do this in first thing —because sometimes windows HCL drivers will take over and won’t let you install the old drivers over the top of their updated drivers.

 

[euskalzabe]

When you say fully updated — did you install the actual motherboard drivers or just let windows install it’s HCL drivers? Over the years I always install the actual motherboard maker supplied drivers as I’ve derermined in several instances they are better. I try to do this in first thing —because sometimes windows HCL drivers will take over and won’t let you install the old drivers over the top of their updated drivers.

Formatted the drive, did a fresh win10 install, then installed Asus drivers. There's nothing else that I can update that I know of.

 

[Filter]

you need more memory.

 

[euskalzabe]

you need more memory.

Care to explain why? I did the same workload on Windows 10 with slower RAM when I was on my FX 6300. No problems then.

 

[LigTasm]

Care to explain why? I did the same workload on Windows 10 with slower RAM when I was on my FX 6300. No problems then.

Because you can see in your screenshot that you're maxed out and thrashing the shit out of your SSD. I mean, what could it possibly hurt to pick up another 8GB that you can carry over to your next build anyhow?

 

[euskalzabe]

Because you can see in your screenshot that you're maxed out and thrashing the shit out of your SSD. I mean, what could it possibly hurt to pick up another 8GB that you can carry over to your next build anyhow?

I get what you're saying. However, I kept all hardware the same, ONLY changed the motherboard and CPU. How come the exact same scenario, with the exact same hardware, did not give any problems with the FX but now does with the i5? Everything else is the same (except the GPU, which used to be a RX470 and now it's a GTX 1060, which is faster, so it shouldn't affect things).

A couple years ago, I would've picked another 8gb for $40 in an instant. Now that means $90 that I'm not that ready to toss around for no reason, because there seems to be no justification as to why memory may be the culprit. There's much more value in understanding why something's happening and fixing it properly, than just tossing more memory and hoping for the best, especially when it's overpriced AF like it has been for the past year.

 

[LigTasm]

I get what you're saying. However, how did the exact same scenario, with the exact same hardware, not give any problems with the FX? Because literally the only thing I changed was motherboard and CPU. The rest is exactly the same (except the GPU, which used to be a RX470 and not it's a GTX 1060). A couple years ago, I would've picked another 8gb for $40 in a moment. Now that means $90 that I'm not that ready to toss around just because, when there seems to be no justification as to why that may be the culprit.

I would hazard a guess that the software has been evolving just like windows has. A few years ago when 8GB was the norm it was fine, now 16GB is the norm so they intend to use it. I understand you don't want to spend money on RAM because its really out of control pricing these days, maybe you could find an 8GB set cheaper on the FS/FT forum? I mean, worst case you could always get it on amazon or something and return it if it doesn't at least help you out some.

 

[euskalzabe]

I would hazard a guess that the software has been evolving just like windows has. A few years ago when 8GB was the norm it was fine, now 16GB is the norm so they intend to use it. I understand you don't want to spend money on RAM because its really out of control pricing these days, maybe you could find an 8GB set cheaper on the FS/FT forum? I mean, worst case you could always get it on amazon or something and return it if it doesn't at least help you out some.

I'm going to ride this out until next spring, and then buy a Zen 2 6-core/12-thread system. By then, memory prices may have gone back to sanity.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to at least understand what may be happening. Unless Win10 has become more of a memory hog in the past couple years, there's simply no reason I can think of for performance to choke like that. I can only think of the FX having 6 independent cores, vs the i5 having only 4 and no hyperthreading, but I didn't lead this thread with that suspicion because I didn't want to be accused of trolling (I had to ask about this at the Intel CPU forum area, after all). I just can't think of why else, with the same hardware or faster, and mostly similar Win10 OS, I can't watch youtube while I edit RAW files. Specially when both Chrome and PS are set to render via the GPU and not the CPU.

It's a puzzle I'd like to solve, it's been nagging me for months. I can deal with it until my Ryzen build next year, but I'd like to understand what is going on. So far I've failed.

 

[Deleted member 184142]

8GB on a rig for PS editing? LOL.

What is PS set to use for RAM? What was the old computer set to? If you over provision RAM to PS it can cause things to lag or studder, big time when PS is using your main OS drive as it's scratch disk and you run out of RAM at the same time and everything is fighting for SSD I/O and when this happens, PS is limited by the SSDs ability to keep up and not the CPU's processing power.

A few things to test, go into performance settings in PS, make sure PS is set to less than 70% RAM allocation. Then go to scratch disks and pick your D dive as the scratch disk, from your screen all I/O is on the C drive, while your D drive is 100% unused, this should free up your main SSD for watching movies and OS time, while the D drive is dedicated to PS for when you run out of RAM and it starts paging out, which will probably happen often if you are working with large RAW files or 40+ layers even on smaller images.

Other things to check while at it, what are CPU temps under load? Have you run a memtest?

 

[CAD4466HK]

So you say this is a fresh install?
Have you optimized the OS in any way? I see you have 207 processes running on 8GB of RAM. I would start getting rid of some of those shit apps that comes with W10 for a start. Plus you seem to be banging against that RAM limit often and thrashing the SSD that has already been pointed out. Try rebooting and see if W10 isn't stuck trying to install an update or 2. Also could be having virtual memory issues as well due to not enough RAM and page file getting swamped.

That i5 is far superior to your old FX, I think your issues stem from a number of different platform deficiencies and not just the CPU as a whole,

 

[euskalzabe]

BlueFireIce Hm, the scratch disk theory was a good one. PS set it automatically at %70, I never changed it. I enabled my 2TB SSD drive as a scratch disk, it was a bit better while editing RAW, but the second I exported to JPEG:

Interestingly, D is still unused, even though I checked that it's activated as the scratch disk. I do remember my RAM usage was never that closed to the limit - maybe Chrome is at fault by taking way more memory now than it did 2 years ago? I closed Chrome, opened 1 incognito window to minimize RAM weight, tried to export RAWs to JPEG again:

Now BOTH disk 0 and 1 were barely used, only the CPU was maxed. Memory was high but not choked. Youtube froze in the background, as expected. In a final, extreme experiment, I limited PS memory use to %20 - this would limit how much PS can hog my system resources, which should leave Chrome alone to keep rendering video. Nope, it still froze, despite Disk 0 and 1 barely being used, and there was 1gb memory left available:


I'm at a loss. I've even tried disabling PS GPU renderer to rule out Nvidia drivers screwing things up, no dice. In the last shot you can see, there's still memory available, and yet the system freezes for a few seconds. Something is happening here, and it's either the CPU being maxed out or the new updates to Photoshop are hot garbage.

CAD4466HK the only processes that are active are from the things I regularly use. As a reminder, this had never been an issue with my old FX6300 - it's not like I suddenly have many more processes. About uptime, this PC has been up for 1 day and 1h, not 21 days - no idea where you got that number. If it's the RAM, check my previous post, because I've forced PS to use LESS RAM and thus take longer to process RAW, and the exact same issue happens. I set the scratch disk to D, but PS seems to refuse to use it. Same performance problem whether I disable/enable the GPU renderer in PS.

Seeing the graphs - and my own previous experience last year - it seems more likely that the 4 threads can't cope with chrome + PS export simultaneously, while the FX, while slower overall, had 2 extra threads to divide the workload.

 

[Deleted member 184142]

Is the only slow down when exporting? Scratch disk is used while processing a image in PS. When exporting the writing will be to the drive the image is on, best case you should have the image on one drive and the scratch disk set to another, however your problem seems to be while exporting, I would move the image to the D drive and try working on it there. Keep in mind if you only clicked to use D as a scratch disk, but didn't uncheck C, it will still try and use both drives. Copy image to the secondary drive, open in PS and try exporting then. Also, did you restart after changing settings? As it does require a restart for scratch disk changes to take effect.

Also, as a note, from what you said above, setting RAM lower was only to test CPU usage and I/O, setting RAM lower means more of the scratch disk will be used IF the image you are working on is using more than the available RAM.

Another request, if you could also use Resource monitor and get screens with just PS and YT open, then again while exporting a image and a video playing, and then after exporting. Also if you could use another browser to try watching the video while you do this and see if the skipping still happens.

 

[euskalzabe]

BlueFireIce there can be a couple hiccups when editing RAWs, say when I make a selection and "fill" it with a random pattern - this is what makes me think the 4 threads may not be enough for PS and Chrome simultaneously, as that's not memory bound work, but CPU intensive. While exporting, D drive should activate as scratch, but it's not doing that even though I did check D and uncheck C and corroborated several times that it remains like that - so I don't get why PS insists on using C if I've told it not to I did both restart PS and reboot the PC, same problem:

After that, I rebooted again and opened only Photoshop and Chrome to play a video fullscreen. This is the resource usage with YT playing video and PS open with RAW files, but not editing anything:



And this is how resources are being used while exporting:

I tried upping RAM use in PS, same issue. I did however realize a mistake - last year I was processing 16MP pictures, not 24. While the jump is not THAT high, I could see that pushing me to RAM limits. It's never an issue, EXCEPT if I try to process RAW while watching video. Ironically the GPU ain't doing crap according to the task manager, the CPU is getting hammered, scratch disk is being unused despite my settings and disk 1 is getting destroyed. All while RAM is near its limit, though processing only uses about 100MB more than just having the files open... Maybe CS6 is now much more multi-core aware, and what wasn't a problem in the past couple years, now sees PS use all my 4 cores and demoting Chrome from priority position while processing RAW to JPEG, because that would actually make sense. If so, it reinforces my idea to get more cores/threads next time around.

Ah, maybe I just have to make do until memory stops being the equivalent of a robbery happening in one's wallet. I'm just not willing to try spending $100 to find that nothing changed. Or maybe I need to let this go and ride it out until Zen 2. Part of me wishes I could go back to my Sandy Bridge, those were happier times until it died...

 

[Snowdog]

BlueFireIce I tried upping RAM use in PS, same issue. I did however realize a mistake - last year I was processing 16MP pictures, not 24. While the jump is not THAT high, I could see that pushing me to RAM limits.

I think that is your issue. New camera, bigger RAW files, possibly different code path in the RAW processor.

Because 6 vs 4 core is a red herring when talking about FX 6300 vs i5 7500. 4 more powerful cores will beat the 6 weaker cores at EVERYTHING. Each core of the 7500 is almost twice as powerful as the FX cores. Making it more like 6 cores vs 8, when thinking about performance.

There is no issue dividing things up. There are always Hundreds of threads running, dividing them between 4 or 6 cores is irrelevant, it is just which cores have the most overall power in total. Some idea how terrible the FX 6300 is at photoshop. Your 7500 isn't in the list, but even an i3-3240 smokes the FX-6300.

 

[sinisterDei]

So, one thing to note is that while the FX-6300 was '6-core', it wasn't six complete independent cores; It had 6 independent integer units, but only 3 floating point units, so depending on the particular bit of processing you are doing you might be effectively a 3 core or a 6 core CPU.

The reason this might matter is if you simultaneously attempt to do some heavy FPU work and some heavy INT work; on the i5, it's got 4 cores, with 4 INT and FPU units, and they can all be maxxed out by whatever processes are trying to do work - like exporting JPEGs or whatever. On the FX-6300, you might have a bit of spare integer compute time left over, because the weaker FPU units are holding up the show. The i5 is much faster, and running at full tilt, so overall the i5 would definitely finish the job faster, but it's possible the FX-6300 might take longer but feel smoother during the operation, or have resources to spare to do something else in the background because it's architecture is being inefficiently used by your exporting process.

The analogy I like to make at work is "wide versus tall". Lots of cores on a CPU give you the width, the ability to do multiple things at once, but not necessarily any particular thing very quickly. The AMD CPUs of yesteryear, and even today's Zen and Epyc CPUs, are all wider than their Intel counterparts, but Intel is taller (higher single-threaded IPC). Whether this arrangement is good or bad is unique to your workload. You might possibly have just stumbled across a very specific load combination where the older Dozer-based FX CPU just 'feels' a little better.

 

[euskalzabe]

The AMD CPUs of yesteryear, and even today's Zen and Epyc CPUs, are all wider than their Intel counterparts, but Intel is taller (higher single-threaded IPC). Whether this arrangement is good or bad is unique to your workload. You might possibly have just stumbled across a very specific load combination where the older Dozer-based FX CPU just 'feels' a little better.

This is what makes sense to me. I just tried processing the RAW files to JPEG, Chrome closed, 3gb or RAM left available, and my system felt sluggish - I guess I never thought of testing that since I usually have YT in the background, which exacerbates the problem. So, while I'm sure not having ample RAM isn't helping the situation, it doesn't seem to be the main culprit. I wouldn't just say the FX "felt" better, it was the difference between being able to play video in the background, and not being able to with the i5. That's more than a feeling. Either way, your suggestion is right - seems like my workloads would benefit from a wider CPU, so my intuition about moving to Zen 2 next year is on point.

Meanwhile, patience, I guess, because RAM prices aren't coming down anytime soon. The cheapest DDR4 2400 I could find was $75, and I'm not giving the sellers twice what that should cost.

 

[Snowdog]

This is what makes sense to me. I just tried processing the RAW files to JPEG, Chrome closed, 3gb or RAM left available, and my system felt sluggish - I guess I never thought of testing that since I usually have YT in the background, which exacerbates the problem. So, while I'm sure not having ample RAM isn't helping the situation, it doesn't seem to be the main culprit. I wouldn't just say the FX "felt" better, it was the difference between being able to play video in the background, and not being able to with the i5. That's more than a feeling. Either way, your suggestion is right - seems like my workloads would benefit from a wider CPU, so my intuition about moving to Zen 2 next year is on point.

Meanwhile, patience, I guess, because RAM prices aren't coming down anytime soon. The cheapest DDR4 2400 I could find was $75, and I'm not giving the sellers twice what that should cost.

This sound like poor software setting choices from Adobe. Photoshop is over-prioritizing what you should be considered a background task (exporting). Exporting should be running at much lower priority only absorbing excess CPU cycles.

Ultimately, you could run into the same problem with 6 or even 8 core Ryzen, if they get all used fully to export and the prioritization is incorrect. Ryzen cores don't have the anomaly between Integer and FP code.

I have no issues with slowdown when I encode video in handbrake, and it is typically using 95-100% of all four of my cores for an hour+ straight.

So you could also try lowering the priority of Photoshop if Adobe wasn't smart enough to launch lower priority threads to do exporting. I notice that Handbrake is running at "Below normal" Priority, which is probably why it can use all available extra CPU without interfering with my foreground tasks.

If setting priority isn't enough, and you want to emulate that old FX-6300, you should just be able to use CPU affinity to limit photoshop to only 2-3 cores, just right click photoshop in Task Manager to set affinity to test it. When you get a solution that works you can setup to launch with that affinity.

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/sa...ow-to-launch-a-process-with-cpu-affinity-set/

That should give fewer cores to Photoshop. It will render slower, closer to FX speed, but it will preserve resources for the rest of your system.

One way or another you should be able to better allocate your resources to have smoother interactive tasks, while export is taking place.

 

[Archaea]

Chrome is the browser you keel mentioning, but does the same thing happen with IE or Edge?

 

[sinisterDei]

Ultimately, you could run into the same problem with 6 or even 8 core Ryzen, if they get all used fully to export and the prioritization is incorrect

Totally true. However, obviously with more cores the 'offending' application has to be more and more heavily multithreaded to fully saturate the system and no other bottlenecks have to interfere with that otherwise linear scaling. For Photoshop, their own documentation talks about systems with more than 6 cores not scaling well enough to justify costs, so I'd guess that's where their multicore optimization begins to top out.

Regardless, he'd be better off with a 6/8 core Ryzen than a 4-core i5 because they're just plain faster, but you're obviously correct that it might not necessarily result in a 'usable' system while the export is happening, and instead may just increase the speed of the export.

 

[Snowdog]

Totally true. However, obviously with more cores the 'offending' application has to be more and more heavily multithreaded to fully saturate the system and no other bottlenecks have to interfere with that otherwise linear scaling. For Photoshop, their own documentation talks about systems with more than 6 cores not scaling well enough to justify costs, so I'd guess that's where their multicore optimization begins to top out.

Regardless, he'd be better off with a 6/8 core Ryzen than a 4-core i5 because they're just plain faster, but you're obviously correct that it might not necessarily result in a 'usable' system while the export is happening, and instead may just increase the speed of the export.

It's better to just have proper prioritization, than rely on poor scaling as a "feature" to ensure you don't starve other programs. For the amount of money Adobe charges/makes, they really don't seem very good at the multicore support from more than one perspective.

 

[Deleted member 184142]

BlueFireIce there can be a couple hiccups when editing RAWs, say when I make a selection and "fill" it with a random pattern - this is what makes me think the 4 threads may not be enough for PS and Chrome simultaneously, as that's not memory bound work, but CPU intensive. While exporting, D drive should activate as scratch, but it's not doing that even though I did check D and uncheck C and corroborated several times that it remains like that - so I don't get why PS insists on using C if I've told it not to I did both restart PS and reboot the PC, same problem:
View attachment 104402
After that, I rebooted again and opened only Photoshop and Chrome to play a video fullscreen. This is the resource usage with YT playing video and PS open with RAW files, but not editing anything:

View attachment 104404

And this is how resources are being used while exporting:
View attachment 104403
I tried upping RAM use in PS, same issue. I did however realize a mistake - last year I was processing 16MP pictures, not 24. While the jump is not THAT high, I could see that pushing me to RAM limits. It's never an issue, EXCEPT if I try to process RAW while watching video. Ironically the GPU ain't doing crap according to the task manager, the CPU is getting hammered, scratch disk is being unused despite my settings and disk 1 is getting destroyed. All while RAM is near its limit, though processing only uses about 100MB more than just having the files open... Maybe CS6 is now much more multi-core aware, and what wasn't a problem in the past couple years, now sees PS use all my 4 cores and demoting Chrome from priority position while processing RAW to JPEG, because that would actually make sense. If so, it reinforces my idea to get more cores/threads next time around.

Ah, maybe I just have to make do until memory stops being the equivalent of a robbery happening in one's wallet. I'm just not willing to try spending $100 to find that nothing changed. Or maybe I need to let this go and ride it out until Zen 2. Part of me wishes I could go back to my Sandy Bridge, those were happier times until it died...

If you can do that again but with resource monitor open, not task manager, with CPU, disk and memory expanded. Also, you didn't try another browser, you could also try turning off hardware acceleration in chrome.

 

[euskalzabe]

Chrome is the browser you keel mentioning, but does the same thing happen with IE or Edge?

Yup, same problem happens on Edge!

If you can do that again but with resource monitor open, not task manager, with CPU, disk and memory expanded. Also, you didn't try another browser, you could also try turning off hardware acceleration in chrome.

No problem, here you go! Although look at my next answer, the priority/affinity tweak solved the issue.

This sound like poor software setting choices from Adobe. Photoshop is over-prioritizing what you should be considered a background task (exporting). Exporting should be running at much lower priority only absorbing excess CPU cycles.

...So you could also try lowering the priority of Photoshop if Adobe wasn't smart enough to launch lower priority threads to do exporting. I notice that Handbrake is running at "Below normal" Priority, which is probably why it can use all available extra CPU without interfering with my foreground tasks.

If setting priority isn't enough, and you want to emulate that old FX-6300, you should just be able to use CPU affinity to limit photoshop to only 2-3 cores, just right click photoshop in Task Manager to set affinity to test it. When you get a solution that works you can setup to launch with that affinity.

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/sa...ow-to-launch-a-process-with-cpu-affinity-set/

That should give fewer cores to Photoshop. It will render slower, closer to FX speed, but it will preserve resources for the rest of your system.

Thanks! This fixed the issue. I just changed PS's priority to Below Normal and set the core affinity only to 0, 1, 2 leaving 3 unchecked. Then I exported 10 RAWs to JPEGs while playing youtube and there were 0 issues! YT kept playing, PS kept processing - I'm sure it took a few seconds longer, but subjectively it wasn't noticeable with only 10 files. Now, upon reopening PS it resets to normal priority/affinity, I'm going to try to do the steps from the link you provided today after work, see if I can keep PS set at those levels - though it's a bit complicated and I'm not sure I'll be able to do it. Worst case scenario, I can always do it manually in Task manager when I export images.

It definitely seems like PS is taking over the system when it shouldn't - at least in my case, I'm sure others would like it to take over. There should be a priority slider within PS for this...

 

[OFaceSIG]

As a manager in an IT group I'm glad to see folks working together to resolve shit. However this was a lot of hoopla to get something working on a new platform that was fine on an older platform.

 

[euskalzabe]

As a manager in an IT group I'm glad to see folks working together to resolve shit. However this was a lot of hoopla to get something working on a new platform that was fine on an older platform.

Yeah, these conversations give me hope for the [H], as in other parts of the forum things quickly devolve into people yelling at each other. Mainly, this is Adobe's fault, for not allowing priority levels to be set. But all's well that ends well.

 

[euskalzabe]

Thought I'd do an update to this thread: I bought another 8GB of DDR 2400, so now I'm up to 16GB. When I export RAWs, i'm at ~%65 memory usage, and yet, my system slows down to a crawl. It is pretty clear that Photoshop is taking over, but again, it feels like it's the CPU that can't keep up. I'm not saying that it is slow by any means, but that for this kind of processing, 4 cores are simply not enough to keep the rest of the system stable. That much seems clear to me now, as we cannot blame it on the RAM (and the same Photoshop CS never exhibited this annoying problem on my FX6300 a couple years ago).

Food for thought. At least I'll be able to use these 16GB RAM in my Ryzen 3 build next spring.

 

[Artificiary]

I didn’t read the whole thread, but by chance did you happen to capture CPU temps? If it wasn’t ram then could also be the result of thermal throttling.

Sorry if I just missed it.

Edit: Disregard, I just read up a few more posts from the last. I have zero PS experience but had seen similar system behavior many years back due to an inadequate CPU cooler.

 

[euskalzabe]

No, I didn't look at temps, but my PC never, ever runs hot. Even while gaming, which is way more intensive than RAW processing, I never have any issues. Other than the number of cores, I cannot figure out why this would be happening.

 

[thebufenator]

Cheap solution here, just get an FX-8320 and put back in your old mobo