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Where's my bottleneck?

G

Globalksp

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Jun 21, 2010
16
0
Late 2009 (I think) iMac
2.8Ghz i7
10GB 1067MHz
ATI Radeon HD 4850 512MB

I'm a photographer and primarily run the Adobe Lightroom & Photoshop. I also stream Netflix while editing and when I do so, any actions taken in Lightroom or Photoshop causes the video stream to lag.

I'd assume it's the 4850 holding me back, but wanted to make sure.

Either way, I'm wanting to sell this iMac and upgrade to the newest, but that's a discussion for another thread.

Thanks.
 
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Have a look at Activity Monitor (Applications / Utilities /) and select All Processes and sort by CPU to see what the culprit may be.
Also check the "System Memory" tab to see what your "Page ins:", "Page outs:" and "Swap used:" are.

image below uses sorting by CPU as an example
Acitivty_Monitor.png

Further reading:
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The GPU should be powerful enough for your needs, the bottleneck might just be the slow HDD.
 
1 TB.

And it's that slow drive that will prompt me to swap in an SSD into the new iMac (if possible) or, gulp, bite the bullet and buy Apple's 2TB + 256GB SSD setup. C'mon OWC!
 
Globalksp said:
1 TB.

And it's that slow drive that will prompt me to swap in an SSD into the new iMac (if possible) or, gulp, bite the bullet and buy Apple's 2TB + 256GB SSD setup. C'mon OWC!
Click to expand...
Too bad they don't have 250GB options :p

Meh, I'm downgrading to a 1TB Hard Drive and it'll have to do. From my knowledge, Apple's SSD isn't so great.
 
Globalksp said:
Hence the "C'mon OWC!!!"
Click to expand...
Haha, wasn't thinking about that. I still wouldn't buy it though, even if OWC doesn't release anything. Which they will, I'm sure. Too bad I can't get a nice Intel X25-M G2 in there without taking the screen off, which I won't do :p
 
Your graphics card is actually decent speed, it's about 3 times as fast as my 24" iMac's 9400M.
I'd definitely go SSD, that's what I'm doing, I am looking into the OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 480GB. For under $900, it seems like a pretty good deal for far better performance than even the Intel X25-M. These have very good read and write speeds, around 270MBps. I'll bet the Intel will get 250. That is read speed, writing speed probably has a drastic gap in speed. I can't make any estimates, but I'll bet OWC is around 40MBps faster. OWC kills!
 
applegenius83 said:
Your graphics card is actually decent speed, it's about 3 times as fast as my 24" iMac's 9400M.
I'd definitely go SSD, that's what I'm doing, I am looking into the OWC Mercury Extreme Pro 480GB. For under $900, it seems like a pretty good deal for far better performance than even the Intel X25-M. These have very good read and write speeds, around 270MBps. I'll bet the Intel will get 250. That is read speed, writing speed probably has a drastic gap in speed. I can't make any estimates, but I'll bet OWC is around 40MBps faster. OWC kills!
Click to expand...
Intel's X25-M G2 writes at about 70-90MB/s. An SSD isn't about sequential read/write speed though, unless that's what you're after, far more important for snappy performance is the random read/write speed (IOPS). X25-M G2 scores pretty well, although I think Vertex does have a few that are better now.
 
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