Working on photos: Adobe Photoshop CS4

On to the time taken to apply a series of filters using Adobe Photoshop CS4. On the entry-level machine, we used the 32-bit version. Of course, we opted for the 64-bit edition on the high-end machine.

No major differences to note on the entry-level machine, though with 4 GB of RAM the procedure was slightly faster. Here we're clearly limited by the processor and adding more memory won't help to improve this.

On a high-end machine, the power of the processor changes things significantly: using 2 GB of RAM clearly handicaps the software which does much better with 3 GB upwards. After that adding memory makes less of a difference though you do continue to gain a few seconds up to 6 GB.